Marketplace Momentum: AWS Marketplace and Partners Simplify Procurement

Software marketplaces are an established concept that has been growing in popularity. Marketplaces offer many benefits, especially in easing the procurement and billing of services, presenting opportunities for partner services and simplifying access to them. Other benefits include accelerating and streamlining service implementation, which can save set-up time without requiring specialist skills.

To understand the role of marketplace solutions, I spoke to Mona Chadha, Director of Worldwide ISVs and Partners at Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS Marketplace is 10 years old and has evolved considerably, but its mission has remained the same: to make it as easy as possible for customers to be in the cloud.

We were joined by Audrey Benjamin, Director of Business Development, Digital Velocity at CDW, and Maureen Little, Vice President of Global Strategic Alliances at Okta. CDW is a US provider of technology products and services and Okta is an identity and access management software company. Both are AWS Marketplace partners.

Our discussion unpacked how marketplaces have simplified procurement and billing for partners, unlocking digital transformation for customers.

The episode explores:

• How marketplaces help customers' journey to the cloud and democratize cloud adoption.
• The effects of democratization of procurement on costs and engagement.
• Growth opportunities for marketplace partners and independent software vendors.
• The future of marketplaces, including integration of AI and cybersecurity services.

CCS Insight has produced a free report detailing the key points of the podcast discussion, available here.

Creators and Guests

Host

Bola Rotibi

Chief of Enterprise Research at CCS Insight

What is The CCS Insight Podcast?

Insightful audio from the global tech advisory firm.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Welcome to the CSS insight Podcast. My name is Bola Rotibi, and I'm the Chief of Enterprise Research here at CCS Insight and your host for today's discussion on Marketplace Momentum: AWS Marketplace and Partners Unlock Procurement Simplification. Joining me today from Amazon Web Services (AWS) is Mona Chadha, Director of Worldwide ISVs and Partners. I also have Audrey Benjamin, who is the Director of Business Development, Digital Velocity at CDW, and Maureen Little, who is VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Okta.
Hello to you all and welcome to the podcast.

Audrey Benjamin, CDW
Hi Bola.

Mona Chadha, AWS
Hi, everyone. Hello.

Maureen Little, Okta
Hi there.

Mona Chadha, AWS
It's good to see all of my friends here!

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Excellent. I think we're going to have a great, great discussion. So, software marketplaces are an established concept that is growing in popularity for procuring cloud-based services among organizations across the business landscape and of a range of sizes. Many see the variety of benefits that they offer, especially in ease in the procurement and billing of services, at the same time as presenting opportunities for partner services and simplifying the access to them.
Other benefits include the ability to accelerate and streamline the implementation of services, which can save set-up time while obfuscating the necessity of some specialist skills. Mona, you lead business development for categories such as security, storage, networking, database, data analytics, machine learning and IoT and help these software providers build their businesses leveraging AWS marketplace.
So, that's quite a long list! I would ask my first question: AWS Marketplace is well over a decade in age. Could you give us a quick historical perspective and then tell us how it provides value to clients?

