Following my recent interview with Doug Woodburn at IT Channel Oxygen, I had a number of people reach out, some to agree, some to offer a different view and a few to add angles I had not fully considered. That kind of response is always the most useful and it got me thinking harder about the topic.
I picked up the phone and spoke to a few friends and former colleagues across different parts of the ecosystem, ISVs, hyperscalers, service providers, distributors and MSPs. I wanted a more rounded view, because if I am honest, sitting inside a VAR gives you a particular lens on this and I was aware I might be missing something.
The same themes came up time after time, regardless of where people sat. The channel conversation about marketplace is still almost entirely framed around volume. Biggest deals, most transactions, percentage of revenue shifted. We are seeing that at SCC too, and the numbers are real. But every time I asked people what they thought the actual customer perception was, not the partner perception, the customer’s, the answer was more complicated than the transaction metrics suggest.
Jay McBain wrote something a few weeks back that gave me a useful frame for why that gap exists. He described the average enterprise buying journey as involving 28 distinct moments before a sale is made, with 6.3 partners in the mix, 7 layers of technology in the solution and a 13-person buying committee trying to make a decision. His question was: who or what orchestrates all of that? His answer was the digital marketplace, augmented by agentic AI. Not a CRM, not a marketing platform, not a PRM. The marketplace becomes the customer’s source of truth. And it is already starting to happen, AWS launched a conversational AI interface at re:Invent last year that lets customers discover and evaluate solutions using natural language. The marketplace as orchestration layer is not a prediction anymore, it is in production.
I think he is right. And I think it reframes what winning in marketplace actually means. It is not about processing the most transactions. It is about being the partner that sits inside the customer’s buying journey at the moments that matter, before, during and after the transaction.
When we talk about marketplace at SCC, we are not talking about a transaction engine. We are talking about a services model. There is a version of this that is essentially moving a customer’s renewal from one column to another, same product, different checkout. Left pocket, right pocket. It feels like progress but it is not.
What we are actually seeing from customers is something more interesting. The ones getting the most from marketplace are not just transacting through it, they are using it as a faster on-ramp to adopting new technology. Data modernisation projects with Snowflake or Databricks are a good example. Customers want to move quickly, but they do not want to start from a blank page. What they are asking for are packaged starter offerings, a defined scope, a proven architecture and a faster path to a working proof of value, rather than a bespoke engagement that takes months to define before anything gets built. We are also seeing real appetite for industry vertical solutions that are pre-configured for a specific use case, so a financial services firm or a public sector organisation can see something relevant to their world from day one rather than something generic that needs translating.
The broader point is that marketplace is accelerating the consumption motion, and that changes what the services wrap needs to look like. It needs to be ready to move at the same speed. The real opportunity, and the real revenue, is in building those packaged propositions so that when a customer commits through marketplace, there is an immediately deployable services offer sitting behind it. That is the services attach, the adoption work, the pull-through. That is where the value sits, not in the transaction itself.
I saw a sharp comment under Jay’s post from someone with eleven years across Microsoft, Google and SAP partner ecosystems, pointing out that no services deal of meaningful size has ever closed through a marketplace UI, that the SOW negotiation still happens in a room. Fair point, today. But the motion is moving faster than most people realise. AWS now lets partners list and transact professional services, advisory, consulting and implementation, directly through the marketplace. That is not a future prediction, that is live now. And ServiceNow just announced they have crossed $1 billion in AWS Marketplace transactions, with the milestone tied directly to an expanded AI governance platform. That is not a simple product sale. It is a complex enterprise platform with agent management and governance capability transacting through a marketplace checkout. The room is getting smaller.
SCC has just done a 15-stop roadshow with our sellers across the UK. We are measuring every customer on both dimensions, the transaction and the services wrap. And the pull-through we are seeing in follow-on services and consumption is accelerating faster than I expected when we started this.
I had a conversation recently with Fabienne Porquet, our Marketplace Sales Specialist at SCC, who works directly with customers on this every day. Her view was straightforward: the organisations seeing the best results are the ones treating marketplace as part of their overall commercial strategy, not just a route to transact. In practice that means structuring deals properly through private offers, making sure committed spend is being utilised intelligently, and reducing the procurement friction that slows down time to value. She also made a point I thought was worth repeating, managing all of this well quickly becomes complex and resource-intensive, and the customers who are getting consistent results are the ones who have a team helping them navigate that complexity rather than trying to figure it out as they go. That is exactly the model we are building at SCC, and it is what I mean when I talk about services and solutions attach. Customers need to realise value quickly. That is the whole point.
The question I keep asking peers and customers alike is this: when your AI investments, your agents, your platforms, your data estate, are all sitting inside cloud commitments, and the marketplace becomes the procurement layer for all of it, where is your services partner in that picture? Because if the answer is “we have not worked that out yet,” that is the conversation worth having now.
Ultimately, the organisations that succeed will be those that can balance innovation with the right operational, financial and governance foundations.
Want to learn more? Connect with one of our specialists:
Fabienne Porquet, Marketplace Sales Specialist – SCC UK Sales Software
Author: Andy Dunbar, Managing Director, Software & Security (UK)