What is the Azure marketplace?
After meeting with your company’s executive team, you start to compile some information about Microsoft’s commercial marketplace to report back to the group during your next meeting. So far, you’ve learned that the commercial marketplace is a cloud-based, on-demand market that allows Microsoft partners to publish their solutions into Microsoft’s online product catalog.
Built for customers
For your current and future customers, this marketplace is a powerful tool to find, try, buy, and deploy best-in-class solutions that they can use to accelerate digital transformation and innovate in the cloud. For your customers that are already Microsoft customers, purchasing solutions from the commercial marketplace has an added benefit - they can include commercial marketplace purchases in their existing Microsoft purchase agreements and receive a consolidated invoice from Microsoft.
Built for partners
As a Microsoft partner, the commercial marketplace is free to join. You can use the commercial marketplace as a dynamic sales and marketing channel to access new markets, customer segments, and Microsoft cloud users with your portfolio of solutions. You can also leverage it as an avenue to find best-in-class solutions you can deploy for use within your own cloud infrastructure to build your own solutions.
Multiple access points
When you list your company’s solutions in the commercial marketplace, customers will be able to find them in the two online storefronts, through Microsoft’s network of resellers, and through in-product experiences in Microsoft products like Office 365, Dynamics 365, the Power Platform, and Azure.
The Microsoft commercial marketplace consists of two storefronts, Microsoft AppSource and Azure Marketplace, which are designed to serve different buyer roles within your customers’ organizations.
Between the two storefronts and the in-product experiences, Microsoft’s commercial marketplace draws millions of active users per month, with each unique user representing a potential customer for your company. Because Microsoft’s products and services are used widely by organizations around the world, these monthly users represent companies of all sizes in every industry.
Summary
The potential to get your products in front of all these people sounds like the opportunity your executive team asked you to find, but you still need to learn more about the two storefronts. Your company sells solutions that were built with different customer groups in mind, and you need to understand how those solutions would fit into Microsoft’s commercial marketplace.