Mona Chadha, AWS
Yeah, thanks for the question. And I've been with AWS for almost 12 years, so I've been present during the whole sort of creation of AWS marketplace. And really, when we first started, it was all about providing capability for our customers, our AWS customers, to be able to run software on AWS, right, to run it on an EC2 instance.
And so that gets those customers on to the cloud, and that's what we were looking for. And that's what customers were asking: give us an easy way, an easy button almost to run our software in the cloud. And so, as we started developing and because we've been getting feedback from customers and ISVs and others on, "this is so simple" and "getting to the cloud is actually really simple", "it's not as complicated as I thought it was going to be".
So that was the first step in really achieving not only the ease of use, but also the efficiency and then the flexibility because of the way in which customers were able to subscribe to software and procure it through a pay-as-you-go or utility-based model.
From there, we started getting a lot of feedback on rather than also having the ability for software to run on an EC2 instance of AWS, what about also creating like SaaS-based applications and being able to subscribe to that? What about having package type of solutions where they're running on a CloudFormation template? What about running in a containerized solution?
So, we started evolving the ability for customers and for ISVs to actually be able to run their software in and through different packages, right. Whether it's pay as you go, you want it on EC2 instance, or if you want to run it in a SaaS-based application, or running a containerized solution, you could do all of that.
And then coupled with the flexibility of procurement, whether again, it's paid on an hourly basis, paid on a monthly basis, paid on an annual basis, and have that flexibility of how you want to be able to procure based on your workload and based on how you need your business to run. All of that is really the genesis of AWS Marketplace and how we evolved it.
And then what we heard loud and clear from our channel community, was, "hey, what about us?", "we want a piece of this action, too". And so, as we were seeing a lot of our ISPs and customers procuring with our channel community, whether they're resellers, system integrators, such as CDW, etc., it was very, very important for us to make sure that we had capability that addressed the needs of our channel and our channel partners.
So, then we started adding things like, you can provide you can provide services, professional services, in addition to adding the software on that. So now as a customer, I have a holistic view and a holistic way to procure my software, my services, together with the channel partner or going direct. And now increasingly, we're adding more and more capabilities for our channel partners.
So that's how it evolved. And, as you can see through that journey and that evolution, the value is really to allow our customers to procure the way that they want to, but then also evolve them to a point where now they're able to procure more efficiently and faster.
Our ISVs and our channel community are able to recognize those accelerated gains in the marketplace in terms of their deals. They are able to get done faster because of all the automation that AWS Marketplace offers. And we'll talk to Audrey and Maureen in a minute, but also the opportunity sizes have increased as well, because more and more customers want to procure more through the marketplace because of that ease of use, because of the automation and they don't really have to worry about it. Once they're able, once they're on the marketplace, they're able to transact maybe a larger-value and longer-term private offer. So, I would say that's the evolution and then the value that we're bringing to our customers.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Wow. That is quite a long list there, Mona.

Mona Chadha, AWS
Yes! I could go on.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
It's quite a long list of capabilities. And it's really quite nice to see that genesis of how it has evolved. And I guess that a lot of that has been built up around how AWS customers have taken it onboard and then seen and ask lots of capabilities because it's a very rich capability list.
And I kind of want to bring Audrey in, because, Audrey, you've been with CDW for eight years holding various positions.

Audrey Benjamin, CDW
Not as long as Mona, but yeah, eight years.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
But you have been you have been there while AWS marketplace has been developing, which is good to know. But you currently lead Business Development for Digital Velocity, and you've overseen teams focusing on account acquisition expansion, particularly in cloud data and ubiquitous artificial intelligence, software engineering and cloud marketplace.
So, as somebody who kind of looks at building relationships, I'd love it if you could tell me a little bit about your journey on the marketplace and how your customer base responds to the AWS Marketplace and a little bit of background: what's the origin driving that or which has driven that customer demand?

Audrey Benjamin, CDW
Yeah, absolutely. So, while I haven't been at CDW as long as Mona, I have been there since the start of our Marketplace journey. So, if you rewind back to 2019 when AWS launched CPPO, that was when CDW had our entry into marketplace, and to no surprise, it was customer-led from the beginning. And procurement is a common buyer for our CDW account teams.
And our customers are always looking for faster, flexible ways to procure and deploy technology, and AWS Marketplace fits right into that sweet spot. If you fast forward to today, I would say the things that our customers appreciate the most about the marketplace is the simplicity and the speed that it provides. And then when you couple that with the ease of integration with AWS-native environments, it's a no brainer for procurement organizations but also line-of-business buyers.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
That makes a lot of sense, actually, in terms of the ease of procurement. And I just wanted to now bring in Maureen because you're the VP of Global Strategic Alliances at Okta, and you've been overseeing the team charged with kind of identifying and delivering unique but high-impact partnerships with the likes of GSIs and cloud hyperscalers.
So, what insights or lessons have you gained that highlight the value of how AWS Marketplace is supporting what clients need?

