Marketplace Mastery – Avoiding commit underspend and winning with cloud marketplaces
Cloud commitments have quickly become the standard and Marketplaces are the most direct route to turn them into outcomes. They are a provider-run channel that brings first-party services and approved ISV software under one agreement with transparent, metered drawdown. In commit-to-consume models, your term spend is pledged and reduced as services are used. Fall short and the difference is billed. Centralising eligible purchases in the Marketplace clarifies what counts and shows progress in one place, which helps keep consumption, not headline price, under control.
With Microsoft discounts no longer available through Enterprise Agreements, the best way to secure savings is through well-structured cloud commitments. The greater your total committed spend, the better your potential to negotiate discount. Use the Marketplace as your primary channel to expand those commitments by including approved non-Microsoft software and services. Leverage private offers to align Marketplace purchases with your enterprise terms, and review usage regularly with finance and procurement teams to stay on plan and avoid end‑of‑term surprises.
Operate the commitment like a living budget
Forecast deliberately and route all eligible spend with intent, prioritising Marketplace lanes that retire commitments under provider rules; be sure to use the correct account/subscription mapping so the drawdown is recorded against the right agreement. Marketplace purchases keep the meter moving in your favour and make consumption visible to finance and procurement. If a three-year commitment enters year two behind plan, teams can map upcoming work and shift recurring ISV subscriptions to the Marketplace where eligible, so drawdown continues even if build activity pauses.
Marketplaces are the operational hinge
Marketplaces can turn fragmented invoices into a single measurable drawdown with clearer accountability. Procurement teams can roll up eligible spend from first-party services and Independent Software Vendors under one easier-to-manage agreement. On major providers, correctly routed, eligible Marketplace transactions can retire commitments alongside core usage, improving metering, accountability, and predictability of end‑of‑term outcomes. The upshot is smarter commitments, cleaner metering and fewer unwanted surprises.
To retire Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment the offer must be eligible and transacted via the Azure portal on a subscription tied to the customer’s agreement; look for “Azure benefit eligible” and use “Get it in Azure portal,” not credit card checkout on marketplace.microsoft.com.
For AWS commitments from 1 May 2025 only Marketplace SaaS fully hosted on AWS counts towards commitment retirement; AWS is adding an eligibility tag in Marketplace to help buyers validate before transacting
What ‘Marketplace Mastery’ looks like
Treat commitments as a portfolio, not a purchase
Commitments commonly run around three years. Metered consumption, cloud plus eligible ISV via the Marketplace, draws them down with incentives from day one. The risk is undershooting and getting billed anyway. The fix is relatively simple – disciplined visibility, accurate forecasting and routing eligible spend through the right lanes across all accounts and all business units.
Make Marketplace central to the negotiation
Pre‑wire renewals to include Marketplace volume alongside core workloads; routing existing ISV spend through Private Offers can accelerate retirement while preserving enterprise terms and governance. Many organisations already buy ISVs such as Fortinet, Cohesity or IBM cloud services. Routing that through the Marketplace retires the commit faster and keep standard procurement controls and auditability intact.
Public Marketplace is the self-serve catalogue. Private Marketplace and private offers mirror your standard buying motion and negotiated terms. Most enterprise transactions run through that private lane. Use Public Marketplace for discovery and Private Marketplace/Private Offers for transacting under negotiated terms; confirm MACC/EDP eligibility per offer and validate the correct checkout path before purchase.
Run a monthly operating schedule
SCC-recommended cadence. Sharpen focus, keep owners honest.
Monthly: Review burn-down, forecast and variance, owned jointly by procurement, finance and IT and ensure actions are taken.
Quarterly: Tune the portfolio and capture earned incentives.
Mid-term: If you are behind, channel eligible purchases through the Marketplace lanes and accounts tied to each agreement to ensure retirement is recorded and incentive bands are reached efficiently
Misalignment is the silent killer
Procurement may not see burn-down, IT may miss renewal windows and finance may leave credits unused. The fix is company-wide and straightforward, shared data, clear owners and a single approval path.
Avoid underspend with three habits
Audit eligibility early: Catalogue every service and ISV subscription that retire the commitment under each provider’s rules.
