 Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in Seattle for theCUBE's coverage of AWS Marketplace Seller Conference. Now part of really big move and news, Amazon Partner Network combines with AWS Marketplace to form one organization, the Amazon Partner Organization, APO, where the efficiencies, the next iteration, as they say in Amazon language, where they make things better, simpler, faster, and for customers is happening. We're here with Chris Cruz, who's the general manager worldwide leader of ISV Alliances and Marketplace, which includes all the channel partners and the buyer and seller relationships all now under one partner organization, bringing together years of work. Yes, years of work. If you work with AWS and are a partner and or sell with them, all kind of coming together kind of in a new way for the next generation. Chris, congratulations on the new role in the reorg. Thank you, yeah, it's very exciting. We think it simplifies the process on how we work with our partners and we're really optimistic. So far, the feedback's been great and I think it's just going to get even better as we kind of work out the final details. This is huge news because one, we've been very close to the partner network. We've been working with them. We talk with them, we cover the news, the startups from startups, channel partners, big ISVs, big and small, from the dorm room to the board room, you guys have great relationships. So check Marketplace, the future of procurement, how software will be bought, implemented, and deployed is also changed. So you've got the confluence of two worlds coming together, growth in the ecosystem, next gen cloud on the horizon for AWS and the customers as digital transformation goes from lift and shift to refactoring businesses. This is really a seminal moment. Can you share what you talked about on the keynote stage here around why this is happening now? What's the guiding principle? What's the North Star? What's the big news? Yeah, so a lot of reasons on why we kind of, we pulled the two teams together, but a lot of it kind of gets centered around COSO. And so if you take a look at Marketplace, where we started off where it was really a machine image business and it was a great self-service model, and we were working with ISVs that wanted to have this new delivery mechanism on how to bring in, at the time it was Amazon machine images. And you fast forward, we started adding more product types like SaaS and containers. And the experience that we saw was that customers would use Marketplace for kind of up to a certain limit on a self-service perspective, but then invariably they wanted to buy a quantity discount, they wanted to get an enterprise discount and we couldn't do that through Marketplace and so they would exit us and go do a direct deal with an ISV. And so to remedy that, we launched Private Offers four years ago and Private Offers now allowed ISVs to do these larger deals but do them all through Marketplace. And so they could start off doing self-service business and then as a customer graduated up to buying for a full department or an organization they can now use Private Offers to execute that larger agreement. And we started to do more and more Private Offers really kind of coincided with a lot of the initiatives that were going on within Amazon Partner Network at the time around Co-Cell. And so we started to launch programs like ISV Accelerate that really kind of focused on our Co-Cell relationship with ISVs. And what we found was that Marketplace Private Offers became this awesome way to automate how we Co-Cell with ISV. And so we kind of had these two organizations that were parallel and we said, you know what, this is going to be better together. If we put together it's going to invent and simplify, and we can use Marketplace Private Offers as part of that Co-Cell experience and really feed that automation layer for all of our ISVs as they interact with AWS customers. Well I got to give you props. You and Mona were up on stage. You guys did a great job. And it reminds me of the humble nature of AWS and Amazon. They used to talk to Andy Jassy about this all the time. It reminds me of 2013 here right now because you're in that mode where Amazon re-invent was in 2013 where you knew it was breaking out. Everyone's, it was kind of small but we haven't made it yet. But you guys are doing billions of thousands of transactions. But this event is really, I think the beginning of what we're seeing as the changeover from securing and deploying applications in the cloud. Because there's a lot of nuanced things that I want to get your reaction on. One, I heard making your product as an ISV more native to AWS's stack. That was one major call out I heard. The other one was, hey, if you're a channel partner, you can play too. And by the way, there's more choice. There's a lot going on here that's about to kind of explode in a good way for customers. Buyers get more access to assemble their solutions. And you got all kinds of like business logic, compensation, integration, and scale. This is like unprecedented. Yeah. It's exciting to see what's going on. I mean, I think we kind of saw the tipping point probably about two years ago which prior to that, we would be working with ISVs and customers and it was really much more of an evangelism role where we were just getting people to try it. Just list a product. We think this is going to be a good idea. And if you're a buyer, it's like just try out a private offer, try out a self-service subscription. And what's happened now is there's no longer a lot of that convincing that needs to happen. It's really become accepted. And so a lot of the conversations I have now with ISVs, it's not about should I do marketplace, it's how do I do it better? And how do I really leverage marketplace as part of my co-sell initiatives as part of my go-to-market strategy? And so you've really kind of passed this tipping point where marketplaces are now becoming very accepted ways to buy third-party software. And so that's really exciting. And we see that we can really enhance that experience. And what we saw on the machine image side is we had this awesome integrated experience where you would buy it, it was tied right into the EC2 control plane, and you could go from buying to deploying in one single motion. SaaS is a little bit different. We can do all the buying in a very simple motion but then deploying it, there's a whole bunch of other stuff that our customers have to do. And so