Azure Marketplace is a widely available commercial platform that hosts Azure products offered by Microsoft and its technology partners. So how can a newly established business or a market pioneer looking to reinvent itself access the power of Azure Marketplace?
Multiple businesses unwittingly use the Azure marketplace without ever realising the platform’s true potential. Of late, many business professionals are undergoing Microsoft Azure Certification to familiarise themselves with the platform and maximise its efficacy.
Table of Contents
- What is Azure Marketplace?
- Benefits of the Azure Marketplace for Publishers
- Solutions offered on Azure Marketplace for customers
- Conclusion
What is Azure Marketplace?
Microsoft said, “The Marketplace is the launch pad for joint go-to-market activities with Microsoft that can help accelerate your business growth.” Azure Marketplace is a centralised cloud-based commercial platform provided by Microsoft Azure where customers can access a wide array of Information Technology (IT) solutions.
Azure helps businesses discover, deploy, and scale various applications and resources from a vast catalogue of offerings, which include ready-to-use virtual machine images, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, managed and consulting services for Azure, and data services and APIs.
Microsoft certified all these services and products before being made available for sale to its customers. Azure Marketplace as a platform has matured immensely over the years owing to continuous UI and platform updates provided by Microsoft. It now offers more than 3,800 products organised into multiple categories.
Benefits of the Azure Marketplace to Publishers
Microsoft launched Azure Marketplace to connect its partners with potential customers while supporting them to expand their business reach. Apart from leveraging and accessing current Marketplace solutions, it also allows customers to publish their own solutions on Marketplace, given they run on Microsoft Azure. Publishing one’s solutions on Azure Marketplace will have the following benefits:
- Global Scalability: By having adequate backend and technical support, you can ensure that the customer can deploy your software solutions anywhere across the world.
- Fresh Sales lead generation: Azure and its growing ecosystem ensures that your solution is visible to as many potential customers as possible, thus generating new leads across different facets of the industry.
- Brand awareness and promotion: Marketplace features such as Social Promotion Spotlight, Commercial Marketplace Marketing toolkit, Marketplace Rewards Testimonial, etc., ensure that your brand and solution are always visible to the customers looking for similar solutions.
- Valuable insights: The analytics and statistics available via Marketplace ensure that you are always aware of the state of the market and adjust your targets and goals accordingly.
Solutions offered on Azure Marketplace for Customers
Owing to its free-to-publish nature and global visibility, thousands of products and services ranging from stand-alone to rent software to niche designing and marketing tools, everything is available on Azure Marketplace for the customers to utilise.
- Simplified SaaS Solutions: Organisations and even independent developers offer their SaaS solutions on the Azure Marketplace via their partnership with Microsoft. Customers purchasing these solutions will be re-routed to the vendor’s website to complete the purchase.
- Virtual Machine Images: Virtual Machine images are clones of entire computer systems, including the operating system and all necessary drivers. These virtual appliances packaged as VM images can be purchased from the Azure Marketplace. Also, an Azure subscription will be required to use these VM images for Windows Virtual Desktops (WVD).
- Azure Applications and Managed Applications: These solutions are directly deployed on Microsoft Cloud services and will require an Azure account to utilise. Managed Applications are extensions of SaaS solutions which are deployed on the customer’s Azure account, but the independent software vendor retains the administrative permissions.
- Azure Applications Solution Template: Solution templates to implement infrastructure as code can be used by developers by making use of their Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates. These are mostly JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) files used in quickly and reliably deploying topologies.
- Managed and Consulting Services: Managed Azure services by capable partners identified through the Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP) program can also be used by companies. Through these services, the providers can directly deliver their services to the customer using the customer’s Azure account.
Conclusion
Through this blog, the aim is to educate businesses as well as customers about the huge potential of Azure Marketplace. The wide range of cloud products and services backed by round-the-clock email, chat, and phone support available for businesses should be utilised to bolster your business and improve business processes as well.