Maureen Little, Okta
Yes, absolutely. The other thing that's important here is, we keep talking about the customer, but you have multiple departments that are making buying decisions. So, as Mona said, AWS Marketplace launched about 10 years ago. Just think of the buying decision-making that's going on and the evolution of SaaS for the IT teams. Oh my gosh, they are just overwhelmed with buying decisions.
Also, they have more people within an organization determining and asking for software. All of that complicates it for the office of the CFO, for managing budgets. That absolutely complicates it for procurement. So, it's been only about four years since we initially decided to launch on AWS, and for Okta, we have to leverage private offers. We're not a standard software. You can't click to add us. Gosh, I wish we could. But really, what's easier for the customer is think of all the buying decisions, the management, the budget management.
So, when we made this decision, our customers were so happy because it streamlined procurement. It sometimes streamlined standard MSA and contract rules that they had in place. It's centralized, who made and clicked on the offer as a buying decision. So, I think you've really seen an evolution of IT buying, and you've really seen customers asking all of us to help from everything from CDW to us as the ISV, trying to bring them new innovation. They just need things to be easier, and they need it to be managed in a way that they can control budget, spending and usage.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
The things that I'm actually hearing in all of this is that ease of use and connection simplification, that almost democratization of who the buyer is and reaching out and talking directly to the buyer. That's a great part of, I always think, transformation: allowing people to get access to the things that they need.
But that does leave us with the procurement team, doesn't it? So, let's look at the good and the bad for procurement teams. And I've got this question because I'm sure there'll be people who are listening who are in the procurement role. And we want to know how do you think procurement should embrace the democratization of purchasing technology solutions and not fear it, but actually kind of take it on board? Does anyone want to jump in on that, Mona?

Mona Chadha, AWS
Sure. Yeah. I think the first thing is, as you said, really embrace it. And we're already seeing a lot of procurement executives, especially in larger enterprises, already embrace procurement transformation because they have to: everyone's jobs are getting very complicated, right? Everyone's getting to do more and more, so how do you sort of streamline it.
So I think some of that change management has already occurred. But for some that haven't, that's where embracing the innovation and to really recognize the fact that marketplace can help you with that, right. Focus on help you really focus on the areas that you really need to in order to accelerate your business.
And I think once that mind-set sinks in, that's where you start to see more involvement with the procurement organizations, more adoption of the AWS Marketplace features and functionality. As an example, we worked with a variety of procurement executives across different companies, small, medium and large, to really help understand some of the key challenges that they're facing today.
And one of the things that came out was, there's all these different compliance and governance types of information that we need to provide, whether it's for Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA, or any compliance stuff that we have around data.
And what the procurement teams asked for was, "is there a simplified way to do that so we don't have to go to each and every ISV or each and every service provider, or to a channel partner and ask them for this information?", "is there a way that we could easily allow those stakeholders to upload or add that information, so that it's easy now for us to get access to it and also in a safe way? Because obviously that's some of that information is confidential for the software provider or the service provider, but do it in a safe way".
And so that's where we created Vendor Insights in conjunction with our procurement teams and our channel partners in our ISV community to really make it easy for those procurement professionals to access that type of data that they need.
Really, they're spending days and sometimes months collating this information and getting it all in one spot. But now with Vendor Insights, they get it just like that. So now they're like, "oh my gosh, that was amazing. That helped me cut down my time and now I can spend my time really understanding budgeting". And that's great. Budgeting is now an area where you need to get better at, and so this is where we've created more reporting and more dashboard visualizations.
So as a procurement executive, I can actually see my entire universe of all my third-party software purchases through AWS Marketplace alongside my AWS services. And now I have the compliance and governance aspect that I need on the security side. So now I get all that AWS security documentation, plus I can get all the third-party documentation that I need from Vendor Insights.
I think from that perspective, some in the procurement role have already realized the benefits of the marketplace. Those that are in the process of that change management and evolving, they're seeing the benefits. In fact, they're coming back and saying, "hey, can I do this? How do I do this?"
We're seeing more and more of our team enable procurement executives. And so, we actually have a role and a function, our customer advisors, that are really embedded with those stakeholders to really help walk them through the benefits of AWS Marketplace and all that they can achieve there.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Wow. You hit upon something that I had was chatting to a procurement professional in the banking industry. And it was very much a case of focusing very much allowing procurements to almost hone in on that skill set so that they're not having to do all of the boring bread and butter kind of things.

