How many buy third-party products & services via Cloud Marketplaces among IaaS/PaaS users

13% of IaaS/PaaS users already purchasing third-party services on #cloud #marketplaces and 51% exploring them for discovery. ⚡️Early signs of a potential marketplace #growth, as hyperscalers prioritize them in their GTM strategies. Let's dive deeper

💡 Context Consulting surveyed 889 UK decision-makers and found:

At the moment, cloud marketplace sales still make up <10% of total ISV sales (PaaS & SaaS) in the UK.

Even for ISVs with a higher proportion of sales through marketplaces, it still constitutes a minority of their sales.

📊 Among those who use marketplaces:

75% of them use them for research/discovery, billing, or buying first-party services.

25% use marketplaces to buy third-party services.

✔️ Reasons to use marketplaces:

Include spending towards committed spend

Secure additional discounts

Simplified billing & terms

Uniform product lifecycle management

💬 Some customers claimed they default to buying all their third-party software for their AWS environments through A

WS Marketplace, rather than going directly to the ISV. This behavior may spread as marketplaces become more popular.

Direct procurement relationships with vendors remain a priority for others. Even customers using marketplaces are open to alternative routes to market, going directly to vendors if they prefer.

👀 Discovery via marketplaces:

Marketplaces may play an important role in exposing ISVs to potential customers and allowing them to discover new services.

25% of IaaS/PaaS users discover new services through marketplaces.

though still <50% of users who buy third-party services thr

ough marketplaces discover services via the same route, implying they knew about the service and specifically chose the marketplace route over alternatives.

🗣️ Amazon Web Services (AWS) in their reply to researchers argued that marketplaces are rarely used for casual shopping, and Microsoft suggested that sophisticated customers use the marketplace to fulfill specific cloud services needs with solutions they've already determined before visiting the marketplace.

Evidence on marketplaces' role in discovery is mixed, as some customers use marketplaces as a discovery tool. But a material fraction of customers still don't rely on marketplaces for discovery.

🔎 As the trend of cloud marketplaces gains momentum and hyperscalers prioritize them in their GTM strategies, we may soon see a shift in how marketplaces impact the cloud #ecosystem and influence discovery and procurement behaviors.

Source: Context Consulting, Ofcom