NANDITHA RAM: Hello everyone.
I'm Nanditha Ram and I lead
Microsoft ISV Ecosystem Strategy
to build and scale
our worldwide network of software solution partners.
I'm joined today by Casey McGee,
Microsoft's Vice President of
ISV Sales and digital natives.
Together, we're excited to
share with you the momentum with
which Microsoft customers are
adopting our commercial marketplace.
The opportunity it creates at the center of gravity,
connecting our customers and partners across
the world to share more about
this opportunity over to you, Casey.
CASEY MCGEE: Thank you Nanditha.
Hello everyone.
I'm Casey McGee and I lead
Microsoft's ISV in digital native business.
Our mission is to help companies around
the world build innovative solutions on
the Microsoft Cloud and deliver
great outcomes for our customers and our partners.
In this session, I'm looking forward to sharing how
the Microsoft Marketplace has been helping
our joint customers increase efficiency,
buy with confidence and spend smarter.
The opportunities this creates for our partners.
Here's a quick look at the agenda before we get started.
We're going to start and
we're going to start by talking about
customer adoption of the commercial marketplace
and the momentum we're seeing here today.
Then we'll discuss the opportunities
that exist for partners in the marketplace.
We will walk you through how you can enable
your marketplace success
and achieve cost-efficient growth.
A topic that is especially relevant in today's market,
where we are all being encouraged to do more with less.
I've had the opportunity to
travel to many regions around the world
in the past few months and
speak with several customers and partners.
A common theme has been that
after more than two years of reacting
to the global pandemic and
the rapid pace of digitization.
Organizations are now having
to navigate macroeconomic headwinds,
geopolitical tensions and talent and labor constraints.
As the world continues to adapt to
these digital imperatives and macroeconomic environments,
there is evidence to suggest that a significant portion,
an estimated 80 percent of customer sales,
will move to digital channels within the next few years.
At Microsoft, we are seeing this change firsthand
through the rapid adoption of our commercial marketplace.
An increasing number of customers are choosing
the benefits of
our digital marketplace to discover, purchase,
deploy and manage all businesses and
technology solutions that need
to run through to grow their business.
Our sales to the marketplace have continued
to double over the past couple of years,
growing by 288 percent year-over-year.
We know this growth has been driven by
customers who are adopting
the marketplace for a number of reasons.
There are value propositions that resonate with them.
Customers are telling us that they
value the efficiency and
convenience of procuring
all their enterprise solutions through one marketplace.
These customers have shared
that they have more confidence buying
solutions from a trusted partner
and the most secure Cloud platform.
They value having the ability to
manage these investments and spend
smarter as responsible custodians
of the organizations and the teams they serve.
I want to dive a little deeper into
these value propositions to demonstrate
the incredible opportunity our marketplace
creates for both customers and partners.
Thanks to the many partners who have
rapidly adopted the Microsoft Marketplace.
In partnership with you,
we offer a rich and growing catalog of over 50,000
solutions and services to
meet every type of customer need.
Our commercial marketplace offers
a comprehensive suite of
solutions from the best of
breed technology solutions and storage,
networking security DevOps to
innovative solutions and IoT,
AI and ML all the way to
business solutions specific to an industry.
We are continually bringing
new solutions to our marketplace every day so that
customers can efficiently and conveniently acquire
all capabilities required to
meet their needs from one marketplace.
We've heard from our customers that they
value the many transaction methods we make available.
Whether our customers on the high-end of
the enterprise or a small business,
this choice is meaningful.
Customers can discover, try, buy,
and deploy their preferred solutions
all through the digital marketplace.
One through the digital store fronts,
leveraging either AppSource or the Azure marketplace.
Two, in product experiences and placements.
Three, network of 90,000 Cloud solution providers.
Lastly, via our 35,000 Microsoft sellers who
worked with our customers every
day to drive their business outcomes.
Apart from these efficiencies and to
convenience that our marketplace offers
customers deeply trust the Microsoft Cloud
and our commercial marketplace.
Customers of all sizes and types
innovate and grow their
businesses on the Microsoft Cloud,
knowing they are protected by industry leading,
advanced security, sustainability,
and responsible AI capabilities.
We extend these same principles
of the highest levels of security,
compliance, and
reliability to our commercial marketplace.
These capabilities extend to our partners that build
their solutions on our Cloud and
our customers trust us for it.
Lastly, and equally importantly, with our Marketplace,
customers have been able to spend
smarter and better manage their dollars.
Our customers can acquire
eligible partner solutions from our marketplace and
apply 100 percent of
their purchases toward
their Cloud consumption commitment.
We are seeing strong velocity
and customer deals for partner solutions
acquired through committed spend
utilizing this marketplace benefit.
Given the cost optimization efforts
every business is facing today,
this benefit is incredibly helpful for customers.
I'm inspired by the innovation
you are bringing to our joint customers.
Whether this innovation is driving down costs,
are looking for new opportunities,
we are excited with all of you
to deliver that innovation to our customers.
Next, I want to invite Nanditha to share with you,
our partners on how you can participate in
this opportunity and the momentum
that our marketplace has created. Back to you.
NANDITHA RAM: Thank you, Casey.
First, I want to thank
all our partners who've been
early adopters of our marketplace.
Your participation has helped us create
a scalable and efficient digital platform through
which we are able to showcase and bring
your innovative solutions and
services to customers across the world.
With the Microsoft marketplace,
every type of solution provider can implement
a cost efficient Cloud go-to-market strategy and acquire
customers globally without incurring
huge customer acquisition costs.
Our marketplace is a platform for
both customers and partners to participate and grow.
