The Marketplace Revolution: Transforming How Software is Bought and Sold.

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If you haven’t yet attended one of our Ultimate Partner Events, you’re in for a truly magical and industry-leading experience. In case you missed our Winter Retreat, we’re bringing one of the final sessions to you here: the Ultimate Guide to Partnering.

In this session, join industry leaders Jason Rook, Dux Sy of AppPoint, and Dexter Hardy of Integral as they dissect the reality behind the cloud marketplace hype.

This dynamic panel explores the tectonic shifts driving customer behavior and how major hyperscalers are responding. Industry leaders Jason Rook, Dux Sy of AppPoint, and Dexter Hardy of Integral dissect the reality behind the cloud marketplace hype.

This dynamic panel delves into the tectonic shifts driving customer behavior and how major hyperscalers are adapting. Discover firsthand accounts of achieving unprecedented reach, accelerating deal velocity, and transforming sales strategies through platforms like the Azure Marketplace.

Explore the evolving promises of marketplaces, from lowering the cost of goods sold to the strategic shift in salesforces and the power of co-selling. Gain invaluable insights into public vs. private offers, multi-cloud strategies, and the role of enablers in navigating this complex ecosystem. Whether you’re a startup or an established enterprise, this session provides actionable takeaways to leverage the immense potential of cloud marketplaces and future-proof your partnering strategy in the age of AI.

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Here are 8 key takeaways from the discussion:

1. Cloud marketplaces are experiencing real and significant growth, driven by customer buying behavior and the need for digital transactions.


2. Marketplaces offer unprecedented reach and the potential for rapid global expansion, as demonstrated by Integral’s experience.


3. Co-selling through marketplaces aligns incentives and can accelerate deal velocity and increase deal size, particularly with cloud consumption commitments.


4. The “lower cost of goods sold” promise of marketplaces is more readily realized by startups with simpler offerings than large enterprises with complex sales motions.


5. Marketplaces are driving a shift in salesforce strategies, with companies increasingly embracing digital-first approaches and leveraging marketplaces for customer acquisition.


6. Combining channel strategies with marketplaces, including multi-party private offers, presents significant opportunities for growth and new service offerings.


7. The choice between public and private offers depends on the company’s maturity, brand recognition, and the nature of their solutions, with public offers being beneficial for initial brand building and private offers for larger, custom deals.


8. While professional services can be offered through marketplaces, they don’t typically decrement cloud consumption commitments, making software sales the primary driver for leveraging those commitments.

It was another bold, thought-provoking, and energizing discussion that left the audience inspired and eager to take action.

And we’re just getting started.

If you found this conversation as compelling as we did, don’t miss another Ultimate Partner event. Our next conference, LIVE, is taking place later this week in Redmond, on May 1–2, at Microsoft’s legendary Conference Center.

We’re curating an even more impactful experience, featuring returning thought leaders and fresh voices who have never taken this stage before.

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Keywords & Transcript

Jason Rook Panel AUDIO EPISODE

[00:00:00 ] Dexter Hardy: It absolutely blew my mind the amount of reach and scale that we were able to accomplish just through the marketplace. When you look at there’s 7 million or more and growing active users in just Azure Marketplace alone, those become your captive audience for your solutions.

[00:00:22 ] INTRO: We believe this time is like no other.

We believe we refer to these as the tectonic shifts, all the hyperscalers in the world, if you add them all together. Managed services will be one and a half times larger

[00:00:34 ] Dux Sy: because it is the customer buying behavior that has created the need for all of us to rethink our models.

[00:00:40 ] INTRO: Until we have data quality, the effectiveness of AI cannot be realized and effectiveness of the partnerships cannot be realized.

Can you figure out, first, what your purpose is and how Microsoft can support your purpose and how you can support Microsoft purpose? Now we have a partnership. It’s the ultimate partnership. Welcome to, or welcome back to The Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi, own your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering.

On February 20th, 2025, a small group of industry leaders converged here in Boca Raton, Florida, in this very studio for Ultimate Partners Winter Retreat. What followed was an incredible discourse on the tectonic shifts and the rapid change. We’re all seeing as partners. If you weren’t able to join us in person or on the live stream, we’re bringing this incredible session to you here.

This is my gift to you. All I ask in return is that you tell your friends, subscribe. Consider joining the ultimate partner community and hopefully joining us in the future. At an Ultimate Partner event. I hope these sessions provide you the learnings you need to continue to achieve your greatest results.

And now here to this amazing session.

[00:01:57 ] Jason Rook: Um, but my first question I’m gonna ask is, uh, ducks and ducks are both, is is the marketplace hype for real? And then within that, introduce yourself. Tell us a little bit more about what you guys have been doing in marketplace, and we’ll continue to dive in from there.

So Ds, I’ll start with you. Tell us a little bit more about AppPoint and then is this marketplace hype for real?

[00:02:15 ] Dux Sy: Sure. Well, thank you. Hey everybody. My name is Ds Raymond SI serve as a Chief Brand officer at AppPoint. We’re the global leader in data security, governance, and resilience. And we’ve been in business over 20 years and these days we’re so stoked about the channel as, uh.

Um, Janet mentioned we’re all in a hundred percent. We’re helping a lot of our partners build new businesses around ai, making sure their customer’s data is secure as they journey through this new world of, uh, uh, transformation. So it’s the hype reel. Absolutely. Now we’re in the early stages, and I can answer that multiple ways, but I, I, I’m gonna highlight three things why I think the hype is real.

Number one, if you have large customers, specific to the Microsoft world. So a lot of these customers have what’s called Mac. And what we’re seeing for a lot of our large customers, they want to draw on their Mac and it just helps our uh, deal cycle to go through much faster. So that’s number one. If you’re an enterprise Azure marketplace, for us it’s real second beyond the Microsoft marketplace, there’s tons of marketplaces out there.

That’s how really we scale and go to market with our channel business. Uh, we’re in over a hundred marketplaces around the world, and that’s one, one of our top strategies to grow our business in the channel ecosystem. And number three, that’s the reality of the world. Looking forward to the future, you can only hire so many sellers in your organization.

You can hire so many p dms and channel uh, leaders. You need automation. You need technology. You need a better way to distribute. So I think that’s why the hype is real.

[00:03:50 ] Jason Rook: So Dexter, I’ll kind of come to you with the same question. I know you’ve, you’ve been on this journey for a little bit of time now. Um, you’ve got kind of a little different business model that you’ve built and you’re building, um, for you is the marketplace hy