When you, as a user, access your Azure Portal or AWS portal, you have the option to buy thousands of products or solutions preconfigure for you. You don´t need to worry for the licences or the IT capabilities to design or deploy an specific solution as there are all build following customer needs for several AWS or Microsoft partners and ISV (independent software vendors).

We will speak about the AWS marketplace later, in a new post. Just to pointed out, it was launched in 2012 to accommodate and foster the growth of AWS services from third-party providers that have built their own solutions on top of the Amazon Web Services platform such as ISV, SI (System Integrator) an resellers so the customer would buy exactly what they needed and when they needed adding a tremendous flexibility to grow their cloud solutions aligned with the business.

In the case of Azure was launched in 2014, it is a starting point for go-to-market IT software applications and services built by industry-leading technology companies.The commercial marketplace is available in 141 regions, on a per-plan basis.

What are the plans and how to use them (as a Partner)?

Microsoft partners can publish interesting solutions which involve licenses and services together within the Azure Marketplace – On one hand, you don´t need to acquire licenses which prices are prorated within the price. On the other hand, you have access to expertise without hiring new employees in you IT team.

A plan defines an offer’s scope and limits, and the associated pricing when applicable. For example, depending on the offer type, you can select regional markets and choose whether a plan is visible to the public or only to a private audience. Some offer types support an scope of subscriptions, some support price related to consumption, and some let a customer purchase the offer with a license (BYOL), they have purchased directly from the publisher. 

Offer type	Plans with pricing options	Plans without pricing options	Private audience option
Azure managed application	✔		✔
Azure solution template		✔	✔
Azure container		✔ (BYOL)
IoT Edge module		✔
Managed service		✔ (BYOL)	✔
Software as a service	✔		✔
Azure virtual machine	✔		✔

• Markets: Every plan must be available in at least one market. You have the option to select only “Tax Remitted” countries, in which Microsoft remits sales and use tax on your behalf.
• Pricing: Pricing models only apply to plans for Azure managed application, SaaS, and Azure virtual machine offers. An offer can have only one pricing model. For example, a SaaS offer cannot have one plan that’s flat rate and another plan that’s per user.
• Plan visibility: Depending on the offer type, you can define a private audience or hide the offer or plan from Azure Marketplace.

How to publish and what kind of visibility can we provide (As a Partner)?

You can make plans for some offer types publicly available or available to only a specific (private) audience. Offers with private plans will be published to the Azure portal.

You can configure a single offer type in different ways to enable different publishing options, listing option, provisioning, or pricing. The publishing option and configuration of the offer type also align to the offer eligibility and technical requirements.

Be sure to review the online store and offer type eligibility requirements and the technical publishing requirements before creating your offer.

To publish your offers to Azure Marketplace, you need to have a commercial marketplace account in Partner Center and ensure your account is enrolled in the commercial marketplace program.

Also if your offer is published with a private plan, you can update the audience or choose to make the plan available to everyone. After a plan is published as visible to everyone, it must remain visible to everyone and cannot be configured as a private plan again.

Finally, as a partner can enable a free trial on plans for transactable Azure virtual machine and SaaS offers.

For example, azure virtual machine plans allow for 1, 3, or 6-month free trials. When a customer selects a free trial, we collect their billing information, but we don’t start billing the customer until the trial is converted to a paid subscription.

What are your benefits when using Azure Marketplace (As a User)?

Marketplace brings flexibility to customers as they can buy immediately any kind of offer based in a plan which provide several products from thousands of ISV without losing time to deal with any vendor or understand in detail the support model or licensing options.

In the Azure portal, select + Create a resource or search for “marketplace”. Then, browse the categories on the left side or use the search bar, which includes a filter function and choose what you need..

Likewise, there are lots of consultancy services provided from several Microsoft partners, some of them as a free trial so you can test the quality of their professional services and see their approach to fix your pain points.

Enjoy the journey to the cloud with me…see you then in the next post.