In today’s edition:

• Elastic tells Wall Street that hyperscaler partnerships are one of four competitive pillars — while its cloud revenue hit $837M, 48% of total

• Snowflake crossed $2B+ on AWS Marketplace in 2025 and $7B+ lifetime — while signing a new $6B AWS deal and raising growth guidance.

• $1.2T in cloud commits is creating a huge opportunity — but 5 repeatable patterns still keep Cloud GTM teams stuck.

• Zscaler doubled marketplace sales to $900M in 9 months — a $100M/month run-rate inside an already partner-led GTM model.

Before we dive in:

Cloud GTM Leader Cohort 15 starts tomorrow — June 2.

Five weeks to build the system that turns marketplace into repeatable revenue: co-sell, internal alignment, sales enablement, KPIs, scaling frameworks and partner-led growth.

300+ alumni rated it 9/10. If marketplace and co-sell are H2 priorities, this is the cohort to join.

Join the June 2 Cohort

Snowflake’s AWS Math: $2B+ Year, $7B Total

~45% of Snowflake’s revenue now runs through AWS Marketplace: $2B+ in 2025 alone, $7B+ total.

They just committed $6B more to AWS and raised their full-year growth outlook.

Snowflake reported Q1 FY2027 earnings last week

Product revenue hit $1.334B, growth accelerated to 34% YoY. The company raised its full-year outlook from 27% to 31%.

The same day, Snowflake signed a five-year, $6B infrastructure deal with AWS - more than 2X its prior contract from three years ago.

Interestingly, Snowflake exceeded $2B in AWS Marketplace sales in calendar 2025, also 2X+ YoY. Lifetime sales crossed $7B.

Against FY2026 total revenue of $4.68B, marketplace now accounts for ~45% of Snowflake’s revenue.

A few years ago, that share would have sparked debate over whether relying on one partner was wise. Today it shows the scale and the central place that cloud marketplaces have reached in enterprise software distribution.

Cloud partnership GTM is now priced into guidance raise

CFO Brian Robins confirmed the AWS deal is fully factored into Snowflake’s raised FY2027 outlook. AWS committed to “expanded go-to-market investment and collaboration” — co-sell, joint customer programs, and workload migration support.

Robins also noted the contract helps offset lower gross margins on AI products like Cortex Code by reducing infrastructure costs. That’s how Snowflake holds 75% product gross margin guidance despite surging AI revenue. The AWS deal fuels growth and protects margins at the same time.

Discovery, not just procurement

Snowflake calls AWS Marketplace “the fastest path to procure and deploy” its AI and data capabilities. The expanded agreement is designed to help customers ‘discover, procure, and deploy AI and data solutions through AWS Marketplace’ and includes joint investments in customer success, workload migrations, and strategic industry solutions.

AWS field teams actively help Snowflake win enterprise accounts. Customers buying and deploying AI products — Cortex AI, Snowflake Intelligence, Cortex Code — are doing it through marketplace, against cloud commits.

CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy:

“With AWS, we are making it easier for enterprises to bring AI directly to governed data.”

New benchmark — with a challenger

Snowflake’s $7B lifetime and $2B+ annual pace sets the bar for data and AI companies. But Salesforce — a line-of-business software company — is already at ~$3B annually and crossed $5B+ total on AWS.

The race at the top keeps accelerating. Stay tuned as we track the $1B+ Marketplace Club.

3 lessons for alliance leaders:

1. When ~45% of a $5B+ company’s revenue flows through one marketplace, it becomes core commercial infrastructure

2. Partners pricing co-sell into growth guidance is the clearest signal cloud GTM is now an operating model

3. $2B annual is the new marketplace benchmark for top ISVs

How much of your revenue runs through cloud marketplaces?

Share

5 patterns stalling Cloud GTM teams

Cloud commits crossed $1.2T. Yet, too many GTM teams still run marketplace as a side project.

That disconnect is the single biggest theme after training hundreds of alliance, marketplace, and partnership leaders across 14 cohorts of Cloud GTM Leader.

The market has never been better for Cloud GTM

Enterprise buyers increasingly start procurement with “we have cloud commits to use.” Hyperscaler CapEx is expected to reach $550B+ across the Big 3 clouds this year. AI is accelerating cloud consumption and creating new buying paths.

But many teams still struggle to turn marketplace presence into repeatable revenue.

Five patterns that keep holding teams back:

1. They list, but don’t build a system

Getting listed on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud Marketplace is (still!) treated as the finish line. It is only the starting point.

The teams that scale build the full operating system around it: sales process, cloud alignment, marketplace operations, enablement, and channel integration. Listing without GTM infrastructure is like launching a product with no distribution.

2. They chase cloud sellers without a clear ask

Most teams want co-sell support from hyperscalers. Few make it easy for cloud sellers to understand why the deal matters — to the customer and to the cloud provider’s own priorities.

Co-sell works when the ask is specific, structured, and tied to real customer and cloud outcomes. Not “any help is appreciated.”

3. Sales stays on the sideline

Marketplace is still treated as a partnerships initiative in too many companies. That caps growth.

The companies scaling fastest embed marketplace into the sales motion. Sellers know when to introduce it, how to qualify cloud budget, and how to use marketplace to cut procurement friction. Without sales buy-in, marketplace stays a side project.

4. No shared KPIs or internal business case

Cloud GTM touches partnerships, sales, finance, product, legal, and leadership. When each team defines it differently, execution stalls.

The strongest teams align around clear KPIs, realistic expectations, and shared ownership of the revenue role marketplace should play. That alignment starts with one internal business case — not five.

5. Marketplace, co-sell, and channel stay fragmented

Marketplace is not just procurement. Co-sell is not just partner management. Channel is not a separate workstream.

The teams that scale connect these motions into one system — where cloud providers, sellers, internal teams, and partners reinforce each other deal by deal.

These are exactly the gaps we work through in Cloud GTM Leader

Cloud GTM Leader is our 5-week cohort course for alliance and Cloud GTM leaders building repeatable growth across AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

Inside the course: marketplace strategy across maturity stages, co-sell motions that work, internal buy-in with CEO/CRO/CFO, sales enablement, KPIs, business case frameworks, and partner-led growth.

Our summer cohort starts tomorrow - June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Join the June 2 Cohort

Is your team building a Cloud GTM system - or still running marketplace as a project?

Elastic: Hyperscaler Partnerships Are Why We Win

Elastic just told investors that hyperscaler partnerships are part of why they win.

It posted an excellent quarter. Cloud revenue reached $837M for the year - 48% of total.

Elastic reported Q4 FY26 results that changed analyst sentiment

Revenue $1.74B for the year, up 17%. RPO grew 28% to $1.98B, much faster than revenue.

This mirrors what we see across the ecosystem: committed spend is accelerating. Customers are locking in for the platforms they trust and rely upon.

But the partnership and cloud signals are what stood out.

Power of Partnerships is one of 4 strategic pillars Elastic presents to Wall Street

It includes:

• Strategic partnerships with hyperscalers, including co-investments

• Technology integrations

• Preferential access and relationships

• Joint sales pursuits

In addition to alliances as a competitive advantage, they highlight to investors “simplified procurement through marketplace.”

Award-winning GTM across all three major cloud marketplaces

Google Cloud: 5X Partner of the Year. Won 2026 Google Cloud Marketplace Partner of the Year for Data Management & AI.

Integrated with Vertex AI. Available through Monthly Subscription, Private Offer, and reseller.

Amazon Web Services (AWS): integrated into Amazon Bedrock, GenAI Partner of the Year.

Available through PAYG, Private Offer, and resellers. FedRAMP High on AWS GovCloud.

Microsoft Azure: 2x Partner of the Year. Integrated with Azure AI Services and Semantic Kernel. Azure Native ISV Service for observability and security.

Available through PAYG and Annual Agreements.

That is the modern cloud GTM stack:

• technical integration

• cloud-native deployment

• marketplace procurement

• reseller optionality

• field alignment

• regulated-sector access

AI is a growth driver

600+ Elastic Cloud customers with ACV above $100K are using Elastic for AI. That is more than one-third of the enterprise cohort.

Elastic is building across the full multi-cloud AI stack. Vertex AI. Amazon Bedrock. Azure AI Services. Gemini Agent Platform. MCP Apps for security and observability that embed workflows into Claude, VS Code, and GitHub Copilot.

CEO on MCP:

“I think it’s going to be a durable advantage, especially because we are able to not just provide access to data, but smart access to data.”

3 takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. When cloud partnerships and marketplaces appear in investor materials as a competitive pillar, it tells you the scale of impact they are driving

2. AI integration across cloud platforms is becoming a strong co-sell lever. Connect your AI use cases to hyperscaler consumption

3. Marketplace is most powerful when paired with native cloud services, private offers, reseller paths, and field-level joint pursuits - not just a listing

How does your company leverage cloud partnerships?

Subscribe now

Zscaler’s Marketplace Sales Doubled to $900M in 9 Months

Zscaler transacted $900M through cloud marketplaces in 9 months. That’s $100M/month.

Marketplace TCV more than 2X (doubled) YoY, making it the fastest growing GTM channel.

Zscaler reported Q3 FY2026 earnings, ARR hit $3.5B, growing 25%

But marketplace TCV grew much faster than overall revenue, >100% YoY.

For context, Zscaler crossed $1B in total Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace sales last November.

Now they’re doing $900M across all cloud marketplaces in 9 months of the current fiscal year.

CEO Jay Chaudhry:

“This is becoming a more important route to market, as cloud marketplaces simplify procurement, align well with enterprise cloud commitments, and increasingly support larger strategic engagements.”

84% of Zscaler’s revenue already runs through partners

Zscaler disclosed that channel partners generated $2.07B in revenue over the first nine months — 84% of total.

Zscaler is deeply partner-led historically. And cloud marketplaces are the fastest-growing layer inside that partner mix.

New logo growth is the priority — and partners are the answer

Zscaler is focusing on growing new logo acquisition.

Chaudhry explained how they plan to do it: the company has more limited coverage in the lower end of enterprise, roughly 2,000 to 10,000 users

“The channel, especially the VAR channel, plays an important role in the low end of the market. So we are creating specific programs and incentives for new logo in that area.”

For large enterprises, the partner motion is global system integrators.

CEO highlighted “strong growth in bookings through our GSI partners.”

AI Protect crossed $100M in bookings within a year of launch

AI Protect is Zscaler’s suite for securing enterprise AI usage. Bookings crossed $100M in the trailing twelve months since its launch.

The partner play:

Zscaler launched Project AI-Guardian with GSI partners to extend Zero Trust to AI agents. GSIs will build specialized AI discovery and risk mitigation services on the AI Protect portfolio.

Zscaler also partners with Anthropic on Project Glasswing, and with OpenAI as part of its Daybreak program.

Takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. When marketplace TCV grows much faster than overall revenue, the channel mix is shifting. Cybersecurity is leading the marketplace adoption, but data, observability, and line-of-business software are fast following.

2. Study the partner segmentation: VARs for coverage, GSIs for major transformation, marketplaces for procurement. Each has a defined role in the growth plan

3. AI security is creating a new services attach opportunity for GSIs — implementation revenue around AI discovery and agent risk, not just resale.

Is cloud marketplace part of your GTM?

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s edition:

• Zoom’s partner math is hard to ignore. 10 out of 10 top contact center deals were channel-driven — 8 of them competitive rip-and-replaces. Plus: a quiet $1.27B Anthropic bet and what its multi-model AI architecture means for partnerships.

• Only 3% of AI companies use partnerships as their primary GTM motion — yet the research calls it “an incredibly efficient strategic lever for scalable growth.” What this gap means, and why building partner infrastructure before $25M ARR compounds.

• NVIDIA just split its $75B data center business in two — and the non-hyperscaler half grew 2.5x faster last quarter. AI is scaling into neoclouds, enterprises, and factory floors. The partnership surface area is expanding with it.

• The next Cloud GTM Leader cohort starts next week, on June 2. Join us for a 5-week deep dive on turning cloud marketplaces from end-of-deal firefighting into a repeatable revenue system.

Before we dive in:

Cloud commits crossed $1.2T+. AWS alone is at $364B, up $120B in one quarter. Tomorrow (May 27, 9–10 AM PT), we're hosting a free tactical workshop with AWS, LangChain, Grafana Labs and Clazar — breaking down 5 marketplace playbooks AI and SaaS teams are using to scale revenue. Last chance to join us.

Save Your Spot

Zoom's Partner Math: 10/10 Top CCaaS Deals, $1B+ Anthropic Bet

Zoom is one of the few software stocks that is up 22% YTD. Just raised full-year guidance. On track to cross $5B ARR.

The standout growth segment? Contact center. And 10 out of 10 top deals were channel-driven.

Zoom’s Q1 earnings tell a partner-led growth story

Eric S. Yuan, CEO:

“…a lot of new customers, they want to deploy CCaaS. They would like to leverage channel partners.

You look at our top 10 deals, 10 out of 10 are channel driven. Our channel partners, they know how to pitch our story. How to sell to our enterprise customers.”

These aren’t greenfield wins. In 8 of those 10 top contact center deals, Zoom displaced a legacy CCaaS vendor. Partners are running competitive rip-and-replace at scale.

Million-dollar-plus deals hit one of the strongest levels Zoom has ever recorded — in a Q1.

AI is now embedded in the enterprise deal structure

Zoom’s AI Companion paid monthly active users grew 184% YoY. And 9 of the top 10 contact center deals included paid AI.

The pattern keeps showing up across SaaS earnings this quarter: AI features drive larger contracts and more partner involvement, because deployment complexity rises with them.

Zoom is responding by deploying forward-deployed engineers inside enterprise accounts to accelerate AI adoption — the same approach used by Google Cloud, Open AI, Anthropic and others. When your AI product needs that level of hands-on support, the door opens wider for SIs and advisory partners.

Zoom’s biggest external AI bet: $1.27B in Anthropic

Zoom has been quietly investing in Anthropic since 2023. During Q1, Zoom added another $46M to its Anthropic preferred stock, bringing total carrying value to $1.27B.

On top of that, $99.7M went into other private AI companies in the quarter.

Zoom is building AI capabilities and ecosystem through investments, not only internal R&D or vendor relationships.

Zoom itself isn’t locking into a single model.

Their federated architecture dynamically routes across OpenAI, Anthropic, NVIDIA, and Zoom’s own models. For tech partnership leaders, that’s a playbook on how top companies avoid vendor dependency.

One more signal: Zoom just hired Russell Dicker as its new CPO — a familiar hyperscaler story:

“Russell brings more than 25 years of product leadership experience across Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, including leading Microsoft Teams’ product and data science teams.”

3 lessons for alliance leaders:

1. When one of the fastest-growing product lines is 100% partner-led at the top end of the market, it shows what can scale through partners.

2. AI is making enterprise deals larger and more complex, which pulls partners deeper into both the sale and the deployment

3. Multi-model AI architectures create more partnership surface area and reduce single-vendor risk for everyone in the ecosystem

Is your partner motion keeping pace with your fastest-growing product line?

Subscribe now

Tomorrow: LangChain, AWS, Grafana & Clazar on Playbooks they Use to Scale Marketplace Revenue

Cloud commits crossed $1.2T+. AWS alone is at $364B, up $120B in a single quarter.

That creates a massive pool of pre-committed enterprise technology budget — and a growing share can be routed to software purchases through cloud marketplaces.

But for most AI and SaaS teams, the playbook for turning marketplace listings into revenue growth is still being written in real time.

Tomorrow’s workshop (May 27, 9–10 AM PT) brings together operators and leaders who have built Cloud GTM from 0→1 and scaled marketplace revenue to $100M+. Last week we introduced Nate Stecz from AWS and Rob Weidner from Grafana Labs. This week, meet two more leaders joining us tomorrow.

Karan Singh — Head of Partnerships, LangChain

From a standing start to launch partner for AWS Marketplace’s AI Agents & Tools category — and 2026 Google Cloud Marketplace Partner of the Year.

That’s the LangChain marketplace story and Karan Singh is the operator building it.

Karan is LangChain’s founding partnerships hire, building the 0→1 motion across cloud/hyperscalers, technology ISVs and SIs.

LangChain is at the center of AI application development: $1B+ valuation, 150M+ monthly downloads across LangChain + LangGraph, and teams like Replit, Harvey, Clay and Rippling building with it.

In a short window, Karan led LangChain’s move from early marketplace motion to real cloud marketplace traction and recognition:

• 2.7x increase in monthly co-sell deal registrations and 2x increase in inbound monthly referrals from cloud providers in 6 months

• LangChain was a launch partner for AWS Marketplace’s AI Agents & Tools category with LangSmith + LangGraph Platform

• It was named 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year in Marketplace: Agent Platform

Before LangChain, Karan was at AWS for 4 years, most recently leading Agentic AI Strategic Partnerships, building alliances with leading agent and AI infrastructure companies and shaping how AWS shows up for AI partners.