Consolidate routing: Where feasible, route approved purchases through consolidated channels to preserve cost-centre accountability.
Forecast 12–24 months: Schedule programmes and purchasing activity so drawdown remains predictable and evenly distributed across quarters, since the committed amount is fixed at point of negotiation.
Make commitment awareness universal: don’t miss value through silence
Budgets are often tight and renewal dates are not moving, so the operating rhythm has to fit daily workloads without adding noise.
Build a visible, owned system
Create a single register: with provider, contract ID, term dates, pledged amount, remaining balance, eligible spend types, applicable accounts, cost-centre mapping, named owner and renewal triggers. Keep it simple and current.
Map stakeholders and ownership
Maintain a lightweight RACI across procurement, IT, FP&A or finance, security and delivery teams. Make Marketplace eligibility and retirement explicit in service-owner remits.
Automate awareness
Push a monthly Teams or Slack digest and renewal countdowns to the stakeholder list, and auto-tag any variance breaches.
Embed checks in BAU workflows
Add “Does this purchase retire a commitment?” to purchasing and ITSM forms, and default eligible software to the Marketplace.
Train once, remind often
Run short enablement for budget holders and product owners on what qualifies, how to route and when to involve account teams.
Where the Microsoft pricing change fits
From 1 November 2025, Microsoft standardises pricing at renewal to Level A/list across EA, MPSA and EAS, removing Levels B–D volume tiers for both Online Services and on-premises software. Government and education customers operating at Level D with agreed discounts are in scope and should expect changes at renewal under their programme terms. If you previously benefited from Levels B–D, route all your eligible spend through Marketplace to grow commitment, unlock stronger discounts on your cloud bill, and offset lost Enterprise and MPSA discounts.
Q&A with Darren Sharpe :
Meet the Expert: Darren Sharpe, Microsoft (UK) Marketplace Lead
Darren Sharpe leads Microsoft’s UK Marketplace team and supports enterprise customers on Azure Marketplace strategy and MACC operations, including eligibility rules, retirement timing, and governance frameworks for sustained consumption.
In this Q&A, Darren shares practical guidance on how UK enterprises can maximise their MACC investment and align Marketplace purchases with broader cloud commitments.
Q: For UK enterprise customers, which Marketplace offers and types of solutions qualify?
The qualifying offers are from ISVs that have met our top-tier requirements, making them a subset of the transactable catalogue. These ISVs receive a certified software solution designation. We’re guaranteeing customers that the solution is majority Azure platformed, has met our security and automation metrics and possesses financial metrics to prove it’s of the utmost value for customers.
A key differentiator of the Microsoft Marketplace is that those solutions at the top tier, with what we call IP co-sell eligible status, allow customers to decrement their MACC by 100% of the software spend value. This is absolutely market-leading. By allowing 100% MACC decrement, we provide real value to the enterprise with the best Azure platform solutions.
Q: When you see customers come to the table with Marketplace purchases included in their forecast (alongside Azure usage), what best practices separate the top performers from the rest?
Best practices start with getting line of sight across the whole organisation of software spend. In this huge growth world of SaaS and agentic AI, line of business buying for SaaS and software is increasingly common, with an estimated 70% of SaaS actually bought outside of central procurement or central IT. That’s an opportunity and a risk for our customers.
The question is: how do you drive governance in a world where ISVs are positioning themselves at these lines of business buyers to get the job done? That’s where the platform adds real value. It provides governance and guardrails, as well as driving agility and innovation.
The Marketplace is more than a last-mile transaction engine. It allows access holistically across multiple users, not just in procurement, but also in line of business, because discovery may happen before procurement sees the solution. When enterprises contract through the Marketplace, that’s through SCC and the platform with a multi-party private offer.
The final best practice is working really closely with a trusted advisor, like the experts at SCC, to help with complete, integrated adoption of the platform across all business units.
Q: Have you seen in your position at Microsoft any users who have used the system to their advantage that you can tell us about?