we see all kinds of ways that we can simplify that. Recently we launched the ability to put third-party solutions out of marketplace into Control Tower, which is how we deploy all of our landing zones for AWS. And now it's like, instead of having to go wire that up as you're adding new AWS environments, why not just use that third-party solution that you've already integrated to you and have it there as you span those landing zones through Control Tower? Again, back to the humble nature, you guys have dominated the infrastructure as a service layer. You kind of mentioned it, you didn't really kind of highlight it other than saying you're doing pretty good on the IaaS or the technology partners or infrastructure as you guys call it. Okay, I can see how the control panel is great for those customers, but outside that when you get into like CRM, you mentioned ERP, these business apps, these horizontal and verticals have data, they're going to have SageMaker, they're going to have Edge, they might have other services that are coming online from Amazon. How do I as an ISV get my stuff in there? And how do I succeed? And what are you doing to make that better? Cause I know it's kind of new, but not new. No, it's not. I mean, that's one of the things that we've really invested on is how do we make it really easy to list in marketplace? And again, when we first started, it was a big huge spreadsheet that you had to fill out, it was very cumbersome, and we've really automated all those aspects. So now we've exposed an API as an example. So you can go straight out of your own build process and you might have your own CI-CD pipeline and then you have a build step at the end and now you can have that execute marketplace update from your build script right across that API all the way over to AWS Marketplace. So it's taking that, effectively, a CI-CD pipeline from an ISV and extending it all the way to AWS and then eventually to a customer because now it's just an automated supply chain for that software coming into their environment. And we see that as being super powerful. There's no more manual steps along the way. Yeah, I want to dig into that because you made a comment on it, and I want you to clarify it here in theCUBE. Some have said, even us on theCUBE, oh, Marketplace is just a website, a catalog, feels old school, feels like 1995 database. I'm kind of just, you know, I'm saying it. No offense taking it. Okay, and now you're saying, you're now looking at this and implementing more of an API-based. Why is that relevant? I know the answer you already said with APIs, but explain the transition from the mindset of, it's a website, buy stuff on a catalog to full-blown API-layered services. Absolutely, well, when you look at all AWS services, you know, our customers will interface, you know, they'll interface them through a console initially, but when they're using them in production, it's all about APIs. And Marketplace, as you mentioned, did start off as a website. And so we've kind of taken the opposite approach. We've got this great website experience, which is great for demand gen and, you know, highlighting those listings. But what we want to do is really have this API service layer that you're interfacing with. So that an ISV effectively is not even in our marketplace, they're interfacing over APIs to do a variety of their high value functions, whether it's listing so many private offers. We won't have that all available through APIs, and the same thing on the buyer side. So it's integrating directly into their AWS environment, and then they can view all their third-party spend within things like our cost management suites. They can look at things like cost explorer, see third-party software right next to first-party software, and have that all integrated so it's nice to see what's for the customer. That's a nice cloud-native kind of native experience. I think that's a huge advantage. I'm going to track that closer, we're going to follow that. I think that's going to be the killer feature. All right, now let's get to the killer feature on the business logic, okay? All partners all want to know, what's in it for me? How do I make more cash? How do I compensate my salespeople? What do you guys don't compete with me? Give me leads. Can I get MDF, market development funds? So take me through how you're thinking about supporting the partners that are leaning in that the parachute will open when they jump out of the plane. They're going to land safely with you. MDF marketing to leads. What are you doing to support the partners to help them serve their customers? It's interesting, as marketplace has become a much more accepted way to buy, our customers are really defaulting to that as the way to go get that third party software. So we've had some industry analysts do some studies and in what they found, they interviewed a whole cohort of ISVs across various categories within Marketplace, whether it was security or network or even line of business software. And what they found is that on average, our ISVs will see a 24% increased close rate by using Marketplace, right? So we now go talk to a CRO and say, do you want to close more deals? Yes, right, and we've got data to show that. We're also finding that customers, on average, when an ISV sells to Marketplace, they're seeing an 80% uplift in the actual deal size. And so if your ASP is 100K, 180K sounds a heck of a lot better, right? So we're seeing increased deal sizes by going through Marketplace. And then the third thing that we've seen that's a value prop for ISVs is speed of closure. And so on average, what we're finding is that our ISVs are closing deals 40% faster by using Marketplace. So if you've got a 10-month sales cycle saving four months off of the sales cycle, means you're bringing deals in in an earlier calendar year, earlier quarter, and for ISVs, getting that cash flow early is very important. So those are great metrics that we're seeing, and we think that they're only going to improve. And from startups who also want, they don't have a lot of cash. ISVs that are rich and doing well, they have good, good, good, good go-to-market funding. You've got the range of partners. And you know, the next startup could be, the next Figma could be in that batch of startups. You don't know that the game is changing. The next brand could be one of those batch of startups. What's the message to the startup community? Yeah, I mean Marketplace in a lot of ways becomes a leveling effect, right? Because you