Mona Chadha, AWS
Let's face it, we all have to do it!

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Yeah, we all have to do it, but we try to get away from it. But it's really becoming more of that professional, so locking in their knowledge or bringing their knowledge to actually be able to spread around the rest of the organization, which I think actually is untethering and unleashing them. It's quite powerful. It should be really a thing that they take on.
I want to bring in Audrey here because, you know, Audrey and Maureen must have to deal with a lot with the procurement guys and gals. So what's actually resonating most with your buyers in this space?

Audrey Benjamin, CDW
Yeah, there's a lot resonating with buyers. I would say if I was going to pick like the three big ticket items that we're seeing resonate the most, the first would be the ability to burn down a cloud commitment with AWS Marketplace. For those who work with procurement teams often, you know that procurement professionals are always looking for ways that they can do more with less and gain economies of scale on purchasing. So that's one really easy way for them to take advantage of that.
The second, I would say, is the ability to provide enhanced and streamlined experience for their line-of-business users or procurement customers within an organization. So, we're seeing a lot of our customers, specifically people in procurement, leverage marketplace catalogues to promote pre-approved vendors as well as budget caps to maintain governance for their line-of-business users.
And then the last one I would say is just, and this might go without saying, but private offers is huge for our customers because it enables tailored pricing and solutions for them.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
That's fantastic because it provides a level of consistency, doesn't it? In other words, you're making sure that it goes right across the organization. I think another thing, I can imagine that procurement professionals get may get concerned that there may be some people who want to go off-piste, but having that ability to govern and have that consistent policy and protection for any buyer is a really strong feature, which is great.
Maureen, I'd love to know what you've seen. How does enabling purchasing through the AWS Marketplace, when you're thinking about procurement professionals, and they talk about being successful in that role? What do you see to help them be successful through the AWS Marketplace?

Maureen Little, Okta
Well, first of all, let me just add on to what Audrey already said. So, standard buying, renewing a license is way more streamlined, right? Still having controls because some of our customers use a CDW, they don't purchase directly. They need that buying entity like a CDW to help them because they are looking more strategically across all software buying.
So that's number one. I just want to add on to that how critical that is in the CPO programme has allowed that. But let me just take a little step back. I'm going to throw you guys for a second, because actually, when I first tried to get us on the AWS Marketplace, I was essentially told in the assumption inside was, "no one's going to buy identity on a marketplace", right?
There's this disconnect of the control or the removal of control the procurement team will have when it's gone on our marketplace. I think that's just natural. Human nature says, "oh, it's like where my kids accidentally bought 400 pencils on amazon.com", right? They picture something and they don't realize the evolution that AWS has done and the controls that are in place.
So again, as I mentioned, the beginning for a product like Okta, which is a large identity purchase, there are multiple features and enhancements. I think the story inside Okta was, we're not going to see a lot of growth, it's not going to help us sell, we're not going to have the control. And my assumption is our buyers and procurement teams probably felt the same way, in the opposite: "I'm not going to be able to negotiate my price", "someone, somewhere is going to click a button and oh my god, we're going to buy millions of dollars of software", and "holy crap, how do I do this?"
So, what I would say to make a procurement professional more successful is actually they should be educating themselves on the modernization of buying of IT, period.
That means, what are the value-add resellers and consulting firms that are helping them make these buying decisions? How do you look at the usage of the software you've already purchased that should allow you simply to come back to your office of the CFO with savings? How do you manage private offers? What are the internal processes that you've stood up as a procurement professional to ensure that buying decisions are made and controlled, but in the end also made faster?
You win. I mean, come on now, you all win as a procurement professional. If you save money, make your internal decision-makers — that could be the CTO, that could be the head of product, that could be the head of marketing — if you make their jobs easier, then you win and then overall cost savings and cost management.
So one of the things that that we talk a lot about in our head of procurement is amazing. I mean, we spent a lot of time on this because I also manage a lot of ISVs, is it's a very difficult problem to solve these days. So educate yourself, understand who your top resellers are, make a strategy and identify the flow and process for the acceptance of renewals and new purchases.
If you don't do that internally at your company, then yeah, it's going to feel like the wild, wild West. It's going to feel like, "oh crap, somebody put something up there". The other thing that's really important is if you communicate proactively with your top software vendors to help us understand who's responsible to accept that final offer where do you stand as far as cloud credits?
The hiccup I'm seeing right now is everybody wants to move fast. They go to close a deal and maybe they didn't understand how many, credits are left. That kind of thing is where a procurement professional can stand up and become extremely strategic and still have a ton of negotiate and power inside your company.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
I think what I like about that actually is the way that you kind of push that to say, embrace it, because it's a positive for you, it is something that you can actually bring a lot of your skill sets. But at the end of the day, you need to educate yourself.
You need to streamline your own thoughts and make sure that that you're kind of part of that process. So don't worry about the inside-line and really engage with it and bring your capabilities to the table, because that is what's going to really get success for all your company, for yourselves, but also for your buyers, which is a very powerful message.
So, I want to bring that section to a close. You've all talked about the possibilities and what you've achieved and what there is for your clients and other partners.
I want to focus with Audrey and Maureen, but Audrey in particular. Can you say how AWS Marketplace enables you to shift your business to unlock new opportunities? We talked about the procurement teams. What else has it enabled you to do?