On the panel, Karan will break down parts that matter most in marketplace traction:

• How to think about build → market → sell with AWS and what it looks like in an AI-first world

• How to drive marketplace motions with sellers not familiar with cloud co-sell

• How to reduce the perceived risk that slows early marketplace deals

• How to think about building the foundational pieces in a startup to set up for cloud co-sell

• How to align and influence marketing, product and engineering to think about cloud marketplaces as a distribution channel

Save Your Spot

Trunal Bhanse — CEO, Clazar

If Karan will cover the 0→1 journey, Trunal sees what happens at scale — where marketplace GTM breaks operationally, and what unlocks the next stage of growth.

Clazar has facilitated $2.5B+ in cloud marketplace transactions across AWS, Azure, and GCP. Top AI companies including Cursor, Perplexity, Replit, Zapier and n8n use Clazar to power their marketplace operations.

At that volume, Trunal has seen every bottleneck that slows ISVs down — and what the teams that break through actually do differently. Using Clazar, Vectra AI grew 2.5x YoY on AWS Marketplace; Honeycomb achieved a 100% opportunity approval rate from AWS.

Trunal will explain how to scale marketplace GTM operationally — and how to remove manual friction without adding headcount.

Join Us Tomorrow

Karan and Trunal join a panel alongside:

• Nate Stecz, Senior Partner Development Manager — AI, AWS

• Rob Weidner, Director, Global Cloud Alliances, Grafana Labs ($100M+ via AWS Marketplace in 6 months)

• Roman Kirsanov, CEO, Partner Insight

In 60 minutes, we’ll cover:

1. Why $1.2T+ in cloud commits is changing the marketplace opportunity

2. How AI companies build marketplace revenue from 0→1 and how they scale it

3. What AWS looks for in AI partners

4. How top operators activate co-sell and field alignment to turn cloud marketplace into revenue

5. How to scale marketplace GTM operationally, and more

Join us tomorrow, May 27, 9–10 AM PT

Save Your Spot

For AI Companies, Partnerships are an “incredibly efficient strategic lever for scalable growth”

Partnerships are one of AI’s most efficient GTM levers for scalable growth, according to the just published State of AI report.

Yet only 3% of AI companies use channel / partnerships as their primary GTM motion. Why?

ICONIQ, one of the largest VC/PE funds, surveyed 300 software execs - CEOs, revenue chiefs, and product leaders — for their AI report.

It highlights that “AI builders increasingly formalizing partner ecosystems”, leaning on partners and hyperscalers to drive revenue.

My takeaways:

Channel, partnerships and hyperscalers are driving revenue for AI companies

“Channel and partnerships are emerging as a meaningful growth lever, particularly with consulting firms, hyperscalers, and PE-backed platforms, contributing directly to pipeline generation and post-sale implementation.”

Primary GTM motion is still sales-led at 38%

• product-led/self-serve is 30%

• hybrid is 29%

• and channel/partner-driven is 3%

What it means: Partnerships are not yet the main route to market (they rarely are), but they are an important force multiplier across sourcing, credibility, implementation, and expansion.

Partnerships need to be built earlier than most companies think

Rob Bernshteyn, former CEO of Coupa highlights the importance of timing:

“Partnerships are an incredibly efficient strategic lever for scalable growth. The earlier companies lay the foundation (ideally well before $25M ARR) the more likely they are to see channel revenue become a meaningful contributor down the line.”

Companies that wait until scale to build partner ecosystems may miss the compounding effect of partner-led revenue.

AI is forcing a rethink of GTM

“Go-to-market strategies for AI products are becoming more complex and diversified” — highlights the report

“While sales-led motions remain the most common, nearly 60% of companies now employ hybrid or product-led elements, reflecting the need to combine enterprise selling with hands-on product experience.”

The self-serve-plus-sales motion is now the norm — it maps on how cloud marketplaces operate with free trials and PAYG layered onto an enterprise sales process.

AI stack is going multi-model, multi-cloud

Companies now use ~3.1 model providers on average, up from ~2.8 six months ago.

Orchestration is beating allegiance to a single vendor in AI — the same logic we see in multi-cloud.

Two insights for alliance leaders:

1. 3% shows that partnerships doesn’t have to be your primary motion to become one of the largest revenue drivers.

2. Leaning on partnerships and cloud GTM is an early-stage decision. Partner infrastructure built before $25M ARR compounds. Bolted on at $100M, it is harder to catch up because GTM motion, and sales habits are already set.

Source: research.

Share

NVIDIA Just Revealed AI’s Second Growth Engine

Half of NVIDIA’s $75B data center revenue now comes from outside the big clouds. The AI buildout just gained a second engine — and last quarter it grew faster than the first.

NVIDIA posted a record quarter: $81.6B in revenue, up 85% in a year, with $75B from the data center alone, up 92%. Demand, in Jensen Huang’s words, “has gone parabolic.”

But the more interesting number sits underneath.

NVIDIA changed how it reports. Data Center now splits into two sub-markets:

• Hyperscale — the public clouds (AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle) and the largest consumer internet companies

• ACIE — AI Clouds, Industrial and Enterprise

NVIDIA only began reporting the business this way this quarter, so treat it as a fresh signal, not a long trend. Still, the two halves are now almost the same size:

Hyperscale: ~$38B, up 12% quarter on quarter.

ACIE: ~$37B, up 31% quarter on quarter.

Half of the data center business now sits outside the hyperscalers — and this quarter, that half grew more than twice as fast.

To be clear, the clouds are not slowing

They remain the largest route to market for NVIDIA.

As Jensen put it, hyperscaler capex is “a trillion dollars this year,” and “I have every expectation it’s going to grow from here.”

CFO Colette Kress added context:

“Analysts now forecasting hyperscale CapEx to exceed $1 trillion in 2027… AI infrastructure spending is on track to reach $3 to $4 trillion annually by the end of this decade.”

What changed is the scale of everything growing alongside big clouds.

So what is ACIE? NVIDIA defines it broadly — AI factories “across industries and countries.”

It didn’t give a full breakdown, but from what Jensen described on the call, it appears to span:

• AI-native clouds (the neoclouds)

• Enterprise AI factories

• Industrial AI on the factory floor

• Sovereign and regional clouds

• On-prem AI builds

His framing: hyperscalers are 5 or 6 companies — a simple GTM motion for NVIDIA. This second group is “hundreds, thousands of companies. And in the future, hundreds of thousands.”

Frontier AI is now multi-cloud by default

That same diversification strategy is showing up at the frontier.

NVIDIA named Anthropic a new strategic partner, with Jensen noting it has “partnered with them to secure computing capacity across Azure, AWS, CoreWeave” — coverage that was “largely zero until just recently.”

No single cloud now owns the frontier model layer, except maybe GCP.

The signal is simple: AI is no longer scaling only on the big clouds.

It’s scaling across industries — into neoclouds, enterprises and factory floors.

Of course, NVIDIA has reason to tell this story. A more diversified buyer base means less dependence on a handful of clouds, and that’s a good narrative for its own stock.

But the direction is hard to argue with: AI is spreading — and the partners who reach these new buyers scale with it.

Where are you placing your bets this year?

Subscribe now

Turn Marketplace Into a Real Revenue Driver: 5-week course for Alliance & Cloud GTM Leaders

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it is not a GTM motion. It is firefighting.

And that is where many Cloud GTM teams get stuck.

• A rep pulls alliances in late

• A private offer becomes urgent

• The cloud rep gets a vague ask

• Procurement shows up in the final week

It may save the deal. But it does not compound.

That is the pattern I keep seeing across SaaS and AI companies trying to scale on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

They are “doing marketplace.” But they are not building a repeatable Cloud GTM growth system.

The teams pulling ahead do a few things differently:

• they identify marketplace as a buying path earlier, not at the end

• they train sales to use it, instead of treating it as an alliances side project

• they make co-sell structured: real context, clear asks, better timing

• they connect channel, marketplace, and cloud field into one motion

• they build internal support across finance, ops, product, and leadership

That is what turns marketplace from extra work into leverage.

And it matters more now than it did even a year ago.

Cloud commitments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud have crossed $1.2T.

Customers are more open to buying software digitally.

But they are also more selective.

Co-sell is getting more competitive.

And AI is reshaping how software gets discovered, packaged, and sold through hyperscaler ecosystems.

So the gap is widening: between teams that are listed and teams that turned marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

David Mauer — who helped drive $100M+ in marketplace revenue at GitLab and is now rebuilding the motion at LucidLink — put it well in our recent webinar:
”You never want a customer to tell you how they want to buy and have to say no.”

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance and Cloud GTM leaders have gone through our Cloud GTM Leader course to build that capability.

• Some launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks.

• Others closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion.

• Some scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high base.

That is not because they found one trick.

It is because they built the growth system.

Our next cohort starts next week — June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Join the June 2 Cohort

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s edition:

• The marketplace pitch that wins CEOs may fail with CFOs or CROs — learn exact language that resonates with each C-suite role.

• Channel jumped from 21% to 31% of B2B software revenue in one year — ICONIQ’s 2026 GTM data shows partners are now the second-largest revenue driver.

• Cisco’s hyperscaler AI orders surged from $2B to $9B in one year, revealing how AI demand is pushing partnerships deeper into co-design and architecture.

• Cloud GTM Leader course returns June 2: what separates teams “doing marketplace” from teams building a repeatable revenue system

Before we dive in:

Cloud commits just crossed $1.2T+. AWS alone is at $364B, up $120B in a single quarter, accelerating marketplace momentum.

On May 27, we’re hosting a tactical online workshop with AWS, LangChain, Grafana Labs and Clazar - we'll break down 5 Marketplace playbooks AI and SaaS teams are using to scale revenue.

Save Your Spot

CEO to CFO: How to Win Marketplace Buy-In

CEO, CRO, CFO and CPO do not buy into marketplace strategy for the same reason. Many alliance teams learn this the hard way.

Cloud marketplace pitches often fail internally when companies repeat the same message to every executive.

That was one clear takeaway from our workshop with leaders from AWS, Qlik and Clazar, who have driven billions in marketplace traction.

CEO: Growth and Market Positioning

CEOs need to see why marketplaces can be a major route to enterprise buyers, unlock cloud budgets and joint GTM with hyperscalers.

CEO pitch must answer:

• Will this grow total revenue?

• Will this improve strategic distribution?

• Will this make us more relevant to cloud partners?

But first, correct the misconceptions:

Many leaders still assume marketplace works like Amazon.com: list the product, buyers discover it, revenue follows. In reality, the largest marketplace deals are still enterprise-sales-led and private-offer-driven.

Another CEO concern is channel shift. Our data proves that the marketplace done right grows the pie, not just moves it.

CRO: Sales acceleration

For CROs, marketplace matters only if it helps sellers win. Introducing it as a new tool/workflow is the fastest way to lose them.

So the CRO pitch: bigger deals, faster closes, higher seller productivity and co-sell leverage.

When the CRO is on board, co-sell and growth accelerate much faster.

Michael Levy from AWS highlighted that sales alignment is the single most important factor in ISV marketplace success.

Comp neutral used to be the goal. ISVs now run comp positive SPIFs to kickstart the motion. Once reps see bigger deals and faster closes, the behavior sustains.

Share

CFO: Dollar impact, not partnership stories

CFOs do not fund “strategic relationships.” They need measurable impact.

Drew Zurek recommends using Marketplace Impact Analysis: compare marketplace vs. direct deals on velocity, win rate, deal size and realized revenue impact.

In usage-based SaaS, closing a $1M deal on January 15 vs. March 31 can mean $200K more revenue.

Trunal Bhanse from Clazar added a powerful reframe: position marketplace as helping buyers retire committed cloud spend before it expires.

That shifts the conversation from “why pay a listing fee?” to “we help customers use budget they already allocated.”

CPO: Product architecture as distribution

Product leaders should see marketplaces as part of discovery, packaging and buying experience.

AWS is pushing this direction with AI-assisted discovery, Express Private Offers, multi-product solutions, agents, etc.

CPO questions become:

• Is our product easy to discover?

• Is our packaging marketplace-ready?

• Can we support free trials, PLG, and bundled partner solutions?

For alliance leaders:

To win buy-in, translate marketplace into C-suite language:

• CEO: show market leverage

• CRO: higher sales velocity

• CFO: financial impact

• CPO: product distribution

We’ll go deeper into the AWS Marketplace playbooks on May 27:

Meet the AWS and Grafana Leaders Joining Our Marketplace Workshop on May 27

Cloud commits just crossed $1.2T+. AWS alone is at $364B, up $120B in a single quarter.

That creates one of the largest pools of pre-committed enterprise technology budget ever created — and a growing share can be routed to software purchases through cloud marketplaces.

The opportunity is obvious. The playbook is not.

Many AI and SaaS teams know cloud marketplaces should become key revenue drivers. Fewer know how AWS evaluates AI partners, how co-sell actually works with the field, or what top operators are doing differently to scale.

That’s exactly what our May 27 online workshop will break down.

This week, meet two of the leaders joining the panel.

Nate Stecz — Sr. Partner Development Manager — Artificial Intelligence, AWS

Nate covers AI model providers delivering solutions through both AWS Marketplace and Amazon Bedrock — the cornerstone of every GenAI solution being built today, and the layer most AI platforms are fitting into.

His day job: helping AI partners build strategy across these channels and prioritize different GTM motions to reach customers faster.

Why Nate’s perspective is unique:

Nate spent 8+ years on AWS Marketplace before moving to the AI partner development role. From technical account management to business development to partner development, he’s been part of every major stage of AWS Marketplace evolution and partner adoption.

He’s managed partner portfolios generating $100M+ in cloud software sales. In his BDM role, sellers in his portfolio grew 5X in 12 months.

He is a major contributor to the AWS Marketplace SaaS playbook on product-led growth, and authored a PLG blog — “Guide to executing a SaaS PLG strategy in AWS Marketplace” — and previously led the PLG adoption strategy for AWS Marketplace across the Americas.

That combination — marketplace and partner strategy, PLG expertise, and a direct line into how AWS thinks about AI partners — is exactly why his insight on this panel is unique.

Save Your Spot

Rob Weidner — Director, Global Cloud Alliances, Grafana Labs

$100M+ via AWS Marketplace in just 6 months. Multiple 8-figure deals with AWS sellers. That’s the Cloud GTM motion at Grafana Labs — AWS Top 10 DevOps Marketplace ISV.

Rob is a hands-on operator who runs Grafana’s go-to-market across marketplaces — a company with $400M+ ARR and 7,000+ customers. Many AI leaders — including Anthropic and Lovable — run their observability on Grafana.

And in January, Grafana and AWS signed a 5-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement to deepen marketplace and AI alignment.

Why Rob’s perspective is unique:

He’s one of the few operators who has repeatedly built and scaled Cloud GTM — and hit the top partner tier across all three hyperscalers.

On AWS, where the volume is: Grafana is a Top 10 DevOps Marketplace ISV, driving multiple 8-figure transactions through AWS co-sell.

They’ve also reached the highest tier on GCP (320% marketplace growth in 2024) and Azure (150%+ average YoY growth over the last 3 years) — proving the expertise translates across hyperscalers.

That combination — deep AWS marketplace execution, scaling across hyperscalers, and insights into AI customer base — is what makes his playbook a must-learn for any team scaling marketplace revenue in 2026.

Join Us on May 27

Nate and Rob will be joined by:

• Karan Singh, Partnerships Lead at LangChain

• Trunal Bhanse, CEO at Clazar

• Roman Kirsanov, CEO at Partner Insight

In 60 minutes, we’ll break down:

• Latest market data: why cloud commits crossed $1T+ and what it means for AI GTM and marketplace acceleration

• Operator tactics: how top AI-native teams scale revenue on AWS Marketplace

• 5 marketplace playbooks: Better Together framing for AI, co-sell outreach, seller enablement, and more

• Scaling tactics: how smart operations and workflows remove friction and drive marketplace revenue

Join us May 27, 9–10 AM PT

Save Your Spot

Thanks to our partner for supporting this workshop:

Clazar is the leading Cloud Sales Acceleration Platform for Go-to-Market teams to scale revenue on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud marketplaces. From listing to co-selling to revenue reconciliation and recognition, it helps companies streamline and automate their entire cloud sales journey from a single, unified platform—with zero operational overhead.

Top AI companies like Cursor, Perplexity, Replit, Zapier, and n8n trust Clazar to power their success on cloud marketplaces. To learn more, please visit www.clazar.io

Channel Drives 31% of SaaS Revenue. GTM Is Tilting to Partners

In one year, channel and partnerships went from 21% to 31% of B2B software revenue.

