With some 4 million monthly users, the Microsoft Azure Marketplace is one of the most powerful ecosystems on the planet and the go-to place for IT professionals looking for solutions to accelerate and simplify their organizations’ digital transformations. If you’re an independent software vendor (ISV) looking to accelerate growth, you are missing out on a serious opportunity if you have not deployed your cutting-edge SaaS or PaaS offering to the Azure Marketplace

The Microsoft Azure Marketplace is essentially an online store that offers Microsoft-certified applications and services that are built on or designed to integrate with Microsoft's Azure public cloud. It features thousands of cutting-edge solutions that are designed to extend directly into users’ Azure infrastructure, including building blocks, digital cloud services, finished software solutions, and consulting and managed services. Products and services are organised by category and easy to filter to facilitate discovery.

A smarter way to Azure marketplace deployment

Getting on board is a smarter way to promote your SaaS/PaaS solutions via the prestige of the Azure name, as well as to benefit from a range of great technical resources and tools Microsoft offers ISVs on the platform. You can publish your solution for free to reach potential customers in all Azure Public regions worldwide. This offers exciting opportunities for your ISV business to generate new sales opportunities and to scale its growth as a global brand. You can accelerate growth even faster if you attain ‘co-sell’ status, which means that other Microsoft field sellers are incentivized to sell your product on your behalf.

Before you can publish on the Azure Marketplace, you will need to get pre-approval via the Microsoft Azure Certified program and create a Microsoft Developer account. When you start publishing, the first thing you will want to do is define what kind of solution your company is offering. Each kind of solution on the Azure Marketplace requires a slightly different set of work from you to successfully publish into the Marketplace. Before you can deploy your solution, you will need to meet certain technical prerequisites, and create and test your offer—here’s a guide.

Accelerate time to market

As this basic description reveals, deploying your solution to the Azure Marketplace can be a lengthy and complex process. To accelerate speed to market and simplify the process, you can leverage a B2B marketplace enabler like Stactize from 1Nebula. This solution, designed by a knowledgeable Microsoft Partner with an intimate understanding of the Azure platform, can accelerate your path to market.

Such a cutting-edge solution offers a smarter way to deploy your solution to the Azure Marketplace. It automates the onboarding of your solution with a pre-built orchestration app. You can customise user journeys, using templates. It also lets you customise product branding in your customer sign-up journey and notify customers of changes and new features.

What’s more, it can accelerate the Azure go-to-marketplace process from well beyond six months to less than four weeks, allowing for minimal development effort and fewer resource expenses. Beyond deployment, Stactize offers direct product subscriptions, branded customer sign-up journey, low to zero development effort, and full subscription lifecycle integration.

Get in touch to learn how our expert team and the seamless process can guide and simplify your journey onto the Azure Marketplace.