Cloud marketplace momentum building, according to Omdia

For years, the IT industry has said that cloud marketplaces would reshape how software and services are sold. At Canalys Forum APAC 2025 last week, Omdia chief analyst Mark Iles argued that momentum is building, even as some friction points persist.

Committed cloud spend and sales motions for partners are making marketplaces a more attractive channel proposition, according to Iles.

Cloud customers are looking for ways to use marketplaces to meet cloud spending commitments, he said – using some of those budgets to buy third party solutions and services.

“Budgets are tight, so the ability to take some of that spend and utilise it in different ways – that flexibility – is extremely attractive,” Iles said. “They're getting financial incentives in some cases.”

Omdia estimated that the value of spending on third party products and services – such as cybersecurity, business applications and professional services – through AWS, Google and Microsoft marketplaces would reach US$45 billion in 2025, up from US$30 billion in 2024.

The likes of CrowdStrike, Salesforce, Palo Alto and Splunk were now earning a billion dollars in sales through marketplaces in a year, according to Omdia. Some were approaching $2 billion in marketplace sales.

By 2030, Omdia predicted total spending on enterprise software through hyperscalers’ marketplaces would increase to US$163 billion. About 20% of that growth is predicted to be in the Asia Pacific region. “The numbers are massive,” Iles said.

“We have momentum here and we have a real change in the ecosystem now,” he said.

The channel’s marketplace moment?

Today, more than half of third party marketplace spend still bypasses partners and is transacted directly, Iles said. Omdia forecasted that almost 60% of marketplace sales would be channel enabled by 2030.

“This is a market and a motion from a channel perspective that's beginning to gain traction as vendors start to see the value the partner ecosystems brings,” Iles said. “We really see channels as the key pillar to make this work.”

Omdia saw partners helping customers manage commitments, purchase across multiple cloud marketplaces, and provide expertise and support across the customer lifecycle.

It also saw marketplaces as a cross-border marketing vehicle for partners. “It allows you, if you're in Australia, to potentially pop things onto a marketplace in Malaysia or Singapore,” Iles said.

But the channel hasn’t fully embraced cloud marketplaces.

“Some of that's been that the platforms haven't really been ready to do that,” according to Iles. “Enabling a partner motion inside a marketplace is quite complicated and requires some technology to be built.”

Hyperscalers have been working on that, with partner private offers and distributors coming into play.

In the mid-market, Iles noted integration of hyperscaler and distributor marketplaces – pointing to Microsoft’s recent announcement of Microsoft Marketplace integration with Crayon, Ingram Micro, Pax8, TD SYNNEX and others, and AWS’s recent strategic agreement with NEXTGEN.

Third party marketplaces are also positioning for roles. For example, with the acquisition of Tackle.io, AppDirect will be able to say “come to us and publish and we'll push that out to Google and AWS and Microsoft,” Iles said.

Hyperscalers are also “competing hard to win the race as a channel for agentic AI through their agent marketplaces, because this accounts for an ever-greater proportion of cloud consumption,” said Omdia chief analyst Alastair Edwards in October.

The marketplace landscape is fragmented, Iles noted. “We're starting to see a proliferation of marketplaces – we think this category is going to be very broad,” he said.

“This is going to boil down to a battle between the hyperscalers and the ISVs for your mind share of the channel ecosystem, because this model really doesn't work long term without a partner involved,” Iles predicted.

Large customers on board

Amar Bilas, A1 Technologies head of Microsoft Cloud Services, agreed with Omdia’s predictions about cloud marketplace spending growth.

“Our larger customers are preferring to transact their spend on these platforms,” Bilas told techpartner.news, saying he sees the biggest advantage when customers only need to onboard a handful of vendors, and when customers want faster, simpler procurement processes aligned with their cloud commitments.

In Bilas’ view, marketplaces excelled at streamlining transactions and accelerating time-to-value.

But in his opinion they fell short when it came to flexibility and tailored support for complex enterprise deals. Another negative in his view was “the fee associated with some of these platforms. For small MSPs it doesn't always work out the best value.”

Nevertheless, he saw a “massive opportunity for partners to bundle cyber, apps and services into one seamless buying cycle.”

“It’s one of our highest objectives to get all of our services into the marketplace and start transacting on them, especially for transacting with our large clients who have committed spend with the hyperscalers.”

Nervousness

Some customers are nervous about how dependent they are on hyperscalers, Iles said.

He added that some partners preferred the “traditional” sales motion.

“That's probably just not where the future is going to be,” he argued. “Is [marketplace] going to replace everything? No. But is it going to be a high growth and popular route to market? Yes.”

“The way we think about how technology, software and services flow from the people that make it and the people that implement it, to the people that want to buy it, is fundamentally changing.”

William Maher travelled to Canalys Forum APAC 2025 as a guest of Omdia.

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