Direct sales dropped from 73% to 57%. The GTM mix is shifting fast.

ICONIQ, one of the largest VC/PE funds, surveyed 150+ B2B software CROs, CEOs and sales leaders for their 2026 State of GTM. The channel signal is one of the loudest findings in the report.

Channel is now second largest revenue driver

2026 revenue split across all companies:

• Direct Sales: 57% (was 73%)

• Channel/Partnerships: 31% (was 21%)

• Self-serve: 11%

10-point swing to partners in 12 months

Partners are now a real lever well before $100M ARR

For sub-$100M high-growth companies, channel drives 27% of total pipeline.

For non-high-growth peers at the same scale, it’s 19%.

Fastest-growing smaller companies aren’t waiting for enterprise scale to build partner motions.

Full pipeline mix for sub-$100M high-growth:

• Sales: 46%

• Channel/Partnerships: 27%

• Marketing: 15%

• CS: 9%

Partners are ~2x marketing as a pipeline source in this cohort.

Partners outpace marketing on new logos too

New logo pipeline for <$100M high-growth:

• Sales: 62%

• Channel/Partnerships: 19%

• Marketing: 12%

Sales still drives most new logo origination, but partners are now the #2 source.

Channel beats marketing on win rates by 12 points

Win rates by opportunity source in 2026:

• Sales: 43%

• Channel/Partner: 39%

• Marketing: 27%

• CS: 52% (a winner or an outlier?)

Channel-sourced deals convert better than marketing-sourced ones.

PAYG and Short contracts are gaining ground

Sales cycles compressed from 25 to 19 weeks - great news.

But contracts moved the other way:

• Under 1-year contracts: 2% - 13% in one year

• 3+ year contracts: 40% - 29%

Free Trial/POC conversion also jumped from 36% to 50% - buyers want to try more, commit less, and keep options open as AI evolves.

AI is producing leaner GTM teams — and shifting their KPIs to retention

At $100M–$250M ARR, high AI adopters run 125 GTM FTEs vs 165 for low adopters.

At $250M–$500M: 275 vs 350.

At the same time, 40% of companies now measure customer retention as AI ROI, up from 26% a year ago.

Leaner direct teams mean partners cover more of the field. And retention — through implementation, renewal, and expansion — is exactly where strong partner ecosystems pull ahead.

Shorter contracts, PAYG, free trials, leaner sales teams, and a channel motion that beats marketing on win rate — are all structural tailwinds for cloud marketplaces.

Takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. Build partner pipeline well before $100M ARR

2. Treat free trials and POCs as deal-accelerators, pair them with marketplace GTM

3. Track retention KPIs in addition to net new — that’s where AI ROI is now being measured

Source: Research

Share

$2B to $9B in one year: inside Cisco's hyperscaler surge

Last week Cisco added ~$70B in market cap in a single day — its biggest move in ~20 years. The AI infrastructure numbers grabbed the headlines. What’s underneath them is an important signal for the cloud ecosystem.

Three takeaways from Cisco’s Q3 FY26 print and Chuck Robbins’ CNBC interview:

Extreme co-design is becoming the default

Cisco landed 5 new hyperscaler design wins in Q3 — 2 in optics, 3 in systems — including the first wins for its Silicon One P200 chip in scale-across workloads.

Robbins, Cisco’s CEO, said hyperscalers want “silicon diversity,” meaning they want multiple trusted options at very deep technical layers.

The lesson is not only about hardware.

It shows where strategic partnerships are heading when AI demand gets large enough: customers and suppliers work together much earlier, much deeper, and much closer to the architecture.

The same dynamic is starting to show up in software.

Joint engineering, co-built reference architectures, and deep technical integration are becoming the price of entry for any serious AI partnership across the stack.

The AI buildout is spreading from hyperscalers into the enterprise

Cisco raised FY26 hyperscaler AI infrastructure orders to $9B, up from $5B at the start of the year. The bigger signal for ISVs is what’s happening downstream:

• Enterprise data center switching orders up >40% YoY

• Nexus switches tagged for AI deployments up ~50% sequentially

• Cisco reported ~$900M of AI orders YTD from neocloud, sovereign, and enterprise customers, separate from hyperscalers

Robbins called it the “AI acceleration we’re starting to see in the enterprise.” This is no longer a 2027 story.

AI demand is starting to pull forward modernization across networking, security, observability, data, and cloud operating models.

A single security narrative reshaped customer roadmaps in 90 days

Robbins said Anthropic’s Claude Mythos was not even on the radar 90 days ago. Now it’s “the number one topic that we talk about with almost every customer on the planet.”

The effect is concrete: refresh and security projects that customers had been delaying are now getting rapidly pulled forward.

Meanwhile, Splunk shows continued shift from on-prem to cloud subscriptions, with 1,000+ new logos expected in FY26.

Three lessons for alliance leaders:

1. Co-design is becoming the norm. The deepest AI partnerships now begin in engineering, often before commercial terms are on the table

2. Enterprise AI demand is showing up in pipelines already

3. Customer priorities can flip in just 90 days. Alliance teams need to be ready to change just as fast.

Cisco showed a broader hyperscaler ecosystem story: when AI demand accelerates, the impact spreads across the stack.

Subscribe now

Turn Marketplace Into a Real Revenue Driver: 5-week course for Alliance & Cloud GTM Leaders

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it is not a GTM motion. It is firefighting.

And that is where many Cloud GTM teams get stuck.

• A rep pulls alliances in late

• A private offer becomes urgent

• The cloud rep gets a vague ask

• Procurement shows up in the final week

• The “win” depends on one person who knows the maze.

It may save the deal.

But it does not compound.

That is the pattern I keep seeing across SaaS and AI companies trying to scale on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

They are “doing marketplace.”

But they are not building a repeatable Cloud GTM growth system.

The teams pulling ahead do a few things differently:

• they identify marketplace as a buying path earlier, not at the end

• they train sales to use it, instead of treating it as an alliances side project

• they make co-sell structured: real context, clear asks, better timing

• they connect channel, marketplace, and cloud field into one motion

• they build internal support across finance, ops, product, and leadership

That is what turns marketplace from extra work into leverage.

And it matters more now than it did even a year ago.

Cloud commitments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud have crossed $1.2T.

Customers are more open to buying software digitally.

But they are also more selective.

Co-sell is getting more competitive.

And AI is reshaping how software gets discovered, packaged, and sold through hyperscaler ecosystems.

So the gap is widening: between teams that are listed and teams that turned marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

David Mauer — who helped drive $100M+ in marketplace revenue at GitLab and is now rebuilding the motion at LucidLink — put it well in our recent webinar:

”You never want a customer to tell you how they want to buy and have to say no.”

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance and Cloud GTM leaders have gone through our Cloud GTM Leader course to build that capability.

• Some launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks.

• Others closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion.

• Some scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high base.

That is not because they found one trick.

It is because they built the growth system.

Our next cohort starts on June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Save Your Spot

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s edition:

• Hyperscalers aren’t just co-selling or co-building — they’re buying. Datadog’s first $1B+ quarter, fueled by 7- and 8-figure deals from two hyperscalers

• ServiceNow’s ~2-year sprint to $1B on AWS Marketplace — and the AI control architecture powering Act II

• $11.5B in a single day: OpenAI and Anthropic just made private equity their newest AI distribution channel

• The myth that enterprise AI sells itself: BCG data on why Sierra runs at $290K rev/FTE while Cursor hits $3.3M — and what it means for your GTM motion

• Cloud GTM Leader course returns June 2: what separates teams “doing marketplace” from teams building a repeatable revenue system

Before we dive in — cloud commits just crossed $1.2T, and AI is becoming one of the fastest-growing buying motions through cloud marketplaces.

Join us on May 27, 9–10 AM PT for a tactical online workshop with operators from LangChain, Grafana Labs, AWS, and Clazar.

We'll break down the 5 marketplace playbooks AI-natives use to turn commits into pipeline and closed revenue.

Save My Spot

Datadog’s $1B+ Quarter: Hyperscalers Are Now Customers, Not Just Partners

Last quarter two hyperscalers signed 7- and 8-figure deals with Datadog. Partners can be customers too.
Datadog posted its first $1B+ revenue quarter, up 32% YoY. RPO surged +51% YoY to $3.48B.

New logo bookings 2X+ YoY - all-time record. Shares jumped >30% - its best single-day gain ever.

What’s driving Datadog’s growth?

Hyperscalers aren’t just co-selling and co-innovating. They are buying

Why?
These are companies with massive balance sheets and deep engineering teams. If anyone can build anything in-house, it is them.

CEO Olivier Pomel: “If there was ever a set of companies for whom it makes sense to do it themselves, it’s those companies. And yet, we see that they have the same issue.

When it comes to going as fast as they can, being as efficient as they can with their resources, they come to us to replace some of the things they were using before.”

This is co-opetition at its best. Clouds can build, but they still buy best-of-breed products when the problem is important/urgent.

It is also why they co-sell with leading ISVs. Customers don’t want only cloud infra. They need solutions, including best-in-class products, AI, security, etc.

AI + Cloud: two growth engines

Pomel was clear:
“There is no change to our overall view that digital transformation and cloud migration are long-term secular growth drivers for our business. But we now have an additional secular growth driver with AI...”

AI numbers were striking:

• 6,500 customers now use 1+ AI integrations

• They represent only 20% of customers, but ~80% of ARR

• MCP server calls grew 4X QoQ

• LLM Observability surged ~3X QoQ

Pomel added an insightful point for everyone considering agent pricing:

“We don’t care whether most of the usage is humans or agents. Our business model lends itself to do pretty well — we are usage-based, it doesn’t matter where the load is coming from.”

Regulated sectors still need channel

Datadog received FedRAMP High certification for U.S. federal customers.

CFO David Obstler explained:
“On the FedRAMP, we’ve been working on both the different certifications, but at the same time, we’ve been investing in the go-to-market function,

both in terms of reps and channel partners for a number of years…
the channel partner relationships are a very important part of this.”

Public sector GTM requires partners to unlock the market.

Cloud GTM flywheel runs both ways

AWS highlighted in Dec that Datadog crossed $2B in total sales on AWS Marketplace.
They also signed an expanded Strategic Collaboration Agreement covering “solution development, AWS Marketplace availability, and go-to-market programs.”

Datadog itself disclosed ~$1.4B in cloud commits they have for the next 5 years.

Which brings us to the bigger lesson

Datadog is:

• major cloud customer

• strategic hyperscaler partner

• top marketplace seller

• and now a vendor to hyperscaler AI teams

That is the new Cloud GTM playbook - strongest hyperscaler relationships are no longer one-dimensional.

Share

$1.2T+ Cloud Commits: 5 Playbooks AI-Natives Use to Build Marketplace Revenue

Cloud commits just crossed $1.2T — up from $900B in a single quarter.

AWS commits alone hit $364B, up $120B QoQ. AWS revenue grew 28% — its fastest pace in 15 quarters. Bedrock revenue is up 170% QoQ.

Translation for alliance leaders: marketplace is becoming the AI buying path. Enterprise customers have pre-allocated cloud funds they need to spend, and AI is now the fastest line item moving through it.

The question is no longer whether AI-native (or AI-adjacent) companies should be on cloud marketplaces. It is how they turn marketplace into pipeline, co-sell momentum, and closed revenue.

That is the focus of our next online workshop.

Join us May 27 (9–10 AM PT) for a tactical 60-minute session where we’ll break down what’s working for top AI-native companies scaling on AWS Marketplace — and hand you the playbooks to do the same.

We’ll cover:

• Latest market data: why cloud commits crossed $1T+ and what it means for AI GTM and marketplace acceleration

• Operator tactics: how AI-native teams qualify buyers, activate co-sell, and scale revenue through Marketplaces

• 5 marketplace playbooks: including Better Together framing for AI, co-sell outreach, seller enablement and more

• Scaling the motion: how smart operations and workflows remove friction and drive marketplace revenue

Learn from operators who’ve built the motion

• Karan Singh, Partnerships Lead at LangChain

• Rob Weidner, Director of Global Cloud Alliances at Grafana Labs

• Nate Stecz, Senior Partner Development Manager for AI at AWS

• Trunal Bhanse, CEO of Clazar

You’ll walk away with 5 Marketplace Playbooks.

Save My Spot

If you’re leading alliances, marketplaces, sales enablement, or RevOps for an AI or AI-adjacent ISV — this is the session that turns the $1T+ commits milestone into your pipeline and closed revenue.

ServiceNow Hit $1B on AWS in Just ~2 Years

ServiceNow just crossed $1B in AWS Marketplace. It is one of the fastest ramps to $1B on AWS in just ~2 years.

This milestone matters even more because of what ServiceNow is now selling through AWS marketplace.

Not a point product. A full enterprise AI architecture: governance, AI agents, AWS cloud and model infrastructure, ServiceNow workflows, developer tooling, and services partners to move it into production.

Back in Nov 2023, ServiceNow and AWS announced a Strategic Collaboration Agreement:

• ServiceNow Platform and full suite available as SaaS on AWS

• Co-developed AI-powered industry applications in AWS Marketplace

• New ways for joint customers to purchase and use ServiceNow

Marketplace worked because it was inside a strategic partnership and co-engineering, not beside them.

Now the next chapter is AI and marketplace execution

At Knowledge 2026, ServiceNow announced AI Control Tower with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore — available in AWS Marketplace.

The goal: one governance architecture for agents built on AWS infrastructure and connected into ServiceNow workflows.

Chris Grusz, Managing Director of Technology Partnerships at AWS, framed the moment well: “Organizations aren’t experimenting with AI anymore, they’re operationalizing it.”

Enterprises are deploying agents across clouds, models, teams, and systems. But they still need governance, auditability, permissions, security, workflow context, and human approval.

ServiceNow is positioning itself as the control layer for that complexity.

• AWS provides cloud and model infrastructure

• ServiceNow provides orchestration and governance

• Marketplace becomes the commercial route

• Workflows turn AI into outcomes

ServiceNow and AWS highlighted agent workflows across security, IT operations, and telecom — from vulnerability remediation to AIOps and customer care.

That is where enterprise AI becomes valuable: governed actions inside workflows where decisions happen.

This connects directly to ServiceNow’s bigger growth story

The company laid out a path to $30B+ in subscription revenue by 2030, with AI expected to represent more than 30% of ACV.
The AWS Marketplace milestone is part of the growth model.

One more signal worth watching: Action Fabric

ServiceNow is opening its full system of action to any AI agent via MCP — including agents built on Claude, Copilot, or custom stacks.

That makes the platform more than a system of record. It becomes the governed execution layer for the broader agent ecosystem.

For alliance leaders:

• Marketplace strategy is becoming growth strategy

• The strongest cloud partnerships package product, cloud, agents, workflows and services into something enterprises can actually buy and run

ServiceNow’s $1B milestone is impressive. For a workflow platform, not a security vendor, the speed is remarkable.

It shows that cloud marketplaces are becoming the commercial layer for enterprise AI transformation.

Subscribe now

Private Equity Just Became AI’s Newest Channel

$11.5B committed in a single day to distribute AI through private equity portfolios.
OpenAI and Anthropic just made PE firms their newest “channel partners”.

Two massive deals announced last week

OpenAI finalized “The Deployment Company” — a $10B vehicle anchored by TPG, with Brookfield, Advent, Bain Capital and 15 other investors.
PE firms open their portfolios as a captive customer base. In exchange, OpenAI commits up to $1.5B of its own capital and guarantees backers 17.5% annual return over five years.

Anthropic announced a $1.5B joint venture with Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman — each investing ~$300M — plus Goldman Sachs, Apollo, GIC, Sequoia and others. The entity will deploy Claude across PE-backed businesses and mid-sized companies.

Different structures. Same strategic direction.

AI labs are not waiting for enterprise adoption to happen company by company. They are building distribution through portfolios.

PE firms are a powerful channel. They have operating teams. They can standardize AI playbooks across dozens of companies at once.

That makes PE less like a traditional reseller and more like a portfolio-level adoption engine.

Last month, Google Cloud launched a partnership with Thoma Bravo — the world’s largest software-focused PE firm ($183B in assets).

The deal includes Gemini access, forward-deployed Google engineers, and routes to market through Google Cloud Marketplace and co-sell.

This is where it gets interesting for Cloud GTM leaders.

Many PE-backed software companies will not only use AI internally. They will embed AI into their products and look for faster enterprise distribution. Cloud marketplaces become one of the commercial rails for that shift.

Both AI labs are also locking in consulting capacity

OpenAI launched Frontier Alliances JV with BCG, McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini. Anthropic highlights partnerships with Accenture, Deloitte and PwC.

Across all of these moves, a pattern repeats:

AI companies are combining models with PE portfolio access, consulting delivery, forward-deployed engineering, hyperscaler field teams and marketplace distribution.