Audrey Benjamin, CDW
Fun fact: 60% of CDW's AWS Marketplace revenue is net new to CDW. So, the marketplace has really allowed us to enter new markets. It's allowed us to meet new contacts in our customers. So, this shift from procurement to line-of-business buyers procuring solutions through the marketplace has allowed us to expand who we're talking to within our customers.
It's also allowed us to gain share in our existing customer base. We talked about how much of our marketplace business is net new. So, we're entering into new markets there. And then most importantly, it's also allowed us to leverage the marketplace as a door opener to expand conversations with our customers. So, we're using the marketplace to now get into having expanded AWS-native conversations that are leading into how CDW can help our customers accelerate their cloud adoption and accelerate their transformations.
So it's really not just about transacting in the marketplace. It's leveraging the marketplace as a door opener to really drive incremental change with our customers and go beyond just reselling, but into adoption of ISVs and managed services where it makes sense as well.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
I love that that metric. You said 60% of net new business comes through the marketplace. That's an absolutely fantastic metric.
Maureen, you've already talked about some of the fears or perceptions that people have internally as well as externally. But those were completely changed where you came into the marketplace. Can you talk a bit about how you've partnered or worked with other partners to create better customer outcomes?

Maureen Little, Okta
Yeah. Again, I want to make sure I'm clear that we still have to have a salesperson involved, which we do. There's going to be features and products that are add-ons where the salesperson has less of a role. But what we're doing is such a high-end bot purchase and such a large integration.
When we start thinking about how marketplace has helped us with our partners, I'm actually going to start with our integration partners, believe it or not. So, with our integration partners as an identity product, you have a lot of decisions that you're making. At the same time, you're making your identity purchase. There has to be a compelling event.
So, it could be things like a security assessment, a potential breach could be, "hey, we're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions and we have all of these different pieces of software". Or it could actually be cloud migration. Identity is a huge streamlining feature that helps you with your cloud migration.
So, we first started with joint marketing. When we are out there, we sell a lot with Zscaler or CrowdStrike or Palo Alto, these technologies that are around security. Once we started articulating how not only you could make your buying decision at the same time, but actually you could purchase us all on the marketplace, that was a huge influence on revenue and strong co-marketing.
The second area is we're starting to talk to a lot of our SIs and GSIs, those that help our customers make the buying decisions. They handle the deployments. Many of those companies are adding cloud buying teams. And then, as you've heard a lot from Audrey, CDW is one of our largest partners. We only recently launched with CPO, and it is the fastest growing segment for us for publicly traded. And I can't really give a ton of details, but we blew out all our metrics last quarter alone.
And why is that? Because we took the time. We took the time. We don't let every reseller leverage CPO. We took the time to have it be our strategic resellers who really are there to consult and bring value to our customers. And then we built that strategy together. So, it is pivoting that buying decision, that influencing as well as speeding up the purchasing and processing.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
That's great. Mona, this must be music to your ears!

