AWS expands Marketplace to include third-party services

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has expanded its online marketplace to allow the sale of third-party professional services, making it a one-stop-shop for not only software and applications to run on its cloud but also managed services and other offerings to support their deployment.

Services that its partners now can add to the wares that they sell on AWS Marketplace include implementation, assessments, managed services, training, or premium support to go along with their products, the company said in a post on its website published Monday. Sellers also can authorize other sellers to receive wholesale pricing on professional services, enabling them to offer support or implementation services in addition to software in AWS Marketplace.

“The authorized partner can then use the resell authorization to customize pricing, duration, and legal terms to offer professional services that best meets customers’ needs,” according to the post.

Sweetening the deal with third-party professional services

AWS Marketplace offers software for developers and enterprises covering 26 categories in areas such as infrastructure, developer tools, and business applications. This software is ready for deployment on the AWS cloud, and AWS takes a percentage of sales by charging its partners listing fees, which the company earlier this month said it simplified and reduced.

The marketplace allows its partners to offer customers a range of products, with AWS handling the billing – simplifying the transaction and sweetening the deal for partners that want to save on back-office and other billings costs. Now they also can bundle services under the umbrella, expanding their own opportunity to sell and providing more potential profit from the sales for AWS.

Enterprise customers that use marketplace vendors also can now “purchase software and professional services directly from their preferred partner, helping customers to leverage a partner who has knowledge of their business, localized support and expertise, and receive the same fast purchasing experience,” AWS said in its post. This also will help its ISVs and channel partners grow their professional services businesses while offering software and other services.

Staying on top of cloud platform market

AWS sits at top of the cloud-computing platform market amid a tight leader pack that includes its closest competitors, Google and Microsoft. According to estimates from Synergy Research Group, Amazon’s market share in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 32% going in the second quarter of 2023, which was down slightly from its position in the beginning of the year.

Though its competitors aren’t particularly close to taking over the top spot – Microsoft Azure had about 23% of market share after Q1 2023, while Google had 10% – as a pioneer in the market AWS no doubt wants to stay on top.

The company’s expansion of its software marketplace to include professional services – which should be received well by vendors that use the shop – is likely part of a broader strategy to secure even more of the public cloud service revenue, which was predicted to reach $526 billion by the end of last year.