Unlock opportunities to engage customers at scale
Tanuj Bansal, General Manager, Azure Marketing
With customers’ technology needs exploding, helping them discover the right solution can unlock limitless possibilities to achieve their goals. Together, with our partners, we are helping customers everywhere find solutions that serve every need and reach new heights.
Through the commercial marketplace, we connect our customers to a catalog of over 30,000 apps and services created by our partners. It’s also how we help our partners scale. The commercial marketplace pulls from one central catalog that is managed in Partner Center. Once an ISV publishes, they unlock access to over 1 billion Microsoft users and over 90,000 partners in the Cloud Solution Provider program.
New, better together partner-to-partner opportunities
At Microsoft Inspire we announced the private preview of CSP margin sharing. A new capability to help ISVs activate our ecosystem of over 90,000 partners to resell their applications (check out this on-demand session for details). With CSP margin sharing, ISVs can create new private offers and extend the margin to Cloud Solution Providers—incentivizing partners to sell an ISV’s application. This capability is now in public preview and available to our partners to sell together in our commercial marketplace.
By selling through the partner ecosystem, ISVs can grow their business by expanding into new markets and acquire new customers—all without adding any operational cost.
“Barracuda leverages the Microsoft commercial marketplace to help customers accelerate innovation and simplify transacting and deploying solutions engineered for Azure. Now that we can engage Microsoft’s ecosystem of Cloud Solution Providers by creating private offers tailored to them, we have new opportunities for partner-to-partner selling for our shared customer success.”
—Nicole Napiltonia, Vice President, Global Alliances, OEM Sales, Barracuda
With CSP margin sharing, partners in the Cloud Solution Provider program can expand their catalog with new ISV solutions from the commercial marketplace to provide customers end-to-end solutions. This creates stronger, better together, partner-to-partner opportunities to help our partners grow their business while helping Cloud Solution Partners attain new revenue streams.
“Being able to sell applications from the commercial marketplace empowers us to add new services as our partners’ and customers’ needs evolve. And now that ISVs can create private offers and offer us a margin, it simplifies our processes substantially and provides us with an opportunity to grow our marketplace business even more. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
—Jon Ferrara, Chief Executive Officer, Nimble
By empowering partners to work together through the commercial marketplace—we are reinforcing our commitment as the most partner-focused business platform. This is also supported by our recent news of cutting agency transaction fees to 3 percent from an industry-standard 20 percent.
A wide range of ISVs and CSPs have found success with these capabilities during the private preview—and we thank them for their partnership.
Spotlight: LawToolBox and Pax8
From participating in the private preview and embracing the commercial marketplace as a major sales channel, LawToolBox—a SasS offering integrated into Microsoft Teams—is scaling to new customers and hitting new revenue milestones. Just two months into partnering with Pax8 and embracing the commercial marketplace, LawToolBox has seen a 105 percent increase in licenses transacted through the marketplace.
LawToolBox partnered with trusted technology advisor Pax8 by creating a private offer for them to sell their SaaS offer and receive a margin. Pax8 is a cloud distributor with more than 20K managed service providers that are trusted by law firms. The Pax8 marketplace provides LawToolBox a direct method to reach new markets by allowing their partners to easily buy, sell, and manage the solution for all clients from one portal. By integrating into the commercial marketplace, customers can seamlessly deploy their app without any additional onboarding or procurement sign-off.
The marketplace is the path to co-sell
Co-sell is simply how we sell apps and services together and engage thousands of global field sellers and partners while ensuring that all participants benefit from this effort together. It solidifies the mutual interest of customer success for everyone involved. Since we started the co-sell program, we have been able to jointly sell more than $22.1 billion in partner apps and services. And that is not Microsoft revenue, that is partner revenue directly from co-selling together.
Selling through the commercial marketplace is the entry point to starting the co-sell journey. The first step to seizing this tremendous opportunity is by joining the Microsoft Partner Network. Once a partner, ISVs should publish their paid offers to the commercial marketplace to reach Microsoft customers and tap into the massive network of Cloud Solution Providers. Now that Cloud Solution Providers can partner with ISVs and be rewarded to sell their applications—it’s a win-win for everyone.
Sell with us and publish your paid offer.
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Source: Azure Blog Feed