know, if you look at pre-marketplace, if you were a startup, you were having to go generate sales, have a sales force, go compete, you know, kind of hand-to-hand with these largest ISVs. Marketplace is really kind of leveling that because now you can both list in Marketplace, you have the same advantage of putting that directly on the AWS bill, taking advantage of all the management and governance features that we offer, all the automation that we bring to the table. And so, a lot of our startups, and joint selling, right? When it goes through Marketplace, you know, it's going to feed into a number of our APN programs like ISV Accelerate. Our sales teams are going to get recognized for those deals. And so, you know, it brings nice co-sell behavior to how we work with our field sales teams together. It brings nice automation that, you know, pre-marketplaces, they would have to go build all that. That was a heavy lift that really now becomes just kind of table stakes for any kind of ISV selling to any of these customers. Well, you know I'm a big fan of the Marketplace. I've always had been, even from the early days, I saw this as a procurement game changer. It makes total sense. It's so obvious, not obvious to everyone, but there's a lot of moving parts behind the scenes, behind the curtain, so to speak, that you're handling. What's your message to the audience out there, both the buyers and the sellers, about what your mission is, what you wake up every day thinking about, and what's your promise to them and what you're going to work on, because it's not easy. You're building an operating model that's not a website. It's a full-on cloud service. What's your promise and what's your goal? Ultimately, what we're trying to do from an AWS Marketplace perspective is provide that selection experience to the AWS customer. There's the infamous flywheel that Jeff put together that had the concepts of why Amazon is successful, and one of the concepts he points to is the concept of selection. And what we mean by that is if you come to Amazon, it's effectively that everything's stored. And when you come across to AWS, Marketplace becomes that selection experience. And so that's what we're trying to do is provide whatever our AWS customers want to buy, whatever form factor, whatever software type, whatever data type, it's going to be available in AWS Marketplace for consumption. And that ultimately helps our customers because now they can get whatever technologies that they need to use alongside AWS. And I want to give you props too. You answered the hard question on stage. I've asked Andy Jassy this on theCUBE when he was the CEO, Adam Sileski last year. I asked him the same question. And the answer has been consistent. We have some solutions that people want AWS end to end, but your ecosystem, you want people to compete and build a product. And mostly point to things like Snowflake, other people that compete with Amazon services. You guys want that, you encourage that. You're ratifying that same statement. Absolutely. Right, again, it feeds into that selection experience. If a customer wants something, we want to make sure it's going to be a great experience. And so a lot of these ISPs are building on top of AWS. We want to make sure that they're successful. And while we have a number of our first-party services, we have a variety of third-party technologies that run very well in AWS. And ultimately, the customer is going to make their decision. We're customer obsessed. And if they want to go with a third-party product, we're absolutely going to support them in every way, shape, we can, and make sure that's a successful experience for our customers. I know you referenced two studies. Check out the website. It's got buyer and seller surveys on their proposed. I don't want to get into that. I want to just end on one kind of final note. You got a lot of successful buyers and a lot of successful sellers. The word billions with an S on the slide. Can you say the number? How many billions are sold through the marketplace and the buyer experience future? What's those two things? Yeah, so we went on record at re-invent last year, since approaching his birthday. But it was the first year that we've, in our 10-year history, announced how much was actually being sold through marketplace. And we're now selling billions of dollars to our marketplace. And that's with an S. So you can assume it, at least it's two. But it's a large number and it's going around very quickly. Less than 10? Yeah. Can't disclose it, you know. But it's been a very healthy part of our business. And we look at the experience that we saw. There's a lot of headroom. I mean, you have infrastructure nailed down. It's looking to get better, but you have basically growth upside with these other categories. What's the hot categories? You know, we started off with infrastructure-related products. And we've kind of hit critical mass there. There's very few ISVs left that are, that infrastructure-related space that are not in our marketplace. And what's happened now is our customers are saying, why haven't I been buying infrastructure products for years? I'm going to buy everything. I want to buy my line of business software. I want to buy my vertical solutions. I want to buy my data. And I want to buy all my services alongside of that. And so there's tons of upside. We're seeing all of these either horizontal business applications coming to our marketplace or vertical specific solutions, which, you know, when we first designed our marketplace, we weren't sure if that would ever happen. We're starting to see that actually really accelerate because customers are now just defaulting to buying everything through their marketplace. Chris, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I know we went a little extra long there. I wanted to get that clarification on the new role, new organization. Great, great reorg. It makes a lot of sense. Next level, next gen. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Okay, thank you for the opportunity. All right, here covering the new big news here of AWS Marketplace and the AWS partner network coming together under one coherent organization serving buyers and sellers. Billions sold. The future of how people are going to be buying software, deploying it, managing it, operating it. It's all happening in the marketplace. This is the big trend. It's theCUBE here in Seattle with more coverage here at the AWS Marketplace Sellers Conference after the short break.