“You cannot avoid a cloud marketplace conversation today,” stressed Jeff Cornwell, Product Strategy Leader at Microsoft Marketplace, in our course. 🎯 Marketplace is so crucial, that Microsoft went all-in on it. So why is everything converging now?
Having Jeff Cornwell in our Cloud GTM Leader course has been one of its highlights. For the past 5 years, Jeff has served on Microsoft cloud marketplace leadership team, helping to define the product, platform, and processes responsible for 10X revenue growth over that period.
Here’s a few insights from his session:
🏆 95% of Fortune 500 Use Azure, and 99% Use the Marketplace
While AI and macroeconomic headwinds are driving companies to innovate and be frugal, the growth of cloud spend has proven to be resilient. "The one thing that remains pretty durable… cloud spend continues to grow," Jeff noted.
He shared striking statistics that indicate the marketplace's integration into the operations of the world's largest companies: "95% of the Fortune 500 uses Azure at some level...99% use the marketplace to manage their cloud portfolio."
Forrester's study showed that customers see ~600% ROI from using the Microsoft marketplace, with a payback period of less than 6 months.
“Marketplace has reduced employee time for onboarding new vendors by as much as 75%. Employee effort and work is reduced by 50%. And increasingly we see these customers experiencing this optimized Azure cloud budget,” underscores Jeff.
Importantly, the marketplace continues to grow rapidly across all customer segments and verticals. “Whether it's financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, we're seeing significant growth of marketplace business from these customers,” he shared.
📈 3X More Customers Leverage Marketplace
But marketplaces are not just about efficiency. They're about scale as Jeff highlighted their growth potential:
“Over the past year, we've seen almost a 300% increase in SaaS-built sales through the marketplace…
Well over a 300% increase in customers who have those MACC commitments…buying through the marketplace”
As private offers (custom deals) represent a large portion of marketplace transactions, Microsoft went all-in to support ISVs using its marketplace to reach enterprise customers: “Microsoft has made a commitment that says our Co-Sell program and our Marketplace are synonymous.”
These efforts help ISVs to accelerate significantly, Jeff notes,
“We see deals close 40-50% larger and 2-3 times faster when going through the marketplace."
🤝Partners Accelerate Marketplace Momentum
Finally it's not just customers and ISVs, but now channel partners and resellers are driving much of the marketplace momentum as well, underscores Jeff.
“200% increase in private offers sold through our CSPs, our cloud solution providers, those channel partners that are that conduit between Microsoft and our SMB and SMC customers.”
Increasingly, the marketplace helps companies to scale through partners as well.
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