Barry Russell, Head of Business Development, AWS, at AWS Re:Invent 2014 with John Furrier and Stu Miniman
AWS Marketplace, where sales happen faster | #AWSSummit 2014
https://siliconangle.com/2014/04/01/aws-marketplace-where-sales-happen-faster-awssummit-2014/
During our exclusive coverage of #AWSSummit 2014 last week, Barry Russell, Head of Business Development for AWS Marketplace, stopped by #theCUBE to discuss some pretty interesting things that are happening in his line of work. One interesting note from the interview was just how fast the AWS Marketplace has grown. When launched in April of 2012, the Marketplace had a couple hundred vendors or ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). Today, customers in the marketplace can search over 1,400 vendors.
The make-up of those 1,400 vendors is quite expansive too; from start-ups like JasperSoft, all the way up to bigger companies like Adobe and Cisco. Russell mentions how Adobe released its media server product, and Cisco released its crowd router product in the Marketplace at #AWSSummit this year. One takeaway for potential vendors of the Marketplace that was clear from his interview was this: There is a new sales channel for ISVs on AWS’s infrastructure. AWS Marketplace offers a new opportunity to reach a customer base that is adopting the plug-and-play method of an open marketplace built on top of AWS.
Getting started is a cinch, according to Russell. ISVs package up software in a format that AWS calls an Amazon Machine Image, or AMI. Even for large vendors, the entire process usually takes under a month, with most deployments going live in as little as two weeks. After a couple days of testing, the vendor provides some meta data about the product and the product goes live in the marketplace. From there, customers all over the globe can immediately buy and begin using the software.
A unique aspect of the AMI format is that customers can purchase an instance of the software. That means that the price they pay is associated with the software and the instance size they want to launch and what feature of that instance they want to launch. In essence, they’re only paying for specifically what they need. Russell explains:
“We have this feature called one click, which is pretty cool. It enables the customer to literally just hit a button, and sit back and a few minutes later the product is actually up and running in a production-ready mode, fully configured to run optimized on AWS. It takes away a lot of the friction and error out of launching software that normally a customer feels on prem., and literally reduces it to minutes.”
The AWS Marketplace offers a couple of different pricing models too. Vendors can charge by the month, or map to how EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) is consumed and charge by the hour.
“what we find is that customers like having some control over how they consume the process,” Russell points out.
No matter how much or how fast a customer is spinning up or down their usage, the vendor can charge a completely accurate cost to the consumer. This is a significant change for the vendor’s sales channels. To better support this change, AWS Marketplace rolled out a program called sales enablement. The first step of sales enablement is deal registration. It allows deals that vendors’ sales reps want to close using the Marketplace fulfillment, increasing usability.
Sales reps within the Marketplace can calculate how much of the product their customer is going to use, and when they register the deal it does a couple of things:
Gives them some visibility for how the customer is using the product.
Helps unlock some proof of concept funds that AWS can give to those sales team so that the customer can run a pilot or test.
AWS will inject some money to help make that sale and close that opportunity on marketplace.
And what’s the feedback so far? Sales are happening much faster in the Marketplace.
Even if sales aren’t immediate, ISVs are able to give up to 30 days of their software away for free, so they can allow their customers to do trials and proofs of concepts. There are many hidden benefits of the marketplace, but here are four Russell highlighted:
Selection.
Ease of search to find what they (customers) want.
Transparent pricing in the marketplace.
Quick and friction-free ability to launch the software (product).
AWS Marketplace is a necessary component of AWS. Amazon is providing both the tools and the platform, along with the AWS Marketplace to close the loop of website, hosting, and software. By investing into its own platform, Russell indicates that Amazon is not only assuring the success of AWS, it’s looking to increase its lead in the hosting marketplace.
