Rigby Group Co-CEO Steve Rigby seemed to be speaking for an entire industry last week when he said “we can’t avoid” hyperscaler marketplaces and “have to embrace the change that’s happening”.
His comments at once acknowledged that the channel is facing a major new disintermediation threat – but how, potentially, it can also be co-opted.
According to Canalys, hyperscaler marketplace spend will rise from $16bn in 2023 to $85bn in 2028 as end users look to burn down more committed cloud spend with the likes of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Enterprise software vendors CrowdStrike (see here) Snowflake, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk have all reportedly now sold over $1bn of software through the AWS Marketplace alone.
But the role channel partners will play in this new landscape has yet to be determined.
Although Canalys predicts that partners will capture half the spending that takes place via hyperscaler marketplaces by 2027, activity is still ramping up (with Microsoft only rolling its new channel programme within Azure Marketplace, Multiparty Private Offer, to the UK in May).
That’s why IT Channel Oxygen checked in with five of the largest UK partners (Computacenter, Softcat, Bytes, Trustmarque and Crayon) to find out how advanced their hyperscaler marketplace strategies really are, as well as which marketplaces they are backing and how anxious they are about their predicted growth.
Not everyone we approached felt ready to reveal all, with one big partner telling us they are “six months off” having anything meaningful to say.
Cloud marketplaces are already “incredibly important” to Computacenter, and “growing”, its Technology Solutions Sales Director UK, Pete Groushko, said, however.
And the new purchasing route sits “comfortably in the top five opportunities for incremental growth” for Bytes Software Services, its MD Jack Watson told us.
Amber King, Cloud Marketplace Lead at Softcat, urged hyperscalers serious about growing their partner-led marketplace sales to take on board feedback from the partner community, meanwhile.
“We have boots on the ground so take our guidance on what is working and what isn’t working – you will able to grow quicker if you do,” she said.
Find out what each had to say on the following pages….