Customers are looking to buy, rather than build, to get faster time to value. The consequence is that this rapid shift to buying is industry-wide, and not limited to any one particular vertical. Up to 30% of the MACC commits are, in some cases, being retired using software bought through the Marketplace. That’s a really savvy customer committing and growing through the cloud platform as they’re trying to innovate, but they’re also driving faster time to value through buying these solutions.
In this new world of shadow IT, or SaaS sprawl, customers are using cloud marketplaces to balance that agility and innovation versus governance and guardrails. For many organisations the first time they’re going to touch an AI solution is when they’ve bought it, rather than because they’ve built it. As these solutions become prolific and increasingly built for line of business personas, we’ve got to find a way to manage that.
The opportunity is that customers can now build a modern procurement practice. In fact, McKinsey called out that organisations with a mature and innovative procurement practice stand to deliver up to five points greater EBITDA and profitability.
This is about business process change and application modernisation. When we get that right, the benefits are cross-industry, cross-persona, and it becomes an evolution toward a highly optimised procurement process centred on Azure and the cloud.
Q: What are the top reasons customers under-consume against their MACC, and what governance rhythms help them avoid that?
Frankly, we see less underutilisation of MACC. Customers are getting on the front foot and understand that the platform gives them a holistic view of how they and their partners are consuming cloud.
Instead, customers are seeing how to build in the software component up front, to potentially drive greater discounts for Azure consumption by looking at a slightly higher committed MACC over a longer term. Or they may look at the opportunity to drive greater commercial benefits, such as running software lifecycle management alongside their cloud platforms. That gives a more value-geared approach to the overall architecture.
The opportunity is for customers to understand their application portfolio and how their non-Microsoft software partners are migrating to the cloud. Because those vendors are also modernising to deliver more efficiently and in a much more cost-optimised way for their backend.
In this world of elastic consumption and just-in-time value, the best advice for customers is to look at how you’re delivering IT services to your entire organisation. Consider both the cloud and the applications you live and breathe every day, both on an individual user level and at the enterprise backend. In short, look at the entire picture.
Q: Are there Microsoft-provided dashboards or APIs you recommend for burn-down visibility and forecasting?
First of all, SCC is the right team to provide that analysis, lifecycle management and best practice. That’s because they bring together the real-world skill of knowing which applications can be MACC decrements, what is applicable to the customer’s current application use and the migration strategy for some of those applications.
We also launched the new Microsoft Marketplace very recently, which makes it really simple to search for which products are Azure benefit eligible. That’s now within the product search functionality publicly.
Those solutions will grow and change, almost on a weekly basis, so customers have absolutely got the ability to search, discover and then report from the portal. But the expertise here sits with the team at SCC to go and look at the overall value.
Q: For readers new to Marketplace, how should they think about public vs private Marketplace, where do you see each one used most effectively by enterprises?
It’s a common misconception that a cloud marketplace is a single button to push. But it’s not Amazon.com for enterprise software. As much as the Marketplace allows you to find, try, test and deploy, it’s about that discovery journey, which is relevant to multiple personas.
The same platform also enables you to manage private offers. And in the case of SCC, that’s a multi-party private offer, or a resale-enabled offer. Through the Marketplace you can get custom terms, custom pricing and a custom end-user license agreement that are built by SCC and the software provider. It uses the same agility and fast contracting capability of the Microsoft Marketplace. But it’s taking the value and the customisation specific to the customer from SCC and the ISV in partnership.
Q: Many customers transact via partners. What value do you see partners adding in private offers and how does this map to Microsoft’s co-sell?
The value comes from the tripartite relationship of SCC, the ISV and Microsoft. We’re all working to drive the right outcome.
It’s about more than Microsoft technologies. You get the value from the combination of best-in-class software solutions built on Azure, lifecycle management, governance and procurement best practices from the team at SCC as well as components of the Microsoft technology stack.
Q: What policy or eligibility changes (if any) should customers anticipate in the next 12–18 months that might affect how they retire MACC with ISV purchases?
We’re bringing out increased platform functionality and increased support for partners to drive this optimal contracting flow. We’re about to launch resale-enabled offers, which puts full control of an ISV listing in the hands of SCC. This will help deliver more elasticity and much more contractual, customer benefits. That launches at our 2025 Ignite show.
