Where the clouds put their money this year

• Oracle: $1B committed over 4 years for partners. Training, demo environments, migration funding, go-to-market support.

• Google Cloud: $750M in April for partners building AI agents, with Google engineers embedded at Accenture, Deloitte and PwC.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): $1B in June for in-house forward-deployed engineers, who bring in partners to fill gaps.

• Microsoft: $2.5B in July for a 6,000-person FDE unit that scales through Accenture, Capgemini, EY, KPMG and PwC.

AWS and Microsoft built their own deployment teams and pull partners in. Google and Oracle put the money straight into partners.

Mark Hura, President of Global Field Operations at Oracle: “Our partners extend our sales reach, expand our delivery capacity.”

Oracle Marketplace is catching up

Like the big three, Oracle signs multi-year cloud spend commitments. Since 2019, customers have been able to spend part of them on partner software. Private offers (custom-priced deals) arrived in 2024.

Announced last week:

• Co-sell: Oracle sellers can “proactively position ISV solutions” on qualified customer deals

• Expanded Multi-Party Private Offers: an ISV and a reseller close a deal with the customer (like on AWS, Azure, etc.): now available in the US, Spain and Brazil

• Marketplace purchasing in India and Japan

Customers also can now spend a bigger share of their commits on the marketplace, though Oracle didn’t clarify how much.

Its docs still show 25% of the commits, similar cap as AWS and GCP use.

How big are Oracle commitments (contracted backlog)?

• May 2024: $98B

• May 2025: $138B, before the AI mega deals

• Aug 2025: $455B, OpenAI signs ~$300B

• Nov 2025: $523B, including Meta and NVIDIA deals

• Aug 2026: $664B

~50% is tied to OpenAI, per S&P (July ‘26). AI companies renting compute won’t spend that on partner software.

My back-of-envelope: ~$120–190B is enterprise. Apply the 25% cap and that’s a sizable pool of funds addressable through its marketplace over the life of those contracts. Raise the cap and the pool grows.

Flywheel

On AWS and Azure, commits pull buyers onto the marketplace. Buyers pull software vendors. More vendors give buyers a reason to commit more.

Oracle now has most of the mechanics. Raising the share of commits that can be spent on the marketplace is how it builds density.

Oracle spent the past year building AI infra. Now it’s putting serious money into its partner ecosystem and more commitments behind its marketplace.

That makes Oracle the next marketplace in the race for buyer and seller attention. It now competes with AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud, and with the new frontier AI marketplaces.

Are Oracle commits showing up in your deals yet?