Mona Chadha, AWS
It is!

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Your partners are really working in the marketplace, which is fantastic news. CDW and Okta, Audrey and Maureen, in your conversations it seems like you're really bringing things on. You're really expanding and making use of all the capabilities the marketplace is offering.
So Mona, how else is AWS helping partners to be successful? Because from what I'm hearing, they're already using a lot of the capabilities, they're finding each other, they're working with each other, they're migrating, they're doing joint things, and they're still using their existing people. As Maureen said, you still need the sales side. What else is AWS doing to help them to be successful?

Mona Chadha, AWS
Yeah, well, first of all, AWS Marketplace has an entire engineering organization behind it where we're developing features, the new features and functionality that are really going to continue to help accelerate. So, we want more than 60% going through net new! We want it to be close to 80% to 100% where you're getting all that business through AWS Marketplace. And also, you're achieving the results in terms of getting that ROI accelerating those opportunities so that your organization, your sales teams, your procurement organization, your marketing team can start to use AWS Marketplace as this valuable engine to help drive growth and innovation.
First, what we are doing is we're constantly listening to our stakeholders. Our ISVs, our channel partners across the board, as well as the buyers. And buyers are a very important part and a very important ingredient for us to sort of innovate on the marketplace. And so, when you look at that and then we take all of those requirements and we feed it into our engineering organization that comes up with a road map in terms of where we're going and how we can meet those needs.
A couple of things that we've been doing from a road map perspective is really helping, now, ISVs and SIs and the channel organizations to expand globally. I think we've done a pretty good job of landing in the Americas and really landing our customer base there.
But what we want to do is expand. And we have expanded over to EMEA. We're now looking to get the right type of currencies. So we launched recently with British pound, Australian dollar, Japanese yen, and we also have currency in Korea. We're trying to really make sure that the marketplace is truly available everywhere in every single region.
That's really what's coming next and where we're developing more and more of our features and functionalities to allow Maureen and Audrey to say, "wow, I've expanded my business globally now, and I truly have a global business". So that's one area we're investing in.
Another area in terms of what's next and how AWS is helping is, also we want to ensure that AWS Marketplace is really the focus of the co-sellers, because we've seen the results. Okta as well as CDW have seen the results in the whole co-selling motion. And so, we're trying to get better at that. We're aligning our programmes and our incentives over to AWS Marketplace as well so that it can further get amplified. So, AWS is making some changes in terms of how we're going to leverage Marketplace as this automation engine for co-selling.
And then, another area is the way that our programmes are structured as well, if you're an AWS partner and part of the AWS partner network, this is where we have programmes such as our workload migration programme, if you're a customer, its migration acceleration programme, to really help you fast track your migration.
And then for that aspect, you're going to need third-party ISV solutions, and likely you're going to procure that through a channel partner. And so, as you're thinking about all the migration opportunities and all the programmes there to help you, because like I said, very few workloads are actually in the cloud. So we need more and more of that. And I think, as we're moving into generative AI, more and more of those workloads are moving to the cloud because you have to, that's where you can achieve the efficiencies with generative AI as well as other workloads. But moving to the cloud is going to be turbo charged, I would say, in this new world of generative AI.
And so this is where we're mapping our programmes and our incentives to align to help with that acceleration. And so, AWS Marketplace is a key ingredient of that co-sell. And again, it just sort of turbo charges that migration because you're going to need third-party ISVs to help you with that and through that migration as well, and you're going to need channel partners to help you accelerate that.
So I think those are all the ways that AWS is really helping to provide more benefits to our end customers and provide those incentives to help them accelerate their innovation in the cloud.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
That's fantastic. As I started off first, that was great news to hear what the partners say. But also, Audrey and Maureen, this must be absolutely kind of fantastic news in terms of what they're doing for partners and it's exciting. Especially as I hear what you guys are doing as well to try to really grow the business.
We're coming to the end of our conversation. So, Maureen and Audrey, what advice would you give other partners and where do you think you think it will be the next major focus area for AWS Marketplace? You've heard what Mona has said, and sounds like there's so many good things, but I'd like to hear your advice. And then, where do you think your biggest area of focus will be?

