AWS Expands Private Marketplace Capabilities For Customers

‘While this has obvious benefits to customers, it’s also a welcome functionality for partners,’ says Scott Drossos, chief operating office at InterVision, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. ‘We end up with visibility within our customers’ curated catalogs and have confidence that those individuals are approved buyers.’

Amazon Web Services customers now can create multiple Private Marketplace catalogs of approved software that their teams are allowed to procure from the broader AWS Marketplace.

The new capability comes a little more than two years after AWS enabled customers to create a single Private Marketplace per AWS account to control what their business and engineering teams could buy from AWS Marketplace, a digital catalog of more than 10,000 AWS-compatible software listings sold by 2,000-plus independent software vendors.

Customers with diverse sets of users need to scale their governance to meet business needs, said Martin Beeby, a principal advocate for AWS.

“For example, a large enterprise with subsidiaries in different industries has varying software needs and policies for each subsidiary,” Beeby wrote in a blog post announcing the new offering. “IT administrators struggle with scaling their procurement process to address these differing needs across their organization and often revert to one procurement policy to govern their entire org. While there are exceptions, companies depend on time-consuming, manual processes to ensure the correct products are approved and procured. As a result, customers struggle to scale their procurement and governance process to meet their organization’s speed and agility demands.

Now customers can create third-party software catalogs that are customized to include different solutions tailored to individual business units or development environments. They also can customize the look of each Private Marketplace by changing up the logos, wording, and colors.

“AWS’s launch of Private Marketplace experiences allows customers to put critical governance controls in place that meet procurement requirements while allowing them to continue moving with the speed and agility they expect from AWS,” said Scott Drossos, chief operating office at InterVision, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based IT service provider and AWS Premier Consulting Partner. “While this has obvious benefits to customers, it’s also a welcome functionality for partners. We end up with visibility within our customers’ curated catalogs and have confidence that those individuals are approved buyers.”

The new multiple Private Marketplace catalogs functionality is another example of AWS delivering customer-centered advancements in AWS Marketplace, according to Dwayne Lyle, vice president of sales at San Francisco’s nClouds, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and DevOps consulting and implementation services provider.

“Customers can now easily curate products, deliver a branded customer experience and achieve the management controls to select the specific AWS accounts associated with each experience,” Lyle said. “That’s powerful, leaves more time for customers to focus on innovation and aligns well with our own mission to help customers build modern infrastructure to deliver innovation faster.”

Private Marketplaces can be another business line for AWS partners. Consulting partners and resellers serving as managed service providers can design and run the custom Private Marketplaces for their customers, Dave McCann, vice president of AWS migration, marketplaces and control services, told CRN in December. AWS that month added AWS Marketplace APIs for Private Marketplace, a set of publicly accessible APIs that can be used to simplify management across customers’ Private Marketplace catalogs.

AWS last month also announced that AWS partners also could list their professional services on AWS Marketplace, allowing customers to procure and be billed for both software and associated services in a centralized place with standard contract terms.