SCC says it will avoid the “transactional approach” taken by some of its peers as it ploughs “high seven figures” into a services-focused hyperscaler marketplace push.
The Birmingham-based IT group is in the throes of recruiting staff for the assault, which it says reflects its customers’ rising adoption of digital-first purchasing.
Analyst Omdia predicts software sales via hyperscaler marketplaces will hit $163bn in 2030 (up from $30bn in 2024), by which point channel partners will be pocketing 60% of the spoils.
A growing number of ISVs – among them Palo Alto Networks, Splunk, CrowdStrike and Salesforce – have joined the $1bn AWS Marketplace club, meanwhile.
But not all partners had even drawn up a marketplace battleplan when we spoke to them in depth in September 2024.
Now SCC has confirmed to IT Channel Oxygen it signed off a “high seven figures” investment in building a hyperscale marketplace business across the UK and Europe before its new financial year beginning 1 April 2026.
But the UK’s fifth-largest reseller is avoiding the “transactional approach” it claims some of its peers have taken, its MD of Software & Security, Andrew Dunbar, said.
“A lot of the traditional resellers are focusing purely on a transactional approach, and for us the transaction is the outcome,” he told IT Channel Oxygen.
“If you’re talking about just purely transactional, yes, they’re 18 months ahead of [us] in terms of size and volume.
“But when we talk about marketplace, it’s not just around the transactional; it’s not a race to the bottom; it’s around the services attach.
“That’s a real differentiated model for us, instead of just saying, ‘Hey, do you want to move your renewal into a hyperscaler marketplace’, which is a little bit left pocket, right pocket.”
“When everyone talks marketplace – speak to any of our peers – they’ll talk about the biggest deals and the volume through marketplace. Great, we’re seeing that – but there’s also a big story around that tail-end spend and moving to much more of an optimised spend intelligent procurement piece as well.”
“The sales cycle is really reducing”
SCC has just completed a 15-stop roadshow around the UK with its sellers, Dunbar revealed.
In the UK, its hyperscaler marketplace sales are currently split evenly between AWS and Azure, with GCP set to come on line soon, Dunbar indicated.
SCC was in December announced as a launch partner for AWS Marketplace’s new multi-product solutions offering, which is designed to enable partners to combine multiple products and services.
But its Microsoft marketplace sales are growing at “triple digits”, he was quick to add.
SCC’s hyperscaler marketplace operating model includes a “new business engine” focused on winning net new customers, as well as a “customer growth engine” dedicated to adoption, expansion and service attach, Dunbar explained.
It also includes a demand generation component looking at marketplace-led campaigns and co-sell, as well as a component focused on “services proposition development and orchestration”, he added.
“We are measuring each and every customer in terms of the transaction, but also what services wrap we’ve got in and around that,” Dunbar said.
“We do a lot of work with likes of Snowflake and Databricks, and we’re looking at them and saying, ‘how do we do a data modernisation story’?
“We’ve got some shrink-wrapped offerings that we’re layering into those customers to allow them to consume it quickly. And then the pull through we’re seeing in terms of follow-on services, attach and consumption is accelerating really, really quickly. The sales cycle is really reducing.”
SCC is seeing many of its strategic vendors “go all in” on hyperscaler marketplaces as a primary route to market, Dunbar said.
This includes ServiceNow – which earlier this month announced it surpassed $1bn in AWS Marketplace transactions and whose ServiceNow Knowledge event Dunbar’s team attended last month (see image, above).
“At ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 this was very clear,” he said.
“Help us go faster”
Dunbar joined SCC in September 2024 with a remit of growing its software and services attach rates. Its software and services business grew by nearly 20% last year, he claimed.
“That part of the business was probably not exactly where it needed to be at the time,” he said.
Asked how hyperscalers can improve their marketplace offering for partners, Dunbar said he felt the tension around how sellers get compensated has been resolved.
“The one thing we’re speaking to them about is more and more automation,” he said.
“Help us go faster, and lean into what SCC can do – because we can go quite quickly, as we’ve proved in the last 12 months.”
Doug Woodburn is editor of IT Channel Oxygen
