One of the most consequential questions in #partnerships today - how growth of cloud and SaaS #marketplaces 🚩 will change the landscape?
How to adjust your partnership strategy to win?
💬 Insights from Jay McBain, Chief Analyst - Channels, Partnerships & Ecosystems - Canalys, in our recent episode:
📈 We're calling on 86% compounded #growth in marketplaces at Canalys over the next number of years - they are growing on a hockey stick.
The fact of the matter is our industry is also growing.
In this decade, our industry doubles from 4.3 trillion to 8.6 trillion of what businesses and governments spend on technology.
💎 What ends up happening is marketplaces aren't killing anyone. Distributors continue to grow, even though Amazon Web Services (AWS) we predicted will become a top 10 distributor within the next couple of years. We have direct, which continues to be a big chunk.
We think by the end of the decade, marketplaces might be 1/3 of the economy, that's a couple of trillion dollars. That's big, but resell and through distribution, everything else is still going to be a couple of trillion dollars. It's just not going to grow as fast as marketplaces are.
🎯 But to any company, you have to figure out your go-to-market strategy, your routes to market. If you're a #SaaS company, you've got to figure out how many of your customers want to exercise enterprise credits at Microsoft, AWS, Google, Salesforce, HubSpot, whichever marketplace they're on.
If they want to buy your software as part of a seven layer stack, which is today's average, you got to create a frictionless way to do that.
If you make them buy direct, or if you make them buy through a reseller, when they want to buy through a marketplace, you're going to lose deals because of that.
And you're going to gain more deals if you're through a marketplace and make it frictionless. You're gonna win deals from the competition because you do it better than they do.
📊 Marketplace has to be viewed as an expansion of your routes to market. And also complementary, because it also serves beyond the point of sale - some marketing helps some retention help. There's some other things that marketplaces do as well as a benefit.
But again, it doesn't kill anyone, we're not selling magazines here. There's the death of nothing - everything grows, it just grows at different paces.
🤝 And as partner professionals, we have to view it as a broadening of the landscape, like distribution is broadening as well into different layers,
This is going to just be a very large, distributed environment, some of it indirect, some of it direct, and good chunk of growing through marketplaces."