Canalys has doubled down on its characterisation of AWS Marketplace as a distributor, asserting that the hyperscaler will be a top-five global distribution player “soon”.
In the latest sign of AWS Marketplace’s growing might, CrowdStrike last week revealed it had sold $1bn on the platform in a single year.
In a lower-key announcement, AWS also confirmed it is opening up its marketplace to all SaaS companies (regardless of what cloud they run on).
“We’re calculating when they’ll be top 5”
Hyperscaler marketplaces arguably defy categorisation. While they are in some cases disintermediating the entire channel, in other cases resellers (and more recently distributors) have been co-opted into the model.
Just last week, Westcon-Comstor exec Adam Davison predicted that distributors will play an “extremely powerful” role in AWS Marketplace’s go-to-market strategy following last year’s launch of its Designated Seller of Record programme.
AWS Marketplace’s role starts and ends with facilitating the transaction, he argued.
Other distributors are taking a more cautious stance towards AWS Marketplace, meanwhile, while Canalys clearly sees AWS Marketplace’s role as analogous with distribution.
Having recently dubbed AWS Marketplace “one of the biggest distributors in EMEA and globally”, Canalys has now gone all in on that characterisation.
“At Canalys (now part of Omdia), we had predicted an 82% compounded growth (years ago) with several companies such as CrowdStrike, Snowflake, Splunk, and Palo Alto issuing press releases when they hit $1 billion in sales on Amazon Web Services (AWS) alone,” Canalys Chief Analyst Jay McBain wrote in a LinkedIn post (see bottom).
“This made AWS a Top 10 distributor in only a few years, joining the likes of TD SYNNEX, Ingram Micro, Arrow Electronics, and ALSO Group. Now we are calculating when they will be Top 5 (soon).”
Big business
According to Canalys, enterprise software sales through hyperscaler cloud marketplaces are set to hit $85bn by 2028, up from $16bn in 2023 – with AWS Marketplace the largest player.
For comparison, the world’s two largest traditional IT distributors – TD Synnex and Ingram Micro – generated net revenues of $58.5bn $48bn in their last reported annual periods, respectively.
Having first made its Falcon platform available in AWS Marketplace in 2017, CrowdStrike last week announced it topped $1bn in AWS Marketplace sales in 2024.
CrowdStrike claimed it is the first “cloud-native cybersecurity ISV” to achieve that feat in a calendar year.
Its 2024 tally was 91% up year on year, with distribution sales up 3,548% (presumably from a very low base).
“CrowdStrike’s unprecedented traction in AWS Marketplace is a testament to our strategy and execution, aligning the CrowdStrike partner go-to-market ecosystem to leverage AWS Marketplace in driving Falcon platform adoption at scale,” Daniel Bernard, Chief Business Officer, CrowdStrike said in a canned statement.
Rigby Group Co-CEO Steve Rigby recently said “we can’t avoid” hyperscaler marketplaces and “have to embrace the change that’s happening”.
Five of the UK’s top partners – namely Computacenter, Softcat, Bytes Technology Group, Trustmarque and Crayon – recently revealed their marketplace battleplans to IT Channel Oxygen here.
