It’s been close to 14 years since AWS Marketplace was launched globally and over five years since the online store became available in ANZ.
During that time, it’s evolved from a way for partners to just contract services or transact with customers looking to find, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS to “more of a guided buying experience”, according to Mona Chadha, AWS’ director of category management.
“Before, you had to know what you wanted to buy, but now we can ask a series of questions and then get to a solution; we started injecting our own AI into Marketplace,” she told techpartner.news.
This capability, called Agent Mode and launched at the company’s annual AWS re:Invent event at the end of last year, is a ‘conversational discovery experience’ that’s purpose-built for software procurement.
Customers describe a use case and upload business requirements documentation to discover solutions, and through interactive dialogue, they can ask questions and explore product insights drawn from AWS data, security and compliance records, verified vendor information, and real-time web intelligence.
This introduction of AI into Marketplace follows on the introduction of offering AI agents and tools from AWS partners, allowing customers to find and buy third-party AI agent solutions.
Private offers and multi-product solutions
At re:Invent 2025, the company also introduced express private offers for third-party products and multi-product solutions in AWS Marketplace.
The launch of multi-product solutions means that partners, from independent software vendors (ISV) to systems integrators (SI) can now sell solutions in AWS Marketplace by combining their own software and services with products they are authorised to resell from other AWS Partners.
Partners can position solutions to their target audience by outlining use cases and explaining how components work together, while customers can take advantage of a single point of contact for negotiation, total cost assessment and one-time approval covering all products.
The launch of express private offers means customers can use a new AI-powered experience on participating products, specifying purchase requirements and contract duration, which results in AWS generating a private offer “in minutes” by automatically evaluating these requirements against a seller’s pre-configured pricing rules.
Previously, obtaining personalised pricing required customers to initiate contact with sales teams, engage in discussions to negotiate terms, and navigate multiple review cycles before receiving a customised offer.
Chris Grusz, the MD of technology partnerships at AWS who looks after the Amazon Partner Network, said that the move came about due to the private offer business “exploding” in demand.
“What's happening with a lot of our ISVs is that now they're doing private offers in the thousands, and so the small private offers just became too tedious because they had to manually submit every single one of those,” he explained.
“Express private offers really streamline how they can leverage the private offer experience.”
Grusz said that in talking to partners, he has found that once the customer has carried out a certain number of private offers, they just default to doing all of them that way.
“For a typical company, they can onboard new technology faster when they buy through Marketplace [and are] able to bring in buyers significantly faster," he said.
Those claims are backed up by a Forrester study from 2025 that interviewed decision-makers at global enterprises and surveyed SMBs and public sector respondents across global regions and industries who had experience using AWS Marketplace.
The study, which aggregated the experiences of the interviewees and combined the results into a single composite organisation - an enterprise organisation with 10,000 employees and revenue of multiple billions per year – found that using AWS Marketplace resulted in a 30 per cent acceleration in time-to-market with deployment efficiencies for the composite organisation.
In addition, the composite organisation saw 60 per cent faster procurement processes, a 70 per cent reduction in solution discovery time and a 377 per cent ROI, with payback within six months.
Agentic and internationalisation leading the way in 2026
Predicting key trends for the year ahead, Chadha said that, unsurprisingly, agentic is at the top of minds of partners that she’s talking to - how to build, scale and subsequently deploy it.
“It really is around areas of how we can reinvent typical use cases - things that we've been doing with CrowdStrike and ZScaler, [like] figuring out how to modernise our joint customer’s SOCs so that it’s implementing more AI or [using] Amazon Bedrock to be able to leverage different LLMs so they can run inquiries on the data that they have coming in,” she stated.
Chadha - whose team focuses on adding ISV solutions to AWS Marketplace for AWS customers to find, test, buy and provision third party ISV software – said that the cloud platform’s partners are getting questions from their end customers around data management, with a focus on how data is accessed, controlled and has data integrity maintained.
“We’re working with Snowflake and Databricks to ensure that we have those solutions built out so that customers have that peace of mind when it comes to data management and having a data strategy, so that when it does go through [AI] agents and we're running workflows, they have confidence in what's coming out,” she told techpartner.news.
Grusz said that internationalisation will continue to be a big focus, with AWS launching regional Marketplace Operators (MPOs) to facilitate transactions and support buyer and sellers' localised business needs, such as tax, reporting, disbursements and compliance.
“One piece of feedback that we got with our ISVs is as they were doing large private offers, especially on the international front, that would be two or three years in length; then you start worrying about the currency fluctuation, and so you'd have [an offer] priced in one currency, but then paid for in another and it would expose the ISVs to currency fluctuation risk,” he told techpartner.news.
“Now, the deal can be priced and paid for in the exact same currency, which we feel provides a much lower risk profile for our sellers selling through marketplace. We see that with what we've done with the MPOs in Australia, India, Japan, Europe [etc], so we're going to continue to add more and more of that, because we think that our approach is really providing the greatest localised experience for both currency fluctuations and taxation.
“[It’s] not the most exciting topics, but when you talk to ISVs, that's super important. [Currency fluctuations] are not what they want to spend their money on - they want to build on their IP and then leverage something like AWS Marketplace to take care of all that heavy lifting.”
Jason Pollock travelled to AWS re:Invent 2025 as a guest of AWS.
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