Technology
Marketplace Isn't the Alternative Anymore. It's the Default.
Cloud marketplace sales are projected to grow from $30 billion in 2024 to $163 billion by 2030, a 29.1% CAGR according to Omdia. That growth isn't happening because marketplace is new or exciting — it's happening because for a growing share of buyers, it's become procurement's default habit rather than a deliberate choice. This piece looks at what that shift means for vendors: why marketplace presence alone is no longer a differentiator, and why depth of catalog and follow-through are what actually keep a provider in the room once a buyer starts browsing.
Part of my job is watching how people actually buy the things we sell, not just how we say they buy them. And over the past year I've noticed a shift that's easy to miss if you're only looking at the sales numbers and not the pattern underneath them.
Cloud marketplace used to be the "easy button." It was the option a buyer reached for when they wanted to skip a long sales cycle or avoid onboarding a brand new vendor. Convenient, sure. But still a deliberate choice, something a buyer opted into.
That's not the case anymore.
Omdia's research puts hyperscaler marketplace sales at $30 billion in 2024, on pace to hit $163 billion by 2030, a 29.1 percent compound annual growth rate. That’s not just an "alternative" channel anymore. It’s one of the fastest growing channels, period.
When I started digging into why, it wasn't really a mystery. Buyers aren't choosing marketplace because it's new or exciting. They're choosing it because it's become the path of least resistance. If a purchase can go through AWS or Azure Marketplace, it usually does, because that's the invoice already sitting on someone's desk, and more often than not, it's the spend that's already been committed.
That's the part I think gets undersold when people talk about this trend. Once procurement becomes a habit instead of a decision, vendors who already show up as marketplace native have won half the battle before a conversation even starts. Nobody wants to be the outlier that requires a separate PO, a new vendor onboarding process, an extra layer of approval. Not when the alternative is one click inside a platform the buyer is already using.
We've watched this play out with our own numbers. We've spent years building out our presence across AWS and Azure Marketplace, with 300+ preconfigured solutions covering everything from enterprise workloads to DevOps tooling to extended lifecycle security support. What I've noticed from the marketing side is that being marketplace native has quietly gone from a nice option to mention in a pitch deck to something buyers just expect by default. The question we hear now isn't "can I buy this through the marketplace." It's closer to "why would I buy this any other way."
If I were to advise another provider thinking about this space, I’d say just being listed on a marketplace isn't the differentiator it used to be. Once the channel itself becomes the default, everyone will eventually show up there. What actually separates providers isn't presence. It's depth. Can you cover the breadth of what an enterprise actually needs once they're browsing your catalog? Can you support the harder, less flashy problems, like the legacy systems that need extended lifecycle support, or the workloads that need real configuration expertise instead of just a listing that looks good in search results?
That's the bet we've made. Not that marketplace presence alone wins the deal, but that it gets you in the room, and depth of catalog and follow through are what keep you there.
If you're evaluating vendors right now and marketplace purchasing is part of the decision, here's my honest take. Don't just check the box that a provider is listed. Ask what's actually behind the listing. That's usually where the real difference shows up.