In enterprise AI, partnerships are becoming the operating infrastructure for adoption itself. LLM vendors bring technology. PEs bring portfolio influence. Consultancies bring transformation. Clouds bring field alignment, orchestration and procurement.

Takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. AI distribution is expanding from accounts to portfolios. PE owners are becoming decision-makers for AI adoption.

2. Winning AI GTM motion is now co-sell + co-build + implementation. Model access alone is not enough.

3. If your cloud partner is embedding engineers inside PE portfolios, can you make your products part of it?

How is AI distribution changing your partnership strategy?

Share

Why Enterprise AI Doesn’t Sell Itself

There is a popular myth right now: AI products are so powerful that customers just find them, try them, swipe a credit card, and revenue explodes.

Sometimes, yes.
Cursor is reportedly generating $3.3M in revenue per employee. Gamma is at $2M. Lovable at $1.3M.
That is the magic of prosumer / PLG AI when it works.

But BCG’s latest AI software report shows a very different picture for enterprise AI.

Enterprise AI companies look much less like Cursor and much more like traditional B2B companies:

• Sierra: $290K revenue/FTE

• Harvey: $230K revenue/FTE

• Glean: $200K

• Legora: $150K

BCG’s conclusion: “Enterprise AI requires real headcount to build, sell, and support.”
That line kills one of the biggest myths in AI GTM.

Yes, there are extreme exceptions.

Anthropic’s growth is almost impossible to benchmark. It said its run-rate revenue surpassed $30B, up from $9B at the end of 2025 and $14B when it announced its Series G in February.

But most enterprise AI companies are not Anthropic.

They still need:

• Sales teams

• Implementation support

• Security reviews

• Procurement navigation

• Partner ecosystems

• Executive alignment

• Usage expansion

The playbook is changing. But the fundamentals stay the same.
In fact, enterprise AI may require a more sophisticated GTM motion than SaaS did.

Because AI value is often realized after the sale.
BCG underscores that for AI applications, usage is the core driver of value, pilots are common, revenue is less stable, and gross margins vary widely.

Enterprise AI sales are not just: Sell seats → expand seats → renew ARR.

It is becoming: Prove workflow value → drive usage → expand consumption → route procurement through the customer’s preferred cloud relationship.

That is exactly why cloud partnerships and marketplaces are becoming central to AI GTM.
OpenAI started with Microsoft, but expanded with AWS too 2 weeks ago - and Amazon Web Services (AWS) explicitly says customers can apply OpenAI usage toward existing AWS cloud commitments.

Anthropic is available across Amazon Bedrock, Google Cloud Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry.
Replit and LangChain were just named Google Cloud Marketplace Partners of the Year in AI-related categories.

Best-in-class AI companies are not just building better products.
They are building better distribution around the clouds.

The key lesson for Cloud GTM leaders:
Enterprise AI is turning sales into a cloud-aligned, partner-led, usage-driven motion.

The companies that win will combine:

• PLG where possible

• Enterprise sales and partners to accelerate sales

• Marketplace procurement to reach budgets already allocated

• Co-sell where hyperscalers and partners already own the customer relationship

• Customer success and ecosystems to drive usage, stickiness and full lifecycle

AI changed the GTM playbook.
But it did not remove the need for GTM.
If anything, the best enterprise AI companies are proving the opposite.

Source: research

Turn Marketplace Into a Real Revenue Driver: 5-week course for Alliance & Cloud GTM Leaders

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it is not a GTM motion.

It is firefighting.

And that is where many Cloud GTM teams get stuck.

• A rep pulls alliances in late

• A private offer becomes urgent

• The cloud rep gets a vague ask

• Procurement shows up in the final week

• The “win” depends on one person who knows the maze.

It may save the deal.

But it does not compound.

That is the pattern I keep seeing across SaaS and AI companies trying to scale on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

They are “doing marketplace.”

But they are not building a repeatable Cloud GTM growth system.

The teams pulling ahead do a few things differently:

• they identify marketplace as a buying path earlier, not at the end

• they train sales to use it, instead of treating it as an alliances side project

• they make co-sell structured: real context, clear asks, better timing

• they connect channel, marketplace, and cloud field into one motion

• they build internal support across finance, ops, product, and leadership

That is what turns marketplace from extra work into leverage.

And it matters more now than it did even a year ago.

Cloud commitments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud have crossed $1.2T.

Customers are more open to buying software digitally.

But they are also more selective.

Co-sell is getting more competitive.

And AI is reshaping how software gets discovered, packaged, and sold through hyperscaler ecosystems.

So the gap is widening: between teams that are listed and teams that turned marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

David Mauer — who helped drive $100M+ in marketplace revenue at GitLab and is now rebuilding the motion at LucidLink — put it well in our recent webinar:

”You never want a customer to tell you how they want to buy and have to say no.”

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance and Cloud GTM leaders have gone through our Cloud GTM Leader course to build that capability.

• Some launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks.

• Others closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion.

• Some scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high base.

That is not because they found one trick.

It is because they built the growth system.

Our next cohort starts on June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Save Your Spot

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

This week’s issue is all about the hyperscaler cloud, AI, and commits race — and what the latest AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud earnings reveal for alliance, marketplace, and partner leaders.

In this issue:

• $1.2T+ in cloud commits: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud now sit on the largest pool of pre-committed enterprise software budget ever created.

• GCP grew 63% to $20B — partner-sold Gemini seats surged 9X YoY, signaling Google’s ecosystem-led AI distribution engine is now at full speed.

• AWS accelerated to 28% growth: AWS hit a $150B run rate, backlog reached $364B, and Bedrock spend grew 170% QoQ.

• Microsoft AI crossed $37B ARR as Azure grew 40%. Microsoft is moving AI monetization toward seats + usage.

But before we dive in, our next cohort of the Cloud GTM Leader Course starts June 2nd. In five weeks, we’ll work through how to turn marketplace from an end-of-deal scramble into a repeatable growth system across AWS, Microsoft, and GCP. Scroll below for details.

Explore the June Cohort

Cloud Commits Cross $1.2T: What Partners Need to Know

AWS, Azure and Google Cloud reported staggering revenue growth numbers last week.
Combined cloud backlog exceeds $1.2 Trillion. All three are capacity constrained. Here’s a quick breakdown.

The hyperscaler AI race is accelerating, and the numbers are extraordinary. I’ll do detailed breakdowns shortly, but here are the key figures tech leaders need to know.

Revenue Growth

Google Cloud grew 63% to $20B - by far the fastest of the three.
AI solutions built on Google’s own models grew ~800% and became Cloud’s primary growth driver for the first time.

AWS grew 28% to $37.6B, its fastest growth rate in 15 quarters. The last time AWS grew this fast, the business was roughly half its current size. AWS is now at $150B annual run rate.

Microsoft Azure grew an impressive 40%.

All three said revenue would have been higher if they had more capacity.

Cloud Commits

This is where it gets really interesting for anyone selling through marketplaces.

Google Cloud backlog nearly doubled in a single quarter to $462B.

AWS backlog reached $364B - and that excludes the recently announced $100B+ Anthropic commitment.

Microsoft RPO remained roughly the same as last quarter at $627B. We estimate Azure commitments at $430B-$440B, including Open AI.

Add it up and customer cloud commits across the big three now exceed $1.2T. While not all are marketplace-addressable, the potential budget that ISVs can tap through the marketplace is rapidly expanding.

AI Revenue

Microsoft disclosed the largest number: $37B annual run rate for AI, up 123% YoY (likely across the business).

AWS said AI revenue is growing triple digits with a run rate exceeding $15B.
Google didn’t share an absolute figure but the 800% growth rate on AI-model-based products tells the story.

CapEx

The investment race is breathtaking.

Google raised 2026 guidance to $180–190B and said 2027 will be “significantly” higher.
Microsoft guided to ~$190B for calendar year 2026.
AWS spent $43.2B in Q1 alone, planning to spend ~$200B this year.

Combined, these three companies are guiding ~$570B+ of 2026 CapEx/ AI infrastructure investment. All three expect to remain capacity constrained through at least the end of 2026.

What this means for alliance leaders:

• $1.2T in cloud commits is the largest pool of pre-committed enterprise software budget ever created. If your product is available on marketplaces, the addressable wallet is growing faster than at any point in history.

• All three clouds are adding AI capacity as fast as they physically can and still can’t meet demand. Cloud sellers are under enormous pressure to show returns on this investment. That creates co-sell leverage for ISVs who help drive consumption.

• The partner signals are incredibly strong. Google reported 9x growth in partner-sold Gemini seats.

Share

GCP’s explosive 63% growth. 9X partner-sold AI seats

Google Cloud’s revenue grew a stunning 63% YoY. Commit backlog hit $462B (~2X in a single quarter). But the key partner signal was this: partner-sold Gemini Enterprise seats grew 9X YoY.

Enterprise AI is now the primary growth driver for Google Cloud - for the first time

Google Cloud revenue reached $20B in Q1, up 63% YoY. That’s from 28% growth a year ago. GCP is growing faster than any hyperscaler in recent memory.

Enterprise AI is now the main growth lever:

• Revenue from GenAI-model products grew ~800% YoY

• New customer acquisition 2X

• Deals between $100M and $1B doubled YoY, with multiple $1B+ contracts signed.

Existing customers are outpacing their initial commitments by 45% - accelerating over the prior quarter. When customers spend faster than they planned, the product is delivering real value.

Gemini Enterprise is becoming Google’s partner-led AI adoption engine

Sundar Pichai: “Our partner ecosystem plays an increasingly critical role in driving Gemini Enterprise adoption.”

Partner-sold seats grew 9X YoY.

Partners adopting Gemini Enterprise for their own internal use also grew 9x.

This matters, because partners are not just reselling Gemini Enterprise. When partners deploy the product internally first, they sell it better afterward.

Gemini Enterprise paid MAUs grew 40% QoQ.

The usage depth signals are striking:

• 330 GCP customers each processed over 1T tokens in the past 12 months.

• 35 reached 10T tokens.

• Gemini-powered workflows in BigQuery grew 30X YoY.

AI adoption is also pulling security into the stack

Wiz acquisition closed in March and is now reported inside GCP. Sundar said early performance has “exceeded our expectations,” as demand grows for Google’s cybersecurity and AI products.

They also highlighted Gemini-powered agents for threat detection, continuous red teaming and automated remediation.

GCP message: we’re building the secure enterprise AI stack - models, data, agents, infra and security.

CapEx tells you where this is heading

CEO was direct: “We are compute constrained in the near term. Our cloud revenue would have been higher if we were able to meet the demand.”

Q1 CapEx reached $35.7B, up an incredible 107% YoY.

Alphabet raised full-year 2026 guidance to $180–190B, and signaled 2027 CapEx will increase “significantly” again.

Google is now selling TPU hardware directly into select customers’ own data centers - a new revenue stream. Those agreements are already reflected in backlog, though the majority remains typical GCP contracts.

Key takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. 9x partner growth signals Google’s ecosystem-led AI distribution engine is now moving at full speed

2. $462B in backlog => massive commit pools for marketplace transactions. The addressable budget nearly doubled in one quarter.

3. Position your solution as one that drives actual consumption and you’ll earn co-sell attention.

What’s your take on GCP momentum?

Subscribe now

Amazon Hits Record High: AWS +28%, $364B backlog

Amazon shares hit an all-time high last week after reporting AWS’s fastest growth in 3+ years. AWS backlog reached record $364B.

AWS grew 28% in Q1 on a $150B annual run rate. Acceleration like that on a base this large is almost impossible.

Signals that stand out from Q1:

$364B in committed customer spend

Amazon Web Services (AWS) backlog reached $364B in Q1, growing 49% or $120B in just 3 months.

CEO Andy Jassy added that the number “does not include the recent deal that we announced with Anthropic for over $100 billion.
There is reasonable breadth in that as well - it is not just one customer or two customers.”

The bigger this customer commits pool grows, the more procurement gravitates to AWS Marketplace.

Bedrock is now the enterprise AI distribution layer

• 125,000+ customers

• ~80% of Fortune 100 use it

• Q1 customer spend on Bedrock grew 170% QoQ

• Tokens processed in Q1 exceeded all prior years combined

OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 landed in Bedrock last week, with 5.5 coming.

AWS also previewed Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI - a stateful runtime Jassy called a “big deal” for production-scale agents.

Jassy on where enterprise AI is monetizing:
“The largest absolute place that we see enterprises having success is in projects that are around cost avoidance and productivity — things like business process automation or fraud or things of that sort.”

AI spend is now pulling core cloud growth with it

Amazon said AWS AI revenue is already above a $15B annualized run rate after only three years. AI revenue is growing triple digits year over year.

As customers spend more on AI, AWS sees a corresponding increase in demand for core services.

CFO Brian Olsavsky: “a strong correlation between AI spend and core growth.”

Post-training, agentic tool use, and inference all pull CPU, storage, and networking with them. AI expands the entire AWS footprint inside an account.

CapEx supports it - $43B in Q1, $151B trailing twelve months, up from $93B a year ago. AWS is building ahead of demand it has already sold

Memory shortage is quietly accelerating cloud migrations

Insight from the CEO: Memory and component prices have spiked, and suppliers prioritize hyperscalers for capacity. On-prem customers watching refresh cycles slip are now accelerating migration plans that had been stuck for months.

3 takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. Lead with the customer’s AWS budget growth

If your target accounts have committed AWS spend, marketplace and co-sell should be part of the deal strategy early.

2. Tie your AWS story to AI-driven core growth.

The best partner positioning will show how your product expands, secures, governs, or accelerates AWS workloads.

3. Build for the Bedrock and agent ecosystem.

Enterprise AI buying is moving toward platforms where models, data, agents, and governance come together.

AWS just reported one of its strongest quarters in years. Are you positioned to ride the next AWS growth wave?

Subscribe now

Microsoft’s $37B AI Business is Shifting to Seats + Usage

Microsoft’s latest earnings call revealed how it’s rethinking AI monetization. Microsoft’s AI business crossed $37B in annual revenue run rate, up 123%.

Last quarter Azure grew 40%, ahead of 37-38% guidance

AI is now one of Microsoft’s largest growth engines, as its AI business surpassed $37B.

Copilot paid seats crossed 20M.
GitHub Copilot reached ~140,000 orgs, with enterprise subscribers ~3X.
Security Copilot customers 2X.

AI monetization is increasingly tied to usage, not just seat expansion

Amy Hood framed it directly: “if you think about getting work done and being more productive, it’s thinking about being a seat or a worker plus an agent.
And when I think about that model, I start to think about it as a license business plus a consumption business, and really applying far more broadly than I think people have thought about that.”

Satya Nadella reinforced: “The basic transformation of, I’ll say, any per-user business of ours, whether it’s productivity, coding, security, will become a per-user and usage business.”

This is already happening.

GitHub Copilot moves to usage-based pricing on June 1.
~60% of Dynamics 365 service customers already purchase usage-based credits. Copilot Credit consumptive offer ~2X QoQ as customers extend Copilot with custom agents.

When Microsoft moves its own products to include consumption, it normalizes usage-based purchasing across its entire customer base.

Azure’s AI platform story is moving beyond “Azure OpenAI”

Microsoft is now positioning Foundry as the enterprise multi-model platform. 10,000+ customers used more than one model on Foundry. 5,000 used open source models. The number using both Anthropic and OpenAI 2X QoQ.

The strongest Azure AI partner story is no longer about integrating with one model. It is helping customers orchestrate the right models, data, governance, and workflows across the platform.

The data layer reinforces this.

Cosmos DB grew 50% YoY driven by AI workloads. Fabric reached 35,000 paid customers, up 60%.

15,000+ customers now use both Foundry and Fabric, connecting agents to operational and analytical data.

Microsoft’s commercial RPO remained roughly flat QoQ at $627B

We estimate Azure commits at ~$430–440B, including OpenAI. For the split see the slide and our last quarter breakdown.

CapEx was $31.9B last quarter. Microsoft still expects demand to exceed supply through 2026, as it guided $190B for CY2026 - one of the largest AI infra bets.

Three takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. Prepare for usage-based pricing, as Microsoft and others are making consumption the default language of enterprise AI purchasing

2. Build your Azure partner story around multi-model orchestration and data integration, not a single model dependency

3. Show how your solution drives Azure consumption and moves AI into production to get more attention

Are you rethinking your Azure strategy given 40% growth?

Turn Marketplace Into a Real Revenue Driver: 5-week course for Alliance & Cloud GTM Leaders

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it is not a GTM motion.

It is firefighting.

And that is where many Cloud GTM teams get stuck.

• A rep pulls alliances in late

• A private offer becomes urgent

• The cloud rep gets a vague ask

• Procurement shows up in the final week

• The “win” depends on one person who knows the maze.