@theCUBE #theCUBE @SiliconANGLE theCUBE #AWS @Amazon Web Services
#reinvent
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Barry Russell, AWS | AWS re:Invent 2014
Barry Russell, Head of Business Development, AWS, at AWS Re:Invent 2014 with John Furrier and Stu Miniman
AWS Marketplace, where sales happen faster | #AWSSummit 2014
https://siliconangle.com/2014/04/01/aws-marketplace-where-sales-happen-faster-awssummit-2014/
During our exclusive coverage of #AWSSummit 2014 last week, Barry Russell, Head of Business Development for AWS Marketplace, stopped by #theCUBE to discuss some pretty interesting things that are happening in his line of work. One interesting note from the interview was just how fast the AWS Marketplace has grown. When launched in April of 2012, the Marketplace had a couple hundred vendors or ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). Today, customers in the marketplace can search over 1,400 vendors.
The make-up of those 1,400 vendors is quite expansive too; from start-ups like JasperSoft, all the way up to bigger companies like Adobe and Cisco. Russell mentions how Adobe released its media server product, and Cisco released its crowd router product in the Marketplace at #AWSSummit this year. One takeaway for potential vendors of the Marketplace that was clear from his interview was this: There is a new sales channel for ISVs on AWS’s infrastructure. AWS Marketplace offers a new opportunity to reach a customer base that is adopting the plug-and-play method of an open marketplace built on top of AWS.
Getting started is a cinch, according to Russell. ISVs package up software in a format that AWS calls an Amazon Machine Image, or AMI. Even for large vendors, the entire process usually takes under a month, with most deployments going live in as little as two weeks. After a couple days of testing, the vendor provides some meta data about the product and the product goes live in the marketplace. From there, customers all over the globe can immediately buy and begin using the software.
A unique aspect of the AMI format is that customers can purchase an instance of the software. That means that the price they pay is associated with the software and the instance size they want to launch and what feature of that instance they want to launch. In essence, they’re only paying for specifically what they need. Russell explains:
“We have this feature called one click, which is pretty cool. It enables the customer to literally just hit a button, and sit back and a few minutes later the product is actually up and running in a production-ready mode, fully configured to run optimized on AWS. It takes away a lot of the friction and error out of launching software that normally a customer feels on prem., and literally reduces it to minutes.”
The AWS Marketplace offers a couple of different pricing models too. Vendors can charge by the month, or map to how EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) is consumed and charge by the hour.
“what we find is that customers like having some control over how they consume the process,” Russell points out.
No matter how much or how fast a customer is spinning up or down their usage, the vendor can charge a completely accurate cost to the consumer. This is a significant change for the vendor’s sales channels. To better support this change, AWS Marketplace rolled out a program called sales enablement. The first step of sales enablement is deal registration. It allows deals that vendors’ sales reps want to close using the Marketplace fulfillment, increasing usability.
Sales reps within the Marketplace can calculate how much of the product their customer is going to use, and when they register the deal it does a couple of things:
Gives them some visibility for how the customer is using the product.
Helps unlock some proof of concept funds that AWS can give to those sales team so that the customer can run a pilot or test.
AWS will inject some money to help make that sale and close that opportunity on marketplace.
And what’s the feedback so far? Sales are happening much faster in the Marketplace.
Even if sales aren’t immediate, ISVs are able to give up to 30 days of their software away for free, so they can allow their customers to do trials and proofs of concepts. There are many hidden benefits of the marketplace, but here are four Russell highlighted:
Selection.
Ease of search to find what they (customers) want.
Transparent pricing in the marketplace.
Quick and friction-free ability to launch the software (product).
AWS Marketplace is a necessary component of AWS. Amazon is providing both the tools and the platform, along with the AWS Marketplace to close the loop of website, hosting, and software. By investing into its own platform, Russell indicates that Amazon is not only assuring the success of AWS, it’s looking to increase its lead in the hosting marketplace.
@theCUBE #theCUBE @SiliconANGLE theCUBE #AWS @Amazon Web Services
#reinvent
