Techaisle Blog

AWS Marketplace, a platform synonymous with accelerating procurement and fostering innovation, is undergoing a significant transformation, propelled by the strategic integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI). A recent briefing offered deep insights into how AWS is leveraging AI, not just as a new product category, but as a core engine to enhance the experience for both customers and partners, particularly Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). The briefing highlighted a comprehensive approach, applying AI across the entire AWS Marketplace lifecycle – from discovery and procurement to partner operations, support, and co-selling motions. This isn't merely a superficial application of AI; it's a fundamental shift aimed at increasing speed, efficiency, visibility, and ultimately, mutual success for AWS and its vast partner community.

The Vice President for AWS Marketplace and Partner Services, Matt Yanchyshyn, shared that the excitement within their engineering teams over the past three to six months has been palpable, directly correlating with the meaningful improvements realized through AI. While AI has been used internally for years, recent advancements, particularly in areas such as prompt-driven development and what some refer to as agents, have led to a "step change" in engineering velocity and the features exposed to users. The focus is on specific, realized time and cost savings, both internally and externally.

AWS Marketplace itself has evolved dramatically since its inception as a self-service software marketplace. It now encompasses software as a service (SaaS), containers, large language models (LLMs), professional services (including consulting and managed services), and data. This breadth positions AWS well to serve emerging trends, such as the increasingly fast-evolving drift of combining private and third-party data sources with AI in the form of agents or foundation models. The core value proposition of the marketplace remains speed in the procurement journey, which is deemed paramount, especially in the context of AI, where rapid experimentation and access to technologies like LLMs or vector databases are crucial for innovation. Slow procurement kills innovation.

The strategic underpinning for this AI-driven transformation is the concept of "Marketplace Everywhere". This four-part strategy involves using AWS Marketplace to power partner experiences across AWS service consoles, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon SageMaker, and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). It involves integrating AWS Marketplace into every sales motion, making it a core component of co-selling. It means bringing AWS Marketplace to every country where customers do business with AWS. Crucially, it also involves exposing the same APIs used internally to power experiences across AWS service consoles publicly. This "Buy with AWS" capability enables third parties, such as ISV websites or distribution partners, to embed AWS Marketplace listings directly into their own experiences. This distributed approach ensures that AI buyers, who may be scientists, developers, or future line-of-business users, can discover and buy AI capabilities within the tools and platforms they already use, democratizing access and meeting customers where they are.

Now, let's delve into the key takeaways regarding AI's impact on AWS Marketplace and the significant advantages it offers partners and ISVs.

Dell Technologies World 2025 (DTW) recently provided a comprehensive look into Dell's strategy and vision, with a particular focus on the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for businesses of all sizes. Keynotes from Michael Dell and Jeff Clarke, alongside detailed briefings on Client Solutions Group (CSG) and Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG), painted a picture of a company positioning itself as the end-to-end partner for the AI journey. While much attention often focuses on hyperscalers and large enterprises, Dell offers significant opportunities and tailored strategies for the midmarket as well as the vital channel partners who serve them.

Here are my seven key takeaways:

1. The Dell AI Factory is an End-to-End AI Framework, Not Just Hardware

Dell introduced and expanded upon the concept of the Dell AI Factory, describing it as an unmatched set of capabilities in the industry designed to help businesses get started with Generative AI and scale it. It is presented as an open, modular infrastructure with a rich ecosystem, delivering powerful GPUs, scalable storage, high-throughput networking, curated tooling, and integrated cutting-edge models, supported by deployment services. This framework covers the entire computing architecture for modern AI workloads, from PCs to data centers and the edge. Dell has helped over 3,000 businesses build their factories and launched over 200 new features since its inception a year ago. The vision is for customers to bring their own company data to the AI Factory, driving unique business outcomes.

Why this is important for Midmarket and Channel Partners: This framework provides a structured approach to AI adoption. For midmarket, it demystifies the complex landscape of AI infrastructure by offering a seemingly integrated and supported stack. They don't need to piece together disparate components or become AI experts overnight. For channel partners, the AI Factory is a complete solution portfolio to take to customers. Dell is making it easier to consume and deploy through reference architectures and packaged software. This enables partners to concentrate on delivering value and outcomes, rather than merely selling individual pieces of hardware. The concept of bringing "your own company data" to drive outcomes resonates strongly with businesses of all sizes, emphasizing that AI value is tied to their unique operations and data, which partners are often intimately familiar with.