It may save the deal.

But it does not compound.

That is the pattern I keep seeing across SaaS and AI companies trying to scale on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

They are “doing marketplace.”

But they are not building a repeatable Cloud GTM growth system.

The teams pulling ahead do a few things differently:

• they identify marketplace as a buying path earlier, not at the end

• they train sales to use it, instead of treating it as an alliances side project

• they make co-sell structured: real context, clear asks, better timing

• they connect channel, marketplace, and cloud field into one motion

• they build internal support across finance, ops, product, and leadership

That is what turns marketplace from extra work into leverage.

And it matters more now than it did even a year ago.

Cloud commitments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud have crossed $1.2T.

Customers are more open to buying software digitally.

But they are also more selective.

Co-sell is getting more competitive.

And AI is reshaping how software gets discovered, packaged, and sold through hyperscaler ecosystems.

So the gap is widening: between teams that are listed and teams that turned marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

David Mauer — who helped drive $100M+ in marketplace revenue at GitLab and is now rebuilding the motion at LucidLink — put it well in our recent webinar:

”You never want a customer to tell you how they want to buy and have to say no.”

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance and Cloud GTM leaders have gone through our Cloud GTM Leader course to build that capability.

• Some launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks.

• Others closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion.

• Some scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high base.

That is not because they found one trick.

It is because they built the growth system.

Our next cohort starts on June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Save Your Spot

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

This week is all Google Cloud — and for good reason. Between Cloud Next announcements, a $750M partner commitment, and what we heard from ~100 alliance leaders at our breakfast at Next, the signals are too significant to split across editions.

Here’s what’s inside:

• Google now controls 25% of global AI compute — and its full-stack strategy across TPUs, Gemini, agents, and Marketplace is changing the partner math.

• $750M committed to agentic AI partner capacity — with forward-deployed engineering teams, Gemini Enterprise practices, and a new Agent Marketplace that moves distribution inside enterprise workflows

• ~100 Cloud GTM leaders joined our GCP Marketplace Breakfast at Next — five signals on agent distribution, marketplace trust, co-sell, and AI GTM.

But before we dive in, our next cohort of Cloud GTM Leader Course starts June 2nd — five weeks to turn marketplace from an end-of-deal scramble into a real growth system. Scroll below for details.

Explore the June Cohort

Google’s 25% AI Compute Lead Changes Cloud Partner Math

Google now controls 25% of all AI computing power - by building its own chips.

Their full-stack model is starting to reshape cloud economics and partnerships.

Epoch AI recently estimated Google holding ~1/4 of global cumulative capacity as of Q4 2025. Google has the equivalent of 5+ million H100 GPUs in compute capacity. Nearly 4 million of that comes from custom TPU chips. Microsoft is second with the equivalent of 3.5 million H100.

When others depend heavily on Nvidia for AI infrastructure, Google built and scaled an alternative.

Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud CEO, explained:

“We’re not just a hyperscaler reselling other people’s technology. Our differentiation comes down to the fact that we own the IP - the model and the chips are ours….

For every dollar of revenue, we’re not shipping 80% of it to either a model or chip provider, which allows us to invest more.” (FT)

The full stack matters even more as the industry shifts to compute-hungry agentic AI.

At Cloud Next last week, Google unveiled two 8th-generation TPUs - one for training, the other for inference and agentic workloads. Those chips power Gemini models. Gemini powers the new Agent Platform. The Agent Platform connects to a new Agent Marketplace.

Compute → models → data layer → agent platform → marketplace. Each layer owned internally, including distribution.

Google is playing a platform-company model

It competes with Anthropic on models - while powering Anthropic’s training on TPUs. Google just agreed to additionally invest up to $40B in Anthropic and provide it with more computing capacity.

It competes with Apple via Android - while supplying Gemini to power the next generation of Siri.

Kurian: “Google’s a platform company. Different parts of your business compete with different players in the market.”

Whether Google wins on models or infrastructure, it generates demand across the stack.

Partnerships sit at the center of how Google plans to scale this

At Next, Google announced a $750M partner fund for agentic AI development. Google wants partners building on Gemini, extending Gemini Enterprise, and helping customers to move agentic AI from pilots into production.

The commercial results already back up the thesis.

Google Cloud is at a $70B+ annual run rate, growing 48% year over year, with $240B backlog. FT puts its market share at 14%, up from 7% when Kurian joined.

For alliance leaders:

• Google may still trail other hyperscalers overall, but AI creates a new decision layer.

• The early data - growth, backlog, partner commitments - says the market is responding.

• The Agent Marketplace is a new distribution category now with multiple surfaces. If your marketplace strategy only expects to include traditional listings, it may need a refresh.

What’s your current read on Google Cloud’s momentum?

Source: graph

Share

Google’s $750M Push Turns Agentic AI Into a Partner Motion

Google Cloud Next last week had many AI announcements, but the biggest partner signal was clear: Google is turning agentic AI into an ecosystem motion.

In his Next keynote, Thomas Kurian said ~75% of GCP customers now use Google AI products.

He also said Google has thousands of agents and services across industries, reaching billions of people through the global scale of the Partner Network.

Google is describing AI adoption as a partner-scaled transformation.

Yesterday’s partner announcement made this clear. GCP committed $750M to accelerate agentic AI development across its 120,000-member partner ecosystem.

What the $750M actually funds:

• New tools and resources

• Forward-deployed engineering teams

• Dedicated Gemini Enterprise practices

• Enterprise-ready agents

This is partner capacity building, not just marketing. Google is trying to help partners move customers from AI interest to AI production to scale.

Numbers back this up

Google says its system integrator partners already have 330K experts trained on implementing Google AI for customers.

It also said more than 80% of the top 100 SaaS companies use Gemini models.

That tells you where the ecosystem is going. AI adoption is becoming both a services motion and an ISV modernization motion.

For services partners, the opportunity is to help customers redesign workflows, organize data, govern agents, modernize systems, and drive adoption.

For ISVs, the opportunity is to use Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform to build agents into existing products and workflows.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Marketplace: distribution is moving inside the workflow

In the keynote, Google showed partner-built agents from its ecosystem discoverable directly inside Gemini Enterprise.

Partner-built agents from Atlassian, Lovable, Salesforce, ServiceNow, etc., are now discoverable and deployable where enterprise employees work.

Marketplace is moving closer to the workflow.

Customers discover agents where employees already work, deploy them inside Gemini Enterprise and connect them into business processes.

That could create a new distribution layer for ISVs and a new packaging layer for services partners.

This is the evolution of the Cloud GTM playbook.

Combined with native MCP integration, GCP is also making cloud services more accessible to agents. ISVs can connect agents to MCP servers and extend workflows across systems more easily.

Three implications for alliance leaders:

1. Partner capacity is now bottleneck & unlock

   AI demand is high, but customers need trained teams that can implement, govern, and drive adoption. $750M fund has specific buckets, so map your org to the right one.

2. Agent packaging becomes a new GTM skill

   Services partners and ISVs need to turn expertise into repeatable agents.

3. Distribution is moving inside enterprise workflows

   Gemini Enterprise is a new surface for discovering and deploying partner solutions.

How are you positioning your partner strategy for the GCP agentic push?

Sources: Opening keynote, GCP $750M annoucement

Subscribe now

Five Signals from Our GCP Marketplace Breakfast at Next

~100 alliance leaders joined us at 7:30 AM in Vegas for the conversation Cloud GTM leaders at Next needed to have. Last week we hosted our largest GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast at Google Cloud Next.

The room was senior: alliance and marketplace leaders from Grafana Labs, Replit, Alteryx, Red Hat, and dozens more brought sharp questions and practical insight. All chose to join us over an extra hour of sleep.

Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud Marketplace, joined for a candid discussion.

A panel brought a direct operator perspective. David Mauer (LucidLink) moderated. Subhash Jawahrani (GCP Marketplace), John Jahnke (Tackle.io), and Rolf Heimes (Incorta) shared what’s actually working - and what’s changing - in co-sell, AI GTM, channel, and marketplace execution on GCP.

A few themes stood out:

1. Marketplace is becoming an AI trust layer, not just a distribution channel

As agentic AI scales the number of publishers, customers increasingly rely on Google Cloud to signal which vendors to choose. For publishers, discoverability will reward real performance - not just listing presence.

2. GCP’s $750M agentic AI investment is designed to help partners and their customers get to production faster

New GCP resources include agentic AI prototyping support, forward-deployed engineering teams, and usage incentives - structured to accelerate real adoption, not just experimentation.

The scale of these incentives shows how serious Google Cloud is about pushing forward with its partner ecosystem. For partners, the time to lean in is now.

3. Gemini Enterprise and Workspace are becoming agent distribution surfaces

The vision is more contextual discovery: agents recommended to users based on what they are working on, not only through search. A significant new distribution path for ISVs.

4. The user experience is shifting to the agent control plane

For many SaaS products, customers will increasingly experience the product through an agent - not the ISV’s own UI. A2A, MCP, and API-first architecture become strategically critical.

Alliance and product teams need to be more in the same room today.

5. Marketplace commerce is getting more ecosystem-native

Google is working toward integrating more partners into Marketplace transactions. Both GCP and ISVs with strong ecosystems recognize the value channel partners bring to customers and to scaling adoption.

Thank you to our fantastic speakers and attendees. The quality of the insight reflected the quality of the people in the room and the depth of their questions.

This was our largest in-person breakfast yet. We’ll be back.

Big thank you to our partners:
Tackle.io, our Presenting Partner, and LucidLink and Incorta for making this possible.

Turn Marketplace Into a Real Revenue Driver: 5-week course for Alliance & Cloud GTM Leaders

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it is not a GTM motion.

It is firefighting.

And that is where many Cloud GTM teams get stuck.

• A rep pulls alliances in late

• A private offer becomes urgent

• The cloud rep gets a vague ask

• Procurement shows up in the final week

• The “win” depends on one person who knows the maze.

It may save the deal.

But it does not compound.

That is the pattern I keep seeing across SaaS and AI companies trying to scale on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

They are “doing marketplace.”

But they are not building a repeatable Cloud GTM growth system.

The teams pulling ahead do a few things differently:

• they identify marketplace as a buying path earlier, not at the end

• they train sales to use it, instead of treating it as an alliances side project

• they make co-sell structured: real context, clear asks, better timing

• they connect channel, marketplace, and cloud field into one motion

• they build internal support across finance, ops, product, and leadership

That is what turns marketplace from extra work into leverage.

And it matters more now than it did even a year ago.

Cloud commitments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud have crossed $900B.

Customers are more open to buying software digitally.

But they are also more selective.

Co-sell is getting more competitive.

And AI is reshaping how software gets discovered, packaged, and sold through hyperscaler ecosystems.

So the gap is widening: between teams that are listed and teams that turned marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

David Mauer — who helped drive $100M+ in marketplace revenue at GitLab and is now rebuilding the motion at LucidLink — put it well in our recent webinar:
”You never want a customer to tell you how they want to buy and have to say no.”

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance and Cloud GTM leaders have gone through our Cloud GTM Leader course to build that capability.

• Some launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks.

• Others closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion.

• Some scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high base.

That is not because they found one trick.

It is because they built the growth system.

Our next cohort starts on June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Save Your Spot

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s edition:

• Salesforce crossed $5B+ on AWS Marketplace - adding ~$3B in less than 12 months and proving marketplace is no longer just for technical buyers.

• Bain says AI advantage now depends on ecosystems - learning speed, trust, and partner execution are becoming core to competitive strategy.

• Google Cloud Next is here - and in 3 days we’re bringing senior marketplace and Cloud GTM leaders together to break down key announcements and what matters for 2026 execution.

Are you at Google Cloud Next? We’re gathering senior marketplace leaders Thursday morning with Dai Vu (MD, GCP Marketplace), John Jahnke (Tackle), and operators scaling on GCP. Last chance to request an invite.

Request an Invite

Salesforce added $3B on AWS Marketplace in less than a year

Salesforce quietly became AWS Marketplace’s fastest-growing ISV - and just crossed $5B+. A line-of-business software company is now setting the new cloud marketplace benchmark.

Not cybersecurity. Not infra. Not dev tools.

It is CRM, sales, marketing, data and AI software.

Salesforce resets the marketplace growth timeline

• Nov 2023: Salesforce announces AWS Marketplace listing

• Early 2024: First products go live

• Dec 2024 (Q3 FY25): Marketplace transactions double QoQ, 10 deals of $1M+

• May 2025 (Q1 FY26): Hit $2B total, tripling YoY, fastest-growing ISV on AWS

• April 2026: Matt Yanchyshyn, VP of AWS Marketplace, confirms publicly: “Salesforce publicly says that they did over $5 billion with marketplace”

That is ~$3B added in less than 12 months.

To put it in perspective: the incremental $3B equals ~7% of Salesforce’s FY26 $41.5B revenue - through a channel they didn’t have 30 months ago.

The “$2B Marketplace Club” now extends beyond cybersecurity and data

• Snowflake: $2B on AWS in 2025 alone (~45% of revenue)

• Datadog: crossed $2B cumulative on AWS

• Palo Alto Networks: $2B on Google Cloud MP (+$500M in 8 months)

• CrowdStrike: $1.5B on AWS, $150M in Year 1 on GCP

• Okta: ~$750M/year on AWS - next to join the $2B club

Now Salesforce is on top of this list.

But the bigger story is what Salesforce sells.

For years, many assumed cloud marketplaces were mostly for technical buyers. AWS itself is now saying otherwise.

Matt Yanchyshyn on the buyer shift in a recent interview:

“We’re seeing increasingly new categories of line-of-business buyers… business applications like ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe and Salesforce are attracting different types of customers to the marketplace.”

That’s the shift. Marketplace is moving higher up the stack - closer to business workflows, closer to AI agents, closer to how enterprises actually want to buy.

The timing is not coincidental

Salesforce is rebuilding for the agentic era under heavy investor pressure (stock down 30%+ YTD).

Marketplace helps on three fronts:

• Lower cost of sales: marketplace motion can reduce friction, shorten procurement, and support operating leverage.

• Larger enterprise deal flow: Marketplace pulls procurement, finance, cloud commitments, and co-sell into the same motion.

• Agent monetization: Agentforce-style usage pricing maps natively to consumption-based Marketplace billing, which marketplaces handle far better than legacy enterprise contracts.

This is Salesforce rebuilding part of one of the world’s strongest direct sales machines around a new buying motion.

3 takeaways for alliance leaders

1. Treat marketplace as an operating motion. Salesforce is embedding Marketplace thinking into 10K+ AEs, partners, procurement, and AI GTM.

2. Reset the benchmark. $5B is the new ceiling - until someone breaks it.

3. Don’t assume your buyer “isn’t a marketplace buyer.” If LOB software sells this way, Marketplace is no longer a technical channel.

Is $5B the new $2B for cloud marketplace winners?

Share

Last Chance: GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast at Next

Google Cloud Next is here, and this will be a big week for GCP Marketplace, AI, and ecosystem strategy.

By Thursday morning, the announcements will be out. We’re bringing alliance and Cloud GTM leaders together to compare notes on what actually matters for 2026 execution.

That’s what our GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast is built for.

3 days out. Last chance to request an invite.

Featured speakers

• Dai Vu - Managing Director, Google Cloud Marketplace. GCP Marketplace has sustained triple-digit annual growth for years. Billions in GTV. $240B in customer cloud commits that increasingly flow through Marketplace to ISVs. Dai leads it globally.

• Subhash Jawahrani - Principal BDM, Data Platform & AI, GCP Marketplace. Google Cloud view on where AI and data workloads are landing, and what that means for ISV co-sell and marketplace growth.

• John Jahnke - CEO, Tackle.io. $20B+ processed across hyperscaler marketplaces. $1B/month today. John’s line: “Most ISVs who failed at cloud marketplace weren’t strategic.” Expect him to unpack what that looks like on GCP specifically.

• David Mauer - VP of Channel & Alliances, LucidLink. Helped drive $100M+ in hyperscaler marketplace revenue at GitLab. A year into LucidLink, he has rebuilt the partner program for scale around one thesis: channel, marketplace, and technology alliances should work together, not against each other.

• Rolf Heimes - Head of Ecosystems, Incorta. 20+ years scaling partner ecosystems. At Talend, he led partnerships to >50% of ACV. At Incorta, he is working on one of the core data problems blocking enterprise AI: getting live Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce data into Gemini and BigQuery in a form companies can actually use.

• Roman Kirsanov - CEO, Partner Insight.

Beyond the speakers, expect a high-quality room: senior alliance, marketplace, and Cloud GTM leaders from ISVs, ecosystem partners, and GCP. The kind of group where the conversations before and after the sessions may be as useful as the sessions themselves.