There are a number of other deeper platform features based on customer feedback to help with partner and customer innovation. For example, full invoice separation to allow segmentation of the Marketplace spend from SCC on the customer’s invoice and comprehensive purchase order numbering and reporting within the Marketplace Insights dashboard. Alongside that, there are a number of integrations into enterprise procurement systems, like Coupa and Ariba.
Innovation is coming not from the MACC decrement piece, because that will be consistent, grow and continue to add value. The innovation is coming from the feedback from customers and partners to better suit the way customers want to buy and innovate. This is why we call the Microsoft Marketplace the platform for partnering. In this digital era it’s the right way to bring great partners together to drive the right outcome.
Q: Where do you see the Marketplace in the 5 to 10 years?
We’ve seen AI come to life and rapidly become agentic delivery. Those agents are increasingly taking on tasks to augment the way we deliver as individuals, so I see much more process automation being delivered with both the platform and partners. That’s going to drive increased efficiency and transparency. When we launched the new Microsoft Marketplace, we launched with 3,000 AI agents, which can be delivered with private commercial terms through SCC.
The next step is to automate. That will come to life through things like advanced syndication, making sure that customers have got access to the right platform and the right solutions.
My other forecasts are the concept of cloud marketplace access anywhere where the customer requires it, plus a really efficient automated quote-to-purchase-to-reporting process that drives this slick innovation and supports the right outcomes for customers.
Q: Any advice for organisations running multi-cloud who want to keep their Microsoft commitments healthy while also using AWS/GCP responsibly?
The way you consume technology across all areas of your business needs to be well-reasoned so you’re getting best value out of these commitments. A key differentiator of the Microsoft Marketplace is that many of our ISV solutions are built not just with our cloud stack, but with the productivity tools that we live and breathe every day as individuals. 70% of the world’s ISVs call themselves a line of business ISV. That’s where the innovation is going to come from – individual users looking to drive optimal tasks.
The Microsoft platform can help you with your cloud stack, but also with things like Dynamics 365, and all those complementary solutions that are helping drive adoption, stickiness, repeatability and maximum customer value. It’s really important to have a holistic view of where and which applications you’re using across the business.
Q. What’s your experience of Marketplace use in the public sector? How are you seeing it used?
Agencies of all sizes are starting to adopt cloud marketplace buying practices. Whether through stealth, because they need to drive innovation, or because they’ve gone through the good governance process to realise that this is a way to drive best commercial value for the organisation.
It’s a journey for a government body to understand framework compliance. But in many cases the cloud marketplace route to market is going to be the most efficient and agile way to deliver not only their technology, but commercially the best price. Public sector account teams in Microsoft have never been more engaged with the Microsoft Marketplace to drive better value, innovation and governance into their customers.
Q. There’s a huge mandate at the moment in public sector agencies to drive cost saving. Are you seeing them using the Marketplace to drive that?
Historically, public sector organisations have shied away from using this platform, preferring more traditional routes. There was a time when cloud marketplaces weren’t understood in the public sector because of the complex billing structure inherent to the partner model (where the customer is billed by Microsoft, but the contract is with the publisher).
But over recent years I’ve seen a dramatic change as the framework providers are starting to include cloud marketplace language within their frameworks to help drive this innovation.
Let’s be clear, many of the world’s digital native software companies are coming to life in the cloud, and only delivering for the first three to five years of their lives through a cloud marketplace. For government bodies to not be able to buy software solutions in a cloud marketplace, is potentially limiting innovation. All sizes of public sector customers have a desire to drive efficiencies and work through those governance processes to drive the right outcome.
Why this matters now?
Marketplaces are scaling rapidly and enterprise cloud commitments already run into the hundreds of billions. Organisations that master the operating discipline, not merely the contract, will capture outsized value. While Microsoft and AWS dominate today, include Google Cloud Marketplace in longer-term planning so your operating model spans all principal providers.
Want to know where you stand? Book a free expert consultation and let’s talk.
Editor : Julian Gustea, Software & Security, Marketing UK, SCC