Every channel event I have been to this year has the same conversation on the main stage. Net new logos. Landmark transactions. The race to move the biggest percentage of revenue through marketplace. The numbers are real and the momentum is genuine. But there is a different conversation happening in the room afterwards, usually over a coffee, that I think is more relevant for a lot of enterprise customers, and it is the one about what is already sitting in their estate.
From what I have seen working with enterprise accounts, a significant chunk of software and cloud spend sits in departmental or business-unit ownership rather than central IT or procurement. Renewals that roll over without review. Licences bought for a project that has since changed. SaaS tools that two or three different teams procured independently without knowing the others had done the same. Point solutions added during a vendor conversation that were never properly evaluated against the broader estate. This is not a governance failure, it is just what happens at scale when procurement, IT and the business are all moving at different speeds with different priorities.
Hyperscaler marketplace creates a genuine opportunity to bring that under management. Not because the technology is magic, but because consolidating spend through a small number of governed procurement channels, with visibility, tagging and commitment alignment built in, is a fundamentally better operating model than the alternative. Customers already sitting on significant Azure or AWS committed spend have a natural commercial incentive to route more of their software purchases through those channels. Done well, it reduces procurement friction, improves visibility and helps finance and IT tell a coherent story about what they are spending and why.
The growth data supports the direction. Business application revenue on hyperscaler marketplaces is forecast to grow from $1.8 billion in 2025 to $5.3 billion by 2029, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 32%, almost triple the broader enterprise software market. There is a well-referenced pattern in enterprise software spend where roughly 80% of budget goes through 20% of vendors, the strategic relationships that procurement and IT know well. It is the remaining spend, spread across a long tail of departmental tools, shadow IT and point solutions, where the visibility breaks down and the cost compounds quietly. That is the problem marketplace, paired with the right intelligence layer, is well placed to solve.
At SCC we talk about this as intelligent procurement, using the marketplace motion not just as a faster checkout but as a way of helping customers optimise what they are already spending. That means understanding the committed spend position, mapping the software estate against it, identifying where consolidation makes sense, and building a buying pattern that compounds over time rather than just creating another silo alongside the existing ones.
This does not get much airtime at channel events because it is not a headline number story. But in my experience the CIOs and CFOs who are most engaged on marketplace are often the ones who have just come out of a difficult audit conversation and realised they do not have a clear picture of what they own, what they are committed to, or what they are actually using. That is a real and common problem. Marketplace, with the right partner wrapped around it, is a genuine part of the answer.
If you are working on this in your organisation, or if you think I have got the framing wrong, I would be interested to hear it. And if tail spend and unmanaged software costs are a live headache, talk to SCC about our spend management and intelligent procurement solutions. Unapologetic plug, but a genuine one.
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)
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