The backdrop, in numbers

• Google Cloud revenue grew 48% YoY last quarter

• Annual run rate crossed $70B

• Customer cloud commitments reached $240B

• Revenue from partner-built AI solutions grew ~300% YoY

• Commitments from Google’s top 15 software partners increased 16x+ YoY

The co-sell and marketplace math is shifting fast.

This breakfast is where we process it with the people shaping the strategy and the operators scaling on GCP.

📅 April 23, 7:30–9:30 am PT at Hakkasan Restaurant Las Vegas (near Mandalay Bay)

Request an Invite

Spaces are limited and confirmation is required.

Brought to you in partnership with:

​Tackle.io (Presenting Partner) - the leading Cloud GTM platform helping software companies generate revenue through the hyperscalers. From co-sell automation to marketplace analytics, Tackle gives ISVs all they need to turn marketplaces into a strategic revenue channel.​
​
LucidLink - enables teams to access, collaborate on and stream large files in real time without moving data or breaking workflow.

Incorta​ - giving enterprise AI the live operational context, by connecting Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce data directly to BigQuery and Gemini.

Bain: Partnerships Just Became Core to Winning in AI

Bain put partnerships at the center of competitive strategy for the AI era.

Not just as a growth lever. As part of how companies will build, learn, and scale.

In a new report, Bain & Company maps three tech eras of competition:

• Information era rewarded scale

• Platform era rewarded network effects

• AI era? It rewards three things: velocity of learning, proprietary data, and trust-based ecosystem control.

In AI, advantage will come from learning faster, embedding deeper into customer workflows, and earning enough trust to help orchestrate how work gets done.

“Ecosystem partnerships provide the scale and experience needed to compete”

Competing in AI now requires capabilities that are hard to build in isolation.

AI now spans data, governance, workflows, orchestration, evaluation, and deployment. That creates a much bigger role for ecosystems.

Four implications for alliance leaders:

1. Partnership value now includes learning speed, not just reach

The old question was often: which partners help us sell more?

Now another question matters just as much: which partners help us learn faster?

Who helps you improve implementation?

Who brings reusable patterns across customers?

Who helps your teams adapt as AI capabilities change every quarter?

The strongest partners in the AI era may be the ones that accelerate learning, not just distribution.

2. Trust becomes a real control point

As AI agents start orchestrating more decisions and workflows, the company that earns trust to run those agents gains the control point.

For ecosystem leaders, trust is built through governance, reliability, security and transparency.

This is especially important in enterprise software, where customers will not let AI touch critical processes without strong controls.

3. The services opportunity gets bigger and more operational

Bain also argues that AI has to be industrialized through an “agent factory” — a repeatable process for building, testing, deploying, and governing agents at scale.

That is a major opening for SIs, GSIs, cloud partners, and specialist ecosystem players.

The value will not sit only in access to models. It will sit in workflow design, orchestration, evaluation, governance, and repeatable delivery.

This is why every hyperscaler launched AI agent platforms in the past year.

4. Differentiation moves higher up the stack

Advantage will come from proprietary knowledge, personalized workflows, and strong user communities.

For alliance leaders, that is a signal when choosing where to invest.

The best partnerships will not just add another integration.

They will deepen workflow fit, improve outcomes, and make the ecosystem harder to replace.

3 Lessons:

1. Treat ecosystem strategy as a company-level competitive asset

2. Prioritize partners with high learning speed

3. Build trust and repeatable delivery into your AI strategy early

Where is your org on the AI partnership curve?

Source

Subscribe now

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this newsletter sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

This week:

• Accenture’s new report moves ecosystem into the digital core — 86% of organizations plan to increase AI investment in 2026, but only 21% have redesigned processes around it. That readiness gap is where partner value gets created.

• AWS AI crossed a $15B run rate — and Bedrock nearly doubled month over month in March, a strong signal that hyperscaler AI businesses are scaling fast (and partner opportunity is getting much bigger).

• MongoDB, Quantum Metric, and Tackle break down what actually works in Google Cloud co-sell — from reframing committed spend, to aligning early with the field, to why agents may reshape marketplace distribution entirely.

But before we dive in: in 10 days we're hosting our GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast at Google Cloud Next '26.

Dai Vu (Managing Director, Google Cloud Marketplace), Subhash Jawahrani, John Jahnke, and other senior leaders will break down what Next’s announcements actually mean for ISVs and partners. If you’ll be at Next, join us on April 23, 7:30–9:30 am PT.

Request an Invite

Why Partners Are Now Core to Enterprise AI Scale

This may be the clearest signal yet that partnerships are now central to enterprise AI strategy. In Accenture’s latest report, ecosystem moved to the digital core.

That is what stood out to me in a new report authored by Accenture’s Chief Strategy and Services Officer and Chief Products Officer — two leaders who oversee $8B+ portfolio and 6,000 AI engagements.

The attached chart is telling.

Partners drive in many ways the AI transformation from Siloed AI to Structural AI to Systemic AI:

• Early stage: limited partnerships with hyperscalers and AI vendors

• Next stage: strategic alliances with partners

• Advanced stage: innovation networks with partners

As enterprise AI matures, partners move from external suppliers to part of the architecture required to scale.

Accenture underscores:

“To accelerate the architecture modernization that AI demands, technology organizations have to engage with ecosystem partners to access talent, leverage specialized tools and co-innovate.”

That line should get the attention of alliance leaders, because it validates something many of us are already seeing:

AI demand is creating demand for cloud foundations, partner orchestration, integration, and modernization.

The numbers behind it are striking

86% of organizations plan to increase AI investment in 2026. But only 21% have redesigned end-to-end processes with AI at the core.

Budget is flowing. Readiness is not. That gap is where a lot of ecosystem value will be created.

Cloud sits right at the center of it.

Accenture writes: “Organizations that unlock AI’s full potential treat cloud adoption as a strategic requirement.”

And then: “Only 16% of organizations, those with mature cloud foundations and strong guardrails, can capture additional benefits from AI and agentic systems.”

Cloud readiness is becoming one of the clearest dividing lines between companies running pilots and companies capturing real AI value.

At the same time, 70% of technology budgets still support legacy systems, which helps explain why partners matter even more now.

Most enterprises cannot modernize data, governance, security, and architecture fast enough on their own.

That is also why Accenture’s buy-build-boost framing is useful:

• Buy where speed and existing capability matter

• Build where differentiation is real

• Boost by layering proprietary data, workflows, and guardrails on top of partner platforms

The technology framework is increasingly a partner strategy framework.

Meanwhile, as AI pushes enterprises toward cloud-native foundations and ecosystem-led modernization, hyperscaler ecosystems gain even more gravity. Which brings us back to their marketplaces becoming more important over time.

3 takeaways:

1. Position around AI readiness, not just partner motions

2. Be clear where your company fits: buy, build, or boost

3. Expect partners and cloud ecosystems to become more central in enterprise AI buying and delivery

Source

Share

Join our GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast at Google Cloud Next ‘26

I’m delighted to invite you to the GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast at Google Cloud Next ‘26 — a curated breakfast for senior alliance and cloud GTM leaders.

​We’ll go beyond the announcements to discuss the Google Cloud Marketplace, AI, and ecosystem moves that matter most coming out of Next — and how leading ISVs can turn GCP Marketplace into co-sell momentum, partner leverage, and revenue in 2026.

​Featured Speakers

• ​Dai Vu — Managing Director, Google Cloud Marketplace (driving its triple-digit growth, billions in GTV)

• ​Subhash Jawahrani — Principal BDM, Data Platform & AI, Google Cloud Marketplace

• ​John Jahnke — CEO, Tackle.io

• ​Roman Kirsanov — Founder & CEO, Partner Insight

By Thursday morning at Next, the major announcements will already be out. This breakfast is where we process what they mean - with the people shaping the strategy. Plus we’ll compare notes with operators who are actually scaling on the platform.

​Why join

• ​Google Cloud Marketplace direction — from the top. Dai Vu leads GCP Marketplace globally. Hear from him on what’s coming next — in a room of 50, not a keynote of 5,000.

• ​Direct perspective from Google Cloud team — what matters most for ISVs and ecosystem leaders in 2026

• ​Operator-level insight. How leading ISVs are structuring co-sell, scaling through channel, leveraging AI and operationalizing marketplace GTM on Google Cloud

• ​Network in senior peer room — alliance, marketplace, and GTM leaders from high-growth ISVs, ecosystem partners, and Google Cloud

​You’ll leave with a sharper view of Google Cloud Marketplace priorities and a short list of ideas worth acting on during Next and after it.

📅 April 23, 7:30–9:30 am PT at Hakkasan Restaurant Las Vegas (near Mandalay Bay)

Request an Invite

Spaces are limited and confirmation is required.

Thanks to our partner Tackle for supporting this event

Tackle (now part of AppDirect) is the Cloud GTM platform built to help software companies win in the cloud. As the category creator and leader in Cloud GTM, Tackle enables ISVs to list, transact, and scale through the hyperscalers.

Tackle streamlines every stage of the cloud marketplace journey with deep co-sell automations, private offer management, and real-time marketplace analytics.

AWS AI Crossed $15B — Partner Opportunity Got Much Bigger

AWS AI crossed $15B+ run rate — putting it in the same revenue tier as OpenAI and Anthropic. Andy Jassy’s shareholder letter confirmed: the AI business on AWS isn’t a forecast. It’s already massive.

Here’s what last week’s letter reveals, and why partners should pay close attention.

AWS grew 20% YoY to $129B in 2025, with Q4 accelerating to 24% at a $142B run rate.

But the AI-specific number is what stands out.

Three years into the AI wave, AWS AI revenue is “ascending rapidly”— its $15B run rate in Q1 2026, ~260x larger than AWS itself was at the same point in its history.

For context, Microsoft’s last explicit AI revenue disclosure was ~$13B annualized last year

Google Cloud has been vaguer, describing “billions in quarterly AI revenue.”

On the lab side, Reuters reported OpenAI at $25B+ and Anthropic at $30B+ — but those comparisons are a bit messy because the business models and revenue accounting differ significantly from hyperscalers.

The point: AWS AI is now a top-tier AI revenue business in its own right. That shapes the co-sell focus and the math for every ISV and partner on the platform.

Three signals partners should watch:

1. Bedrock is becoming the center of gravity

Jassy said Bedrock nearly doubled month-over-month in March and processed more tokens in Q1 2026 than in all prior years combined.

2. AWS is showcasing a full AI stack

Jassy explicitly named SageMaker, Bedrock, Trainium, Strands (agent-building), AgentCore (agent environments), and turnkey agents like Kiro, Transform, and Quick. Each one is a potential integration point — and a “better together” story that AWS sellers can bring to customers.

3. ~$200B in capex for 2026, backed by customer commitments

Jassy said customer commitments already cover a substantial portion of this spend. That means the cloud commit backlog is growing fast. More commits = more marketplace-eligible budgets.

One more important number:

Jassy reiterated that 85% of global IT spend is still on-prem. AWS is a $142B business and has barely scratched the surface.

The migration, modernization, and AI adoption work ahead will take years — and ISVs who position their products as part of that journey will ride the wave alongside AWS.

What this means for alliance leaders:

• If your product touches AI, data, or agent workflows — align your roadmap to Bedrock and the broader AI stack. That’s where AWS focus and incentives are headed.

• $15B is a very large number. So is the investment behind it. The $200B capex figure is your market sizing slide for the years ahead (apply partner multiplier)

• If most IT spend is still on-prem, the real partner prize is helping customers modernize and operationalize AI at the same time.

What’s your read on what AWS AI growth means for ISVs and partners?

Source: Andy Jassy’s shareholder letter

Subscribe now

Insights from Co-Sell & Joint GTM Panel: Google Cloud Marketplace Online Event

During our recent Google Cloud Marketplace event, we brought together leaders from Google Cloud, MongoDB (6X Partner of the Year), Quantum Metric (~60% of revenue influenced by GCP), and Tackle to break down what it actually takes to scale on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Here are my top 5 takeaways from the panel with Kevin Goodspeed (Google Cloud):

1. Reframe how customers think about committed spend

John Murray (MongoDB — 6X GCP Partner of the Year):

“A lot of them view it as a sunk cost or just a procurement exercise. In reality, it’s a strategic lever.”

When a customer buys your software on Marketplace, they’re not adding net-new spend. They’re accelerating initiatives already budgeted for — burning down commit while maximizing ROI on dollars already committed.

Do that well, and “Marketplace stops being a billing vehicle and becomes this growth engine. You’re not just closing a single deal, you’re unlocking this multi-phased project where customers modernize their entire platforms.”

2. Co-sell is a system, not a tactic

John Jahnke (Tackle.io processes $1B in marketplace transactions/month):

“This is a strategy, people, process, and technology problem. The automation’s not going to solve the problem for you.”

The pattern he sees often — broad-based enablement where nothing happens. His advice: start with a tiger team. 5 deals. 20 co-sells. Learn what works, build the story, then go broad.

Russell Efird on the other side:

“If you wait till the very end, most of your deals are gonna have friction. That’s not the point of co-selling.”

Early engagement is what unlocks the co-sell & marketplace benefits.

3. Align to what matters to the Google rep right now

Russell (~60% of Quantum Metric’s net-new revenue is influenced by GCP) was direct:

“The key to maintaining strong engagement in that co-sell motion is aligning to what matters most to the Google rep in the moment.”

This year, that’s Gemini Enterprise. Quantum Metric built their Felix AI agent on Vertex, leveraging Gemini Pro, supporting ADK and A2A protocol. That alignment is what drives field attention at scale.

4. PLG changes the conversation

MongoDB offers a 14-day free trial on GCP Marketplace. By the time sellers engage,

“it’s no longer this theoretical thought idea — it’s about scaling something that’s already working.”

The conversation shifts from “why this ISV” to “how fast can we expand.” They run ~4 webinars/year with a direct CTA to the free trial. Simple, repeatable, frictionless.

5. Agents meet marketplaces

John Murray:

“Marketplaces are going to be the primary distribution channel for agents, not just software. They’ll be optimized for agents and evolve towards selling capabilities and outcomes.”

Still early — but the distribution question is already being answered.

📍 PS. Heading to Google Cloud Next?

We’re hosting a GCP Marketplace Strategic Breakfast on April 23 in Vegas. Curated room, senior leaders — Dai Vu, Subhash Jawahrani, John Jahnke will be speaking

📅 April 23, 7:30–9:30 am PT at Hakkasan Restaurant Las Vegas (near Mandalay Bay)

Request an Invite

Spaces are limited and confirmation is required.

Looking forward to seeing you in Vegas!

This week, two $1B+ software companies show where partner leverage is really driving growth — and why cloud marketplace execution is becoming a core GTM advantage.

• DocuSign’s 30%+ partner growth reveals how AI can reshape Cloud GTM — with IAM hitting $350M+ ARR, Microsoft actively co-selling a 3-year marketplace deal, and partners becoming essential to enterprise expansion.

• Two partners now drive 30% of SentinelOne’s $1B revenue — while its top 10 MSSP partners grew ACV 75%, showing how elite partner concentration can scale revenue without scaling headcount.

• Enrollment is now open for our June 2 Cloud GTM Leader cohort — helping leaders build repeatable marketplace growth: from first $1M+ deals to 4X YoY growth from an already high base.

Before we dive in: if this newsletter helps you stay sharp on cloud marketplaces, forward it to one alliance or GTM leader on your team who should be reading it.

Share Partner Insight Newsletter

Microsoft “really leaned in.” DocuSign 30% partner growth

DocuSign just showed what happens when an AI product forces a real partner and marketplace transformation.
In one quarter, partner-contributed bookings grew 30%+ YoY, and a 3-year deal was closed via Microsoft Marketplace where Microsoft “really leaned in” and was “a big part of the sale.”

Their formula is what caught my attention:

New partner program + New AI product motion + Marketplace transaction +
Active hyperscaler co-sell

Here’s what stands out.

The partner push followed the product shift

At the start of FY26, DocuSign relaunched its partner program around IAM.

IAM is not lightweight e-signature, it is an end-to-end agreement platform spanning sales, procurement, HR, legal, analytics, workflow, identity, and now agentic use cases.

When a product becomes more cross-functional and enterprise-wide, partner involvement usually rises with it.

Fast forward 12 months >> DocuSign partner-contributed bookings grew 30%+ YoY in Q4.

Azure Marketplace signal is even more telling

DocuSign signed the Bank of Queensland deal — a three-year strategic agreement — closed through Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Microsoft didn’t just process the transaction. They actively co-sold it.

CEO Allan Thygesen: “I’ve been thrilled with Microsoft as a partner. They really leaned in here and were a big part of the sale. In fact, a Microsoft leader presented that case at our conference last week to the entire partner community.”