Maureen Little, Okta
Well, I can jump in here and just because I want to add on to what Mona was just sharing, okay. Generative AI is not just a buzzword anymore. Sorry, it just isn't. I think that it was, but now with computing power, with the controls and data access that we have. So yes, it's a buzzword in some way, but it's actually something you can do.
So, when you are a company wanting to build and trial with AI, that what AWS has done. It has made it super easy for you to test and try and build examples and POCs. Guess what, guys? You're going to have to completely understand how to run those trials and do buying, and then determine which of that ISV or that technology, or that machine learning technology you want.
It's going to be 10 times faster to purchase on a marketplace. I just told you how over the past 10 years, IT buying, the decision-making and the number of pieces of software that people have to purchase has grown tenfold. That's going to explode. And it's not going to be over 10 years, it's going to be over one year.
So just embrace it. Build the right processes. And if you're inside the procurement team or you're the Head of IT, train your leaders on how to buy and what the rules are. Give them guidance. Don't make it so rigorous, because that's where things go rogue.
Then the other piece of advice I would give if I could switch a little bit as an ISV who had to embrace marketplace: this is how companies are purchasing, so do the same thing. I just gave the advice to the IT buyer, but as an ISV, we've spent significant time training our sales teams, our finance organization, our legal teams. Embrace it. Figure out how you weave marketplace into your buying processes. So it's streamlined. It's a better customer experience. It really is manageable. But you have to get in front of it.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Oh that's fantastic. Those are really good sage pieces of advice for partners listening.
I'm going to leave the last word to Audrey. Can you come in and say your advice to partners, on top of what Mona and Maureen have said, it's going to be very, very interesting. And what do you think is next for you as well?

Audrey Benjamin, CDW
So I'm going to flip the questions; I'm going to start with the next major focus area. Maureen mentioned AI — this wouldn't be 2024 without us talking about AI on a podcast, but we definitely anticipate that marketplace is going to continue to prioritize two things: specialization and industry focus. AI and machine learning offerings, as well as tools around security and governance, are continuing to rise to the top. As far as importance with our customers, I definitely expect that trend to continue. And then ISV solutions that solve unique industry-specific challenges. Customers are not just buying technology solutions, they're buying solutions that solve challenges for their industries.
And then my advice would be that all customers have challenges with enterprise software adoption. That's probably the largest challenge that our customers have. So, partners that focus on not just transacting the ISV via marketplace, but the adoption and integration of those solutions, will have an immense impact on our customers.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Okay. That's really fantastic. We've come to the end of what I think has been an absolutely great conversation. And I've been really excited by what you guys have said and it's been a great insight to see where AWS Marketplace is going and the opportunities. I think, Mona, you must be very pleased in hearing what the likes of Audrey and Maureen have said.
So I want to bring this to a close, unless, Mona, you want a last word? Anything you want to add quickly to that?

Mona Chadha, AWS
I think Maureen and Audrey said it all! I would just say, yeah, heed their advice. They're very sage counsel. Hopefully people were taking notes because it's good that it's recorded because you can go back to it and listen to Audrey and Maureen's thoughts.

Bola Rotibi, CCS Insight
Excellent. And we will actually be writing a companion report, so you don't need to take notes! We do that for you.
I want to say thank you to Mona, Audrey and Maureen, my three excellent guests, for what I believe has been a great conversation.
And I'd just like to say to our podcast listeners, make sure to tune in to our next CCS Insight Podcast. Until then, goodbye.