How To Sell On Azure Marketplace?

Azure is always at a heart of the Microsoft’s enterprise strategy, and offering the best place for building next generation of apps and solutions. It is also very simple to focus over it as the platform & as the host even for the virtual infrastructures, and forgetting other roles: and host for SaaS solution. 

The customer access is a primary motivation to get listed over Azure Marketplace. The enterprise customers with the Azure contracts will be encouraged by the Microsoft to leverage over their Marketplace solutions. And people with the Azure account will peruse available offerings & download apps to run on their Azure services contract. It is a most preferred approach done by the Microsoft field sellers & will be referred as BYOL.

Customers also can locate apps and services (which includes developer services, applications, as well as data solutions) to run over the partner’s Microsoft Azure instances. The catalog helps to improve the discovery by the IT experts at the enterprise customers.

There’s also the set of authentication services (by using the Azure Active Directory) that help with the single authentication over cloud apps. It serves as the most useful utility to the current apps however will not drive huge customer awareness and trials.

What type of business problems Azure can solve?

At present, most of the organizations are opting to host their business apps in the cloud. And with Azure, the customers will quickly move apps from their on-site servers on the cloud, and creating some major benefits like:

• Leveraging Azure’s cloud infrastructure for scaling up and down as required.
• Avoiding capital cost of buying the new server hardware.
• Building & selling your Azure services
• Building the new “cloud-native” apps or moving apps from the on-site servers at cloud within the virtual machine 

Microsoft offers the route from your ARM templates to the Azure Marketplace service. In that way, you will be able to package the current software, sell them it Azure, and giving you the new stream of revenue. For selling on Azure Marketplace, it is important to get certified, and it is the process that begins with building an appropriate VM images & templates for the application. The certified organizations agree to different Azure’s policies, all along with the publishing company info.

When certified, you will get an access to Cloud Partner Portal, and where you will put together the marketing materials & code, as complete virtual infrastructures or VMs. An approval procedure for the code is very fast; the VM-based apps are generally approved within 3 business days, but complex services will take a bit longer.

Ordering, invoicing and provisioning

Ordering through the Azure Marketplace solution means contracting will be procurement and simplified cycles get shortened. Provisioning deployment is streamlined, whereas VM-based solutions will easily get provisioned to customer's Azure tenant. This decreases challenge of consolidating and managing invoices from various vendors. 

Order process varies depending on the CSP status; the Indirect Resellers have got different order procedure than the Direct Bill Partners. And SaaS subscriptions will get established through a standard purchase workflow over Partner Center, and Microsoft Azure resources like Virtual Machines and container images will be procured and deployed through Azure management portal. 

Mixing the3rd party services & virtual appliances in the Azure apps makes sense; these mashups allow you to take benefit of the familiar tools and use various features that will otherwise need significant configuration & management. With the Microsoft certifying code & offering this through Azure Marketplace, you have got an assurance that it is tested—and access to the support services & single billing platform. 

Like you may see, Microsoft Azure will be redefine in a way business gets done in the cloud-first mobile-first world, as well as organizations over various board are reaping benefits. Because Azure includes several services, it will be good to start just by focusing on the specific area. For example, when you work with the small and the mid-sized business customers, think of starting with the Azure Backup.

Final Words 

Azure Marketplace represents the moderate development goal by ISVs as well as is the best fit for the solutions targeting IT in current Azure enterprise customers.