August 06, 2020

Gary Green: Leverage Cloud Marketplaces without Killing your Channel

44 minutes

Where do the hyper-scale cloud marketplaces from the likes of AWS, Microsoft, and Google fit in your channel strategy? Forrester predicted that 17% of the $13 trillion in B2B spend will flow to marketplaces by 2023, and that was before we were hit by the global Covid-19 pandemic. If you are a SaaS vendor and you don’t have marketplaces in your channel strategy, it’s time to reconsider. To learn how one vendor is finding success in leveraging cloud marketplaces, without alienating their traditional channel partners, I turned to Gary Green, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Cloudera.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Gary shares many ways that Cloudera is leveraging cloud marketplaces while also paying attention to their diverse network of channel partners. Here are my top 5 pieces of advice from our conversation:

Starting your partnership with a technical foundation with deep technical integration can help you develop a deeper commercial partnership down the road.

Make sure that your sales teams come together collaboratively with your cloud marketplace provider’s sales teams in front of the customer.

Work with the go to market teams and the sales organizations of the global cloud providers and your partners to make sure that everybody understands the joint value proposition of your solution in a public cloud environment.

Once you are set up in the marketplace, the biggest challenge is just getting your customers to understand that it’s available and how they go about getting it. Plan on running a lot of market awareness campaigns.

Be flexible in your pricing models. Allow customers to consume your offering in a pay-as-you-go consumption model.