I want to share with your partners some of
the ways in which we've made it easier for
you to participate in this opportunity
and how we're enabling your success.
We understand that customers need
freedom and flexibility to both discover
compelling solutions on their own and through
customize partner offers tailored to meet their needs.
Partners, you need speed and scale to cost efficiently,
service, manage, and grow these customers worldwide.
With a private offer capabilities.
Now generally available,
partners you can customize your offer terms,
including pricing and terms
and condition within minutes and
execute them at scale with
speed across a global customer base.
In cases where customers need
predictability and want to use their
committed spent to purchase
eligible partner solutions through our marketplace,
partners, you can participate in
this opportunity to with speed and at scale.
With the multi-year SaaS capability,
partners can offer long-term deals
and custom payment terms to their customers.
With the launch of this capability,
we're seeing an increasing and growing number of
customer deals with
three-year commitment to partner solutions.
In fact, 66 percent of
SaaS deals that have been
closed have been three year commitments.
The opportunity for our partners is not
just with customers that are adopting the convenience,
confidence, and efficiency of our marketplace.
The unique benefit of
the Microsoft Marketplace is
the ability for partners to tap into
a wild wide distribution of over 90,000 Cloud
solution partners and utilize
this incredible network of direct,
indirect, and resale partners,
to take your solutions and products to customers.
With the private offers for partners
and the CSP margin sharing capability,
we're seeing several ISVs scale to
multiple geographies with CSP partners
and achieve rapid business growth without
having to invest in expensive sales and marketing teams.
Our Cloud solution partners too are equally
participating in this growth opportunity by
taking innovative new partner solutions to
their customers and delivering
value as their trusted advices.
These are some of the ways in which our
Microsoft Marketplace uniquely brings together
the best of our partner ecosystem
across our ISV partners that are
publishing compelling solutions and
our Cloud Solution partners that
are taking these solutions to customers.
Together with our field sellers we're activating
multiple routes to market
using the power of our digital marketplace.
We invite all of you partners to
participate in this marketplace growth opportunity.
To enable your success in addition to investing in
a wide variety of marketplace
onboarding services and offerings,
we at Microsoft are directly investing
in partners through incentives and Marketplace Rewards.
We're excited to be offering
new incentives to assist you partners with
your adoption of our marketplace
and to help you achieve rapid success.
Some of you may be familiar with
our marketplace transact and grow incentive.
It's an opportunity to receive
compelling rewards as you publish
transactable offers and you can continue
receiving incentives across your marketplace journey.
Partners can qualify and earn up to $20,000 US for
a published transactable solution and up to $10,000
US as the solutions are used
by customers and you achieve sales growth.
Additionally you have access to
Marketplace revolts which will be
integrated into the ISV success program
and through it you can unlock
significant benefits right from
accessing highly skilled team that
can help you optimize
your marketplace listings to
driving awareness through Microsoft
social handles blogs and
websites to getting guidance on how you can activate
partner-to-partner benefits or help
you with POCs along with your customers.
For partners that are new to
our marketplace here's how you can get started.
The first step is to publish
a transactable offer in the marketplace.
If you've got started with just listing your offer,
we encourage every partner to enable
trials and publish a transactable solution because
that's the way customers can
expedients your product and buy them directly
from our Microsoft AppSource or Azure
Marketplace utilizing the convenience of one bill.
Once your offer is published and
available to customers you
can unblock marketplace revolts
and help you grow and scale.
Partners with transactable solutions can use
performance-based tiers to access
these benefits and these tiers are
based on marketplace bill sales
or seats sold and they accrue
cumulatively across all transactable solutions
rolled up at your company level.
The more you sell the more you
earn as these benefits increase
based on your marketplace performance
and customer demand.
Partners you can choose from
a wide variety of benefits and as you progress
through these tiers a comprehensive set of
technical marketing and sales benefits
become available to you.
If you're curious about what
some of these technical benefits are,
they include onboarding documentation,
access to marketplace forums,
Microsoft products subscriptions,
architectural consultations to help you
build well architected solutions and more.
You can also unlock
powerful marketing benefits
including featured visibility,
blocked publishing, spotlight with sellers.
We're also excited to extend
Engagement Managers to support partners that have
transactable solutions and help you understand the suite
of available benefits and
assist you in developing an execution plan.
Partners can also qualify for
enhanced sales benefits including
best practices to increase your impact through
Microsoft sellers and our Cloud Solution partners.
Webinars, solution spotlights
and Azure funding to offset
the cost of POCs which in
today's economic times is a meaningful value add.
Several partners like Barracuda,
TwoConnect, Nerdio, Cloud of Things,
OnePlace Solutions and many more have found
great success with
our commercial marketplace and marketplace revolts.
Most of the top-performing marketplace partners
are engaged in these revolts.
In fact we're seeing that on
average marketplace bill sales
for publishers that do engage in
at least one marketplace revolt benefit is
five times higher than
publishers that didn't engage in the program.
So we encourage you-all to
explore these benefits and use them.
As you can see partners we're
committed to your growth and as the world gets
increasingly digitized we all have
new opportunities to service
and delight a global customer base.
We invite you-all to
utilize our marketplace capabilities,
the enhancements and investments to implement a Cloud
go-to-market and grow your business
in cost efficient and sustainable ways.
We greatly appreciate everyone's participation
today and in closing here's a quick reminder,
to first learn more and join the ISV success program,
publish your solutions to our marketplace
and own the incentives and realize
the many benefits and finally reach
customers globally and grow your business with us.
We will continue to innovate and improve
on behalf of all our customers and partners.
We thank you for your continued partnership
and stay tuned for
more great conversations to come
today. Take care everyone.