As the technology landscape continues to evolve rapidly, the success of hyperscaler vendors hinges significantly on the strength and effectiveness of their partner ecosystems. For partners navigating the complexities of multiple vendor relationships and an increasingly demanding customer base, the portals and tools these vendors provide are not just administrative interfaces - they are critical enablers of profitability and growth. Against this backdrop, Google Cloud's new Earnings Hub, launched at Google Cloud Next Partner Summit, is a compelling example of what a truly partner-centric platform can achieve, setting a new benchmark that other vendors would emulate.

My analysis suggests that Google Cloud's Earnings Hub is not merely an incremental update but a significant leap forward in providing partners with the visibility, insights, and tools necessary to thrive. It directly addresses partners' long-standing pain points and offers a glimpse into the future of vendor-partner collaboration, heavily leveraging data and artificial intelligence.

Google Cloud has consistently been at the forefront of innovation, providing cutting-edge solutions to meet the diverse needs of businesses worldwide. One of its latest advancements, the Google Cloud Earnings Hub, is a testament to its commitment to empowering partners and driving mutual success. This comprehensive platform is designed to streamline partner engagement, enhance visibility, and provide actionable insights, making it far ahead of many other partner hubs in the industry. In this analysis, I will delve into the features, functionalities, and advantages of the Google Cloud Earnings Hub, exploring the challenges it addresses for partners in vendor and customer engagements.

The Google Cloud Earnings Hub is a centralized platform that serves as a one-stop shop for all partner-related information and activities. Launched to foster transparency, collaboration, and growth, Earnings Hub offers a range of tools and resources that enable partners to maximize their earnings, optimize their strategies, and enhance their overall performance. Whether it's accessing funding programs, rebates, credits, or discounts, Earnings Hub provides partners with a holistic view of their financial incentives and opportunities.

Critically, recent Techaisle global channel partner surveys, encompassing 2500 partners, underscore key partner requirements for vendor portals. The data reveals that 62% of partners desire an action-oriented portal, enabling them to take direct steps based on the information presented. Furthermore, 57% are actively seeking portals that facilitate robust performance tracking, allowing them to monitor their progress and identify areas for improvement. Additionally, 49% emphasize the need for complete visibility into their relationship with the vendor, including financial performance and program status. Google Cloud's Earnings Hub directly addresses these fundamental partner needs by providing actionable insights, comprehensive performance tracking capabilities, and complete financial visibility.

The debut of IBM Partner Plus marked a significant evolution from the previous PartnerWorld program, specifically designed to accelerate partner business velocity in a rapidly changing cloud adoption landscape. Key to this launch were interconnected enablers such as insider access to sales and training materials, a focus on competitive and transparent incentives, and enhanced support for skill development in critical areas like AI and cloud. The program also introduced a simplified IBM Partner Portal offering real-time incentive visibility, an automated deal share engine, and increased co-marketing and co-sell support investments. These initial steps laid the groundwork for the simplified engagement, enhanced partner enablement, and targeted incentives, demonstrating a consistent strategic thread from the program's inception to its current manifestation in driving AI and hybrid cloud adoption through the ecosystem.

By establishing a program designed for diverse partner models and emphasizing transparency and support from the outset, IBM Partner Plus created an environment conducive to the "Build, Sell, Service" pillars and the incentivization of high-growth areas like Software as a Service (SaaS) and AI. The program's foundational goal of aligning with partners expanding their cloud market presence directly correlates with the current strategy to leverage the ecosystem for broader reach and deeper client engagement in AI and hybrid cloud solutions. This continuity underscores IBM's sustained commitment to its partners as central to achieving scale and success in these transformative technology areas.

The strategic alignment with partners, crucial for success, reflects the fundamental reality that in the dynamic world of enterprise technology at the intersection of AI and hybrid cloud, scale is paramount, and achieving this requires not only innovative products but also a robust and interconnected ecosystem. IBM's strategy for driving growth in the AI and hybrid cloud era is deeply rooted in cultivating a vibrant ecosystem – a community of diverse participants, including value-added distributors (VADs), resellers (VARs), service partners, and independent software vendors (ISVs), working harmoniously towards mutually beneficial outcomes.

The objective of IBM's ecosystem strategy is straightforward: to work hand-in-hand with partners to scale the IBM technology business in a way that benefits everyone involved. This requires a deep understanding of each partner type's diverse needs and drivers and aligning those towards common goals, specifically seizing the significant opportunities presented by AI and hybrid cloud.