Did you attend re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas this year? It was a great show and there was a lot to pay attention to. One of the announcements that didn’t get a lot of attention at the time was made by AWS Marketplace specifically. “Starting today, all registered sellers with a public listing in AWS Marketplace can extend a custom contract through Seller Private Offers. Additionally, starting in Q1 2020, sellers will have a simplified fee structure and reduced listing fees when an offer is extended through Seller Private Offers. ” Translated this means that all SaaS companies can sell custom transactions directly onto a customers AWS bill with less fees.
Seller Private Offers are a feature in AWS Marketplace that allow SaaS companies to negotiate pricing, end-user license terms, and payment schedules via AWS Marketplace with their customers. Many AWS customers prefer to purchase through Seller Private Offers since it allows preferential pricing and terms. Seller Private offers also allow customers to provision, meter, and integrate software charges directly onto their AWS bill. With this announcement AWS also simplified and lowered the fee structure to provide greater incentives for sellers in AWS Marketplace to extend more Seller Private Offers and increase usage of AWS Marketplace in 2020.
What does this mean for SaaS companies?
If you are a SaaS company and your customers are moving their core workloads over to AWS, or other public clouds, you need to be paying attention. We have already written about why public cloud marketplaces are growing and the impact on traditional procurement channels. The move to public cloud is difficult for a lot of enterprises. By consolidating their overall technology spend and budgets onto their public cloud bill, cloud customers get a single place to view and analyze total spend, not to mention the benefits of using this consolidated spend as a negotiating tool with their public cloud provider.
By making it less expensive to offer SaaS products to AWS customers, it should increase the amount of SaaS transactions via AWS Marketplace. This increases the consolidation around the AWS bill capturing more than just the infrastructure spend and increases the opportunities for SaaS companies to grow revenue through the public cloud channels.
How will this impact your software business? Contact us below for a discussion on how you can take advantage of this and sell more strategically with AWS vs. your competition: