Amazon Web Services is an online store for cloud computing customers where they can find, compare as well as use various AWS software & technical services. An AWS Marketplace was formed in April 2012 to accommodate & foster the AWS services and growth from the third-party vendors that have designed their services on top of the AWS platform.
What’s AWS Marketplace?
Customers using the AWS Marketplace have an access to various software and products to buy. They are accessible from the AWS partners, which are qualified and verified to supply the products. Essentially, the AWS Marketplace is the online store where the customers can search, buy, and use software that can help to run their operations on the AWS Marketplace.
AWS Marketplace features a complete range of free and commercial software services and solutions, mainly software infrastructures tools like application and database servers, business applications, and developer tools. The AWS Marketplace commercial partners include Microsoft, IBM, 10gen, SAP, Couchbase, CA, Canonical, and many more, and the open-source offerings of WordPress, Drupal, Nginx, Zend & MediaWiki are available too.
The AWS marketplace is a safe cloud computing services platform, providing compute power, content delivery, database storage, and various other functions that will help the businesses to scale & grow.
In easy words the AWS marketplace allows you to do the following things-
- Safely store your files in the cloud so that you may access it from anywhere across the world.
- Running application and web servers on the cloud and host dynamic sites.
- Deliver dynamic and static files fast across the world by using the Content Delivery Network.
- Using the managed databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQL Server, or Oracle to store information.
- Send bulk email online to your users.
Now as you know what can be done with the AWS marketplace, let us have an overview of different AWS services.
There’re many businesses that the marketplace gets tailored for, it includes Software, Systems Integrators & Value-Added Resellers. All these people can put the software in the marketplace & provide them to the customers to use within their AWS cloud. For the vendor to sell over the AWS marketplace, they should meet some requirements. It means all the vendors can offer such services in a few capacities that include:
- Facilitate regular updating of the software
- Customer support process and strategy
- Simple to start on the Amazon Marketplace
- The software appears production-ready, but not in Beta.
To get launched as the seller on the AWS marketplace is the straight forward process, but simple in a few categories than the others where sellers should be approved & meet some selling requirements.
The AWS Marketing makes it simple for the large user base to reach a scale and provides you the infrastructure and tools required to do so. Getting started is much easier than to set up your website & warehousing infrastructure. You can create the product listing, send out inventory to Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) warehouse, and you’re in the business.
This said, in a few categories it can be very simple to start selling, with the newcomers costing low to attract the buyers away from the established sellers. This has gotten tough to be ‘seen’ on Amazon since it is flooded with the products from the internet marketers & ‘me too’ product categories trying to game this system.
It is one constant battle to compete for counterfeits & listing ‘hijackers’ are growing,” and referring to the companies who try and sell the substandard products by using the most reputable company’s listing.
What will you find on the AWS Marketplace?
The AWS marketplace has several products that will help the customers to run their business as well as build useful tools for themselves. There’re many categories to search under, it includes security, storage, networking, business intelligence, machine learning, database, and DevOps.
Final Words
If you’re selling the product to the AWS customers, you may leverage this partnership with the AWS by the Marketplace as a customer acquisition channel. Listing to the product is the first step. But, you must not stop right there. To get enterprise-ready, it is important to leverage programs that are listed and gain from the shorter sale cycle.