This is cloud GTM at its best:

• customer buys via marketplace

• cloud commits help the economics

• hyperscaler field gets involved

• partner champions the deal internally

That is a very different story from “we listed on marketplace.” It is marketplace as part of enterprise co-sell.

IAM is already big enough to change how the company sells

After only 18 months, IAM reached $350M+ ARR and 10.8% of total ARR, up from 2.3% a year earlier.

Complex AI products rarely stay direct-only for long.

They pull in SIs, cloud sellers, workflow partners, and specialist services because the real work is not the demo. It is deployment, process redesign, trust, and adoption.

DocuSign is trying to become infrastructure for the agentic layer

The company said IAM now connects via MCP to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, Copilot Studio, and Agentforce.

Instead of betting on one AI vendor, they are making agreement data and workflows available wherever enterprise users will work.

Their CEO said EVERY major model provider is interested because agreements are one of the key data elements customers want to expose and act on.

It is a play to become the agreement layer inside enterprise AI workflows.

The broader GTM model is becoming more diversified

DocuSign disclosed that digital sales were 15% of total revenue growing faster than overall revenue.

So the shape of the machine is becoming clearer:

• Digital lands

• Direct expands

• Partners scale delivery and co-sell

• Marketplace helps transact enterprise demand

That is much more durable than relying on one route to market.

3 lessons for alliance leaders:

1. When product complexity rises, partner contribution can rise much faster than most teams expect.

2. Marketplace becomes strategic when the hyperscaler field is actively helping win the deal, not just process it.

3. The strongest AI partnerships are often built by controlling a critical workflow and making it available across the ecosystem.

Subscribe now

Two Partners Drive 30% of SentinelOne’s $1B Revenue

SentinelOne just crossed $1B in revenue, growing 22% YoY — and nearly a third of that flows through just 2 channel partners.

That’s not a “side channel”. That’s the business.

In FY 2026, SentinelOne surpassed $1B in revenue. In Q4, it added a record $64M in net new ARR.

But the more interesting story for alliance, marketplace, and partner leaders is this:

SentinelOne is running a partner-dependent growth model.

A few signals stood out:

Substantially all sales flow through channel partners

At $1B scale, that is worth pausing on. SentinelOne says in its reporting:

“Substantially all of our sales are fulfilled through our channel partners, including resellers, distributors, MSPs, MSSPs, MDRs, OEMs, and IR firms, and we expect that we will continue to generate a significant portion of our revenue from channel partners for the foreseeable future.”

Two channel partners alone drove 30% of total revenue

One represented 18% of revenue, another 12%. That shows the upside of deep channel alignment at scale — and the level of concentration the model can create when it works.

MSSPs are a major growth engine

CEO Tomer Weingarten said the company achieved over 60% ACV growth with its top 20 MSSP partners, and over 75% with its top 10.

That matters even more because these partners are not just reselling endpoint anymore. Management said they are adopting AI, data, cloud, and broader platform solutions and standardizing on SentinelOne.

In some segments partners run the full sales cycle

SentinelOne says that in specific market segments, channel partners independently manage the complete sales cycle.

That is not partner-assisted selling. That is outsourced scale.

Hyperscaler partnerships are deepening on two fronts

First, SentinelOne is integrating across cloud marketplaces and AI services — positioning as both a marketplace seller and an AI services integration partner.

Second, they signed a multi-year infrastructure partnership with a global hyperscaler where their threat intelligence data now pairs with the hyperscaler’s native threat intelligence services.

That’s co-build, not just co-sell. And their platform runs primarily on Amazon Web Services (AWS) across multiple regions, with Google Cloud as secondary — making SentinelOne a significant cloud customer itself.

Partners are also the leverage story

When asked about growth, Weingarten said:

“I do not think you are going to see us grow headcount in a significant way, and it will imply that sales productivity, which is reflected in the margin guide, is going to get better. And we are clear on our continued upmarket trajectory. We are clear on the need and the desire to do more with our partner base. We are clear about the potential in our partner base.”

When a $1B company says “no headcount growth” and “do more with partners” in the same breath, it tells you where the operating leverage lives. Partners are the margin story now.

Three lessons for alliance leaders:

1. Partner-led growth gets more powerful when partners own real parts of the sales process

2. The best hyperscaler partnerships combine marketplace distribution, co-sell, and co-building.

3. In the AI era, partners are not just routes to market. They are part of the product and scale model

   Share

Turn Marketplace Into a Real Revenue Driver: 5-week course for Alliance & Cloud GTM Leaders

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it is not a GTM motion.

It is firefighting.

And that is where many Cloud GTM teams get stuck.

• A rep pulls alliances in late

• A private offer becomes urgent

• The cloud rep gets a vague ask

• Procurement shows up in the final week

• The “win” depends on one person who knows the maze.

It may save the deal.

But it does not compound.

That is the pattern I keep seeing across SaaS and AI companies trying to scale on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

They are “doing marketplace.”

But they are not building a repeatable Cloud GTM growth system.

The teams pulling ahead do a few things differently:

• they identify marketplace as a buying path earlier, not at the end

• they train sales to use it, instead of treating it as an alliances side project

• they make co-sell structured: real context, clear asks, better timing

• they connect channel, marketplace, and cloud field into one motion

• they build internal support across finance, ops, product, and leadership

That is what turns marketplace from extra work into leverage.

And it matters more now than it did even a year ago.

Cloud commitments across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Google Cloud have crossed $900B.

Customers are more open to buying software digitally.

But they are also more selective.

Co-sell is getting more competitive.

And AI is reshaping how software gets discovered, packaged, and sold through hyperscaler ecosystems.

So the gap is widening: between teams that are listed and teams that turned marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

David Mauer — who helped drive $100M+ in marketplace revenue at GitLab and is now rebuilding the motion at LucidLink — put it well in our Q1 recap last week:
”You never want a customer to tell you how they want to buy and have to say no.”

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance and Cloud GTM leaders have gone through our Cloud GTM Leader course to build that capability.

• Some launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks.

• Others closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion.

• Some scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high base.

That is not because they found one trick.

It is because they built the growth system.

Our next cohort starts on June 2

If you want to turn marketplace into a real growth driver — not just push isolated deals through it — this is what we work on for 5 weeks.

Save Your Spot

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

Here’s what’s inside this week:

• Only 3% of CIOs expect AI to lead to more vendors — 54% are actively consolidating. What a recent CIO survey reveals about their buying patterns

• AI-mature buyers are ready to spend 2X more via digital self-serve, averaging $1M deals — the exact shift pushing marketplaces and cloud GTM into the mainstream

• Cohort 15 starts April 7 — the 5-week system behind marketplace motions that helped alumni go from zero to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks

Before we dive in — I’m running a free Cloud GTM Quarterly Live this Thursday, April 2nd, where I’ll break down the 7 most important signals from Q1 and what alliance, marketplace, and GTM leaders should do with them in Q2. Cloud commits growth, co-sell case studies, AI distribution shifts — all of it. Save your spot below.

Save Your Spot

Only 3% of CIOs expect AI to lead to more vendors. 54% are consolidating

The latest CIO survey by Redpoint suggests the software battle is changing.

The hard part is no longer just getting added as a vendor. It is staying on the list at all.

Five insights stood out to me from Redpoint Ventures’ recent market update and its CIO Software & AI Survey (March 2026):

1. Incumbents have an edge — but not a lock

58% of CIOs said AI feature additions are the main reason software budgets are growing — the highest of any category.

54% of CIOs prefer their existing vendors to add AI over switching to AI-native alternatives

But look deeper:

• Only 17% have a strong preference for incumbents adding AI.

• 37% have only a slight preference.

• And 33% are neutral.

So install base still matters. But weak products without AI capabilities are not protected.

2. Vendor consolidation is not slowing down. It may accelerate.

• 54% of CIOs are actively pursuing vendor consolidation.

• 45% of AI budgets are replacing existing software budgets.

• Only 3% expect AI to lead to more vendors.

AI is not opening unlimited new budget lines. In many cases, it is forcing a re-ranking of who deserves to stay in the stack.

3. Buyers still care more about best-of-breed products and integrations than price

When CIOs rank what matters most in vendor selection (after AI), they need:

• 45% best-of-breed functionality

• 45% integrations

• 33% security/compliance

• vs. 29% price

Trusted sales process is at a mere 9%

The bar is not just “has AI.” The bar is “works inside my environment and is worth the risk.”

Meanwhile, the cloud layer keeps getting bigger.

4. AWS, GCP and Microsoft capex jumped from $211B in 2024 to an estimated $509B in 2026

• Google’s 2024–2027E CAGR is shown at 49%

• Microsoft’s at 33%

• Amazon’s at 22%

My takeaway: more AI infrastructure spend creates more room for partner-led consumption, co-sell motions, and ecosystem pull-through. The cloud partner opportunity isn’t shrinking. It’s expanding — driven by AI workloads.

5. The real TAM shift: from software to labor

Redpoint’s agent maturity curve suggests we are moving from copilots toward task agents. That is a bigger shift than adding AI features into existing apps.

Once AI starts completing tasks end-to-end with human oversight, the addressable market moves beyond software spend and into labor spend.

Redpoint estimates that Task Agents alone expand the addressable market from ~$0.5T (US software) to $1.2T.

For cloud alliance and marketplace leaders, I take away 3 lessons:

• Your AI roadmap is now your retention and growth strategies. CIOs will stay with incumbents — but only if AI delivery is real

• Consolidation pressure means the winners will be partners embedded in strategic platforms, including cloud marketplaces

• Pricing models are shifting: 46% of CIOs expect usage- or outcome-based pricing to become more common. 29% say seat-based pricing will decline. This maps directly to cloud marketplace economics.

What’s your strategy?

Source

Share

Cloud GTM Quarterly Live: 7 Insights & Playbooks to Win Q2

Every quarter I analyze company data, hyperscaler updates, marketplace trends, co-sell patterns, and what we’re seeing across our events and Cloud GTM community.

Q1 was one of the more interesting quarters — a lot accelerated at once.

Cloud commits keep climbing (~$900B across the three hyperscalers). The budget conversation is shifting from “should we buy through marketplace” to “how fast can we execute.”
The companies growing fastest are integrating Cloud GTM deeper across sales and partner teams. And AI is now changing how software gets distributed, how deals get structured, and how co-sell works on all three clouds.

I’m running a free live briefing this Thursday to walk through all of it.

I’ll share the most important signals from Q1 — from market moves, top-performing companies, and hyperscaler shifts — and what alliance, marketplace, and GTM leaders should actually do with them in Q2.

We’ll cover:

• 7 signals from Q1 shaping Q2 priorities across AWS, Microsoft, and GCP

• What’s actually working in co-sell — and where friction is increasing

• Cloud commits tracker: where budget is moving

• How AI is changing distribution and GTM on marketplaces

• Operator patterns separating teams that are scaling from teams that aren’t

  Save Your Spot

This session leads into Cohort 15 of Cloud GTM Leader course starting April 7.

AI-Mature Buyers Are Spending 2X More via Digital Self-Serve

AI-forward buyers are driving digital spend according to McKinsey. The most AI-mature group is ready to transact $1M+ deals through end-to-end digital self-serve.

McKinsey & Company’s latest B2B survey of 3,000+ decision-makers across 18 countries points to a shift that cloud alliance, marketplace, and GTM leaders should take seriously.

As customers mature with agentic AI, they buy digitally, buy larger, and move faster with less human mediation.

Digital is no longer just a convenience layer. McKinsey calls it a shift toward a “primary growth engine.”

Here is what stood out:

1. AI maturity changes deal size

The most AI-mature buyers are willing to transact more than $1M through fully digital, end-to-end channels. That is roughly 2X the level of peers still in early pilots.

Each step up in AI maturity is linked to a 20–45% increase in the value customers are willing to buy digitally. This is not a one-off jump. It is a compounding shift in behavior.

2. Buying behavior is changing, not just channel preference

Agentic AI is reducing reliance on human-mediated interactions and increasing comfort with automated, end-to-end digital journeys.

AI is not only changing what companies buy. It is changing how they buy.

3. Human support still matters

About one-third of B2B customers expect digital-first interactions over the next 12 months. But nearly 60% still prefer hybrid models that combine digital and remote human interaction.

The winners will not be self-serve only. They will make digital easy, then bring in the right human support at the right moment.

4. Demand is moving faster than execution

Roughly 80% of large and mid-size enterprises already have agentic AI in some form. Fully implemented deployments are expected to grow 2.3–2.4X in the next 12–18 months.

But only 3–11% have reached full scale in any individual use case. That gap creates room for partners, SIs, and AI-native vendors that can help customers move from pilots to repeatable deployment.

5. Buyers want to buy AI, not build it

Across use cases, roughly 80% of B2B customers prefer off-the-shelf solutions, managed services, or third-party custom builds over building internally.

And no provider type has clearly won yet. That makes this market more open than many people think.

A few lessons for alliance and GTM leaders:

1. Treat digital buying as a core GTM capability, not a secondary channel

2. Design hybrid journeys where sales, partners, and digital channels work together

3. Lead with trust, packaging, and frictionless execution — security is now the #1 reason enterprises switch providers

Cloud marketplaces sit inside this shift, but the lesson is broader: AI is training enterprise buyers to spend more through digital channels. The companies that make buying easier now will have the edge later.

What’s changing in how buyers purchase your solutions?

Source

Subscribe now

Cohort 15 Starts April 7: Turn Marketplace Into a Real Growth Driver in 2026

Enterprises have committed $900B+ to AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud — budgets you can tap into via cloud marketplaces. For SaaS and AI companies, Cloud GTM is no longer optional. It is becoming a core lever for revenue growth, faster sales cycles, and easier enterprise procurement.

The most advanced GTM teams – from scaleups to public companies – are rewriting the rules. They’re using marketplaces and co-sell to scale revenue faster, compress sales cycles by 40-60%, and make buying frictionless.

Real results from real companies

Over the past 2.5 years, 300+ alliance leaders have completed Cloud GTM Leader course and built this capability. Examples of what alumni have achieved:

• Launched from zero marketplace motion to $200K revenue + $7M pipeline in 8 weeks

• Closed their first $1M+ marketplace deal and turned it into a repeatable motion

• Scaled marketplace revenue 4X YoY from an already high eight-figure base

These aren’t outliers. They’re alliance leaders who invested 5 weeks to master the frameworks, tactics, and relationships that drive cloud GTM success.

What we master in 5 weeks:

• How to tap into cloud commits + marketplace buying processes

• Co-sell patterns with hyperscaler field teams that actually create pipeline

• How to position on marketplaces so sellers choose you among thousands of vendors

• Frameworks to align sales, product, finance, and ops around one cloud GTM plan

• How to accelerate deals with smart co-marketing (and more)

If you want marketplace to become a real growth driver in 2026, join Cohort 15 starting April 7.

What alumni are saying

“I wish I had this knowledge before I started my role in the GTM department last year.”

“As someone who has built AWS alliances twice, driven marketplace success, and led cross-functional GTM motions, this program elevated my perspective and sharpened my thinking around cloud co-sell programs, marketplace motions, channel strategy, and scalable GTM frameworks. Highly recommend.”

Save Your Spot: Cohort 15

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works

Share

Ahead of tomorrow’s event, I’m focused on one question: what’s working on Google Cloud Marketplace right now — and how can you replicate it?

• Palo Alto Networks crossed $2B+ in GCP Marketplace sales. Optiv drove triple-digit marketplace growth. Quantum Metric is already scaling one of the earliest agentic AI solutions on GCP Marketplace. The leaders behind those numbers are joining our Google Cloud Marketplace event tomorrow.

• 28% of companies plan new Google Cloud Marketplace listings in 2026 — the strongest momentum of any hyperscaler, according to Tackle’s latest data. Their CEO also joins tomorrow’s event

• Plus, Jensen Huang at GTC said $1T in AI infrastructure demand is coming through 2027, with 60% from top hyperscalers. His comments reveal what clouds actually want from strategic partners.

But first — Dai Vu recorded a personal invite from the floor of NVIDIA GTC. What Google Cloud’s Marketplace chief sees as the growth engine for partners in 2026

Special invite from Dai Vu to the “Google Cloud Marketplace Your Growth Engine for 2026" event

When the leader of Google Cloud Marketplace records a personal invite from the floor of NVIDIA GTC — that tells you where the momentum is heading.

Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud Marketplace, recorded this invite to our upcoming event (March 24) from the floor of GTC in San Jose, the biggest AI infrastructure event of the year.

Here’s what stood out:

• Jensen Huang boldly projected the AI infrastructure market will hit $1 trillion by 2027 — double the previous estimate

His framing: this isn’t a bubble, it’s a once-in-a-century transition.

• Dai’s question: once all that AI infrastructure is built out, how do you monetize and grow?

• That’s exactly what he’ll cover in his keynote on March 24 — how Google Cloud Marketplace is becoming the growth engine for partners and ISVs in this new AI era.

This is our second annual Google Cloud Marketplace event with Dai keynoting.

A lot has changed since last year — GCP revenue from partner-built AI solutions grew ~300%, its cloud commitments jumped to $240B, and its revenue grew 48% YoY last quarter.

GCP new customer velocity doubled in Q4 vs Q1 and $1B+ customer deals in 2025 exceeded the previous 3 years combined.

Dai will share where Marketplace is heading next, what’s working for partners who are scaling, and how AI and co-sell motions are evolving in 2026.

Join our online event tomorrow, March 24 at 9-11.30 am PT.

Save Your Spot

Tomorrow: The Final 5 Speakers Joining Our GCP Marketplace Event (400 Leaders Already In)

Our “Google Cloud Marketplace: Your Growth Engine for 2026” event is tomorrow — here are the five outstanding speakers completing the lineup.

They join keynote speakers Jay McBain and Dai Vu, alongside panelists from Google Cloud, MongoDB, and TD SYNNEX.

These are the leaders behind some of the strongest numbers on GCP Marketplace right now — from $2B+ in marketplace sales to triple-digit growth in cloud marketplace to one of the first agentic AI solutions scaling on the platform.

Partner Ecosystem Panel

Munish Khetrapal — VP for Cloud Engagement, Palo Alto Networks

$2B+ in sales on Google Cloud Marketplace. 5 Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards in 2025 alone — including AI Security and Marketplace. No ISV has scaled harder on GCP Marketplace than Palo Alto Networks.

Munish leads cloud engagement at Palo Alto Networks — driving go-to-market strategy and building joint solutions that help customers securely accelerate adoption of multi-cloud infrastructure. Palo Alto Networks has 30+ listings on GCP Marketplace and 75 jointly engineered solution integrations with GCP.

The next wave of marketplace growth will come from knowing where channel partners create leverage, how to use MCPO effectively, and how to turn cloud commitments into faster, larger, more repeatable deals. That’s what we’ll break down with Munish.

Michael Peters — Vice President, Partners and Alliances, Optiv

Triple-digit growth in cloud marketplace business. 2025 Google Cloud Security Partner of the Year for North America. And one of the first to adopt Google Cloud MCPO at scale.

Under Mike’s leadership, Optiv has driven triple-digit growth in their cloud marketplace business while standing up new secure-use-of-AI motions that unlock AI compute in a security-forward way. Optiv operates at impressive scale: $3.8B+ in cybersecurity sales in 2025, 73% of the Fortune 100 as clients.

Few companies see more of the enterprise security buying landscape — and that’s what makes Mike’s insights on how channel and marketplace are converging so valuable.

Save Your Spot

Co-Sell & Joint GTM Panel

John Jahnke — CEO, Tackle.io

28% of companies are planning new Google Cloud Marketplace listings in 2026 — the strongest growth momentum of any hyperscaler. That’s from Tackle’s latest State of Cloud GTM report, and the leader behind that data is joining our panel.

Tackle (now part of AppDirect) essentially invented the Cloud GTM category in 2016 — before “cloud marketplace” was even a recognized channel. Today they process $1B in transactions per month, supporting 500+ ISVs like Salesforce, CrowdStrike, HashiCorp and GitLab.

John will cover what it takes to earn hyperscaler attention, accelerate co-sell, and how agentic AI is changing the game.

Russell Efird — Senior Director, Head of Strategic Partnerships, Quantum Metric

~60% of net-new revenue influenced by Google Cloud. A quarter of all revenue through GCP Marketplace. And one of the first Agentic AI solutions already scaling revenue on GCP Marketplace.

Under Russell’s leadership, Quantum Metric grew from one of the first ISVs on GCP Marketplace to a top performer in co-sell pipeline — and one of the first to scale an agentic AI solution through Marketplace.

Russell will break down how to scale agentic AI solutions through Google Cloud Marketplace and how to turn a Google Cloud partnership into repeatable revenue growth driver.

Marketplace Operations Playbook

Katie Landaal — Senior AVP, Strategic Alliances, ZoomInfo

$GTM. That’s ZoomInfo’s actual NASDAQ ticker. A $1.25B/year public company literally renamed itself after go-to-market. That tells you how central GTM has become as a category — and how much is at stake in getting marketplace operations right.

ZoomInfo won two Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards: Technology: Data Provider and Technology: Marketplace Business Application. Google Cloud also named ZoomInfo one of the business applications in GCP Marketplace driving the most significant business impact for joint customers across multiple regions.

Katie leads ZoomInfo’s global alliances and ecosystem strategy. Over 5+ years at the company, she has helped build and scale a $150M+ partner revenue ecosystem.

In our Marketplace Operations Playbook session, we’ll get into the operational side of scaling on GCP Marketplace — how Cloud GTM connects into company operations and RevOps, how to scale co-sell and boost it with automation, and how to turn Marketplace into a repeatable revenue driver.

All-Star Lineup — March 24, 9–11:30 AM PT:

• Keynote from Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia

• Keynote from Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud Marketplace

• Co-Sell & Joint GTM Panel: Google Cloud + leaders from MongoDB, Tackle.io, and Quantum Metric

• Partner Ecosystem Panel: Google Cloud + leaders from Palo Alto Networks ($2B+ in GCP Marketplace sales), TD SYNNEX, and Optiv

• Marketplace Operations Playbook: Deep dive on automation, private offers, and operational excellence with ZoomInfo and Tackle

Nearly 400 leaders are already registered. Join them tomorrow.

Save Your Spot

What Jensen Huang Revealed About Winning Hyperscaler Partnerships

60% of NVIDIA’s business now comes from top 5 hyperscalers. At GTC Jensen Huang just showed what clouds actually want from strategic partners.

At GTC last week, Jensen Huang said NVIDIA now sees at least $1T of AI infrastructure demand through 2027. With 60% of it from hyperscalers, it’s a massive number.

Subscribe now

But the part alliance leaders should pay attention to is the mechanism underneath it.

Jensen said NVIDIA doesn’t just sell infrastructure into the clouds. He said the company works with “a large ecosystem of AI natives” it can “bring to the clouds” so that massive compute investments get consumed.

The pitch is not just buy our chips.

It is also: we help drive the workloads, companies, and ecosystem activity that make those cloud investments more valuable.

That’s the part alliance leaders should study.

Because it reveals what hyperscalers really value in a strategic partner:

• Partners that create customer demand

• Partners that accelerate workload consumption

• Partners that attract more ecosystem activity onto the platform

NVIDIA does all three.

In other words: the strongest partners are not just “integrated” with the cloud. They help the cloud win.

That’s what makes this relevant beyond NVIDIA itself.

Most companies are obviously not NVIDIA. But the underlying playbook is still highly transferable:

When you pitch a hyperscaler, don’t just explain why your product is great.

This is where many alliance teams undersell themselves.

They pitch features. They pitch why their company matters.

Explain why your company helps the cloud win.

• Why does your presence make their platform more valuable?

• Why does it help cloud sellers drive more consumption?

• Why does it help customers deploy faster?

• Why does it attract more partners and use cases around your category?

That’s one reason marketplace, co-sell, and ecosystem strategy are converging so fast.

The best partners are no longer just vendors. They are becoming demand creators, adoption accelerators, and ecosystem magnets for the cloud.

That may be the most important part of the NVIDIA story for alliance leaders.

When you present to cloud sellers, are you selling your product — or selling how you help the cloud win?

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In this week’s edition:

• Jay McBain on why cybersecurity, agentic AI, and marketplaces are converging — and why Google Cloud may be uniquely positioned. Plus his special invite to our March 24 event

• How to make Marketplace native to your sales team: the MEDDPICC mapping that turned one AI company’s sellers into co-sell advocates

• MongoDB (6X Google Cloud Partner of the Year), TD SYNNEX, and Google Cloud leaders — meet 4 standout operators joining our biggest GCP Marketplace event yet

• $553B in customer commits. 531% multicloud database growth. Oracle just showed that partner-led AI demand is very real.

A Special Invite from Jay McBain to Our Google Cloud Marketplace Event (March 24)

We caught up with Jay McBain last week ahead of our upcoming event: Google Cloud Marketplace: Your Growth Engine for 2026. Here’s what he’s tracking right now — and what he’ll cover in his keynote:

• The Wiz acquisition ($32B) isn’t just a cybersecurity play — it has ecosystem ramifications for every GCP partner

• Cybersecurity has been one of the most successful categories on cloud marketplaces. Palo Alto alone has done billions through GCP Marketplace

• Agentic AI is creating a “wild west” moment that mirrors the early days of SaaS and shadow IT — but the partner AI opportunity is compounding at 35%+ CAGR through 2030

• Google Cloud is the only full-stack AI player with 100% partner commitment. Jay: “Really, really well set up with what they’ve done around partnering”

• Marketplace is where all of this converges — cybersecurity, agentic AI, partner-led distribution

Join our event on March 24 to hear from Jay on the latest trends and partner opportunities in cloud marketplaces and AI.

Save Your Spot

Make Marketplace MEDDPICC-native: Translate Co-sell into Sellers’ Normal Process

CRO of a fast-growing AI company told me recently: once his sellers saw that Marketplace + co-sell can strengthen every part of MEDDPICC, there was no going back.

Problem:

Alliance teams often introduce Marketplace + co-sell as a separate track: new forms, new steps, new “ask alliances.”

So even when customers can buy through Marketplace, the default path wins: the one sellers already know.

Unlock:

Translate Marketplace + co-sell into MEDDPICC so sellers feel like they’re running their usual process — with more leverage.

Here’s the mapping & slides you can use:

Metrics - M

Quantify the value of your ISV solution and the advantages of buying via marketplaces (using cloud commits, consolidated billing, less admin overhead for the customer’s finance team).

For sellers, marketplaces can unlock faster growth and deployment.

But don’t just say “faster.” Use hard industry/internal data.

Economic Buyer - E

Your champion might be in the business unit, but the budget authority often sits elsewhere.

Use hyperscaler reach to understand the buyer’s commercial strategy, cloud commits, and who owns them. Clouds can also help you access higher levels (CIO/CTO) when the case is clear.

Decision Criteria - D

Understand how your prospect reviews, shortlists, and finalizes purchases. Collaborate with cloud teams to align decision criteria with Marketplace benefits.

Example: if “cost reduction” is a key criterion (and the customer has commits), frame the deal not as new spend, but as a way to use commits that may otherwise go unused.

Decision Process - D

Teams lose time because they map the approval chain too late.

Co-sell helps here: hyperscalers see customer buying patterns across accounts and can guide sellers through the internal decision-making maze.

When you engage cloud teams, share your status and specific requests, not generic “any help is appreciated.”

Paper Process - P

Marketplace workflows can bypass traditional signature delays and grant user access faster. Push for standard marketplace agreements to cut redlines and shorten legal cycles.

Educate sellers to identify who can accept private offers early, not at the last moment.

Identify Pain - I

Work backwards from the customer’s goals: AI, modernization, migration to understand how your solution fits best.

Co-sell can help connect your solution to cloud and AI priorities and frame the pain in customer’s language

Champion - C

When you cultivate champions inside the customer org, use hyperscalers to map stakeholders in areas like Security, Apps, AI, Procurement to strengthen internal support.

If your champion goes silent, cloud sellers can sometimes help to re-engage the account from a different angle.

Competition - C

When competitors go direct, Marketplace gives a structural edge: faster procurement, commit flexibility, cloud seller backing. Turn this route-to-market into a moat.

Could your sellers explain how Marketplace fits in MEDDPICC today?

Subscribe now

Meet the Leaders Joining Our Biggest GCP Marketplace Event Yet

Google Cloud’s marketplace is growing triple digits YoY. Their customer commits jumped to $240B. Revenue from partner-built AI solutions grew ~300% last year.

The opportunity is obvious. The playbook is not.

Most ISVs know they should be scaling on GCP Marketplace. Fewer know how co-sell actually works inside Google, how channel-led deals are closing, or what the top partners are doing differently. We went and got the people who can answer that.

Last week we announced our two keynotes — Jay McBain (Chief Analyst, Omdia) and Dai Vu (Managing Director, Google Cloud Marketplace). This week, meet the four panelists who’ll turn those macro trends into tactics you can use.

Co-Sell & Joint GTM Panel

Kevin Goodspeed — Head of Startups & Vertical ISV Business Development, Google Cloud Marketplace

9 of the top 10 AI labs chose Google Cloud as their infrastructure. The leader helping the next wave of startups scale on GCP Marketplace is joining our March 24 event.

Kevin sits at the intersection of two worlds. At Google Cloud, he works across ISVs and the field to drive growth on GCP Marketplace — from startups to enterprise, across every software category.

At CapitalG, Alphabet’s independent VC arm, he advises growth-stage portfolio companies on Marketplace onboarding, co-sell and growth. Kevin helps CapitalG’s highest-conviction bets scale through GCP Marketplace.

Few people have a better view of what it takes to move from “great product” to repeatable marketplace GTM.

Kevin has spent 7 years in cloud marketplaces. He knows the growth patterns that actually help ISVs break through and scale revenue on GCP Marketplace.

In his panel, Kevin will break down how SaaS businesses stand out on GCP Marketplace—and the co-sell and GTM strategies working with Google Cloud right now.

John Murray — Director Partner Programs, MongoDB

MongoDB is 6X consecutive Google Cloud Partner of the Year, including 2025 Partner of the Year for Data & Analytics – Marketplace.

MongoDB’s growth is one of the strongest examples of scaling through cloud marketplaces. Last quarter, their cloud database Atlas crossed the $2B run rate, growing an impressive 29% YoY.

John Murray leads MongoDB’s global cloud partner strategy with a focus on Google Cloud Marketplace, supporting thousands of customers globally.

He builds programs that make it easier for customers to adopt MongoDB Atlas on cloud marketplaces, align co-sell motions, and enable partners to build joint solutions for shared customers. He’s passionate about creating GTM strategies that turn strategic alliances into repeatable, revenue-generating motions.

John will break down how MongoDB uses PAYG strategy and co-sell to drive both deal volume and value — and what it takes to build a partner motion that actually scales on GCP Marketplace.

Save Your Spot

Partner Ecosystem Panel

Shamsah Hirani — Senior ISV and Channel Strategic Initiatives Manager, Google Cloud

Revenue from AI solutions built by Google Cloud partners grew ~300% last year. Commitments from their top 15 software partners grew 16X+. By next year, 5 out of 10 marketplace deals will be led by channel partners (Omdia). But many ISVs and channel partners are still figuring out how to work and scale on marketplaces together.

That’s exactly what this panel will break down.

Shamsah leads ISV and Channel Strategic Initiatives at Google Cloud Marketplace. Her role connects the two sides of this converging motion — software vendors and channel partners scaling together on GCP Marketplace.

Before Google Cloud, Shamsah held senior alliance and business development roles at AWS, Teradata, and Microsoft, where she launched and scaled industry-leading initiatives for ISVs and channel partners. Few people have operated across this many cloud ecosystems at this level.

Shamsah and the panel will get into the specifics — how ISVs actually unlock growth through channel on GCP Marketplace, where resellers, distributors and service partners fit, and how to operationalize Google Cloud’s MCPO at scale.

Ben Stockler — Business Development Manager, Cloud Marketplace, TD SYNNEX

30,000+ partners. 1,000+ software vendors. Triple-digit growth in marketplace private offers.

TD SYNNEX is turning cloud marketplaces into a strategic growth lever for partners — and the leader behind it is joining our panel.

TD SYNNEX is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and 2025 Google Cloud Partner Award winner. They accelerate cloud marketplace growth for ISVs and channel partners by combining marketplace expertise, operational support, and scalable routes to market.

Under Ben’s leadership, the TD SYNNEX Cloud Marketplace team has been driving triple-digit YoY growth in Hyperscaler Private Offers. They launched a dedicated Private Offer Deal Desk, giving partners immediate access to thousands of Google Cloud Marketplace products to build and transact complete, multi-vendor software solutions.

On the operational side, TD SYNNEX orchestrates a streamlined, support-backed flow for Google Cloud Marketplace Channel Private Offers (MCPO) — covering the entire lifecycle from quoting and acceptance to invoicing and payment. Through the StreamOne platform, ISVs get access to 30,000+ global partners — extending marketplace reach far beyond what any vendor can build through direct motions alone.

Ben will share what’s working right now for channel-led marketplace growth — private offers, co-sell alignment, and how partners can turn cloud commitments into pipeline.

Save Your Spot

All-Star Lineup

Our “Google Cloud Marketplace: Your Growth Engine for 2026” event also features:

• Keynote: Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia

• Keynote: Dai Vu, Managing Director of Google Cloud Marketplace

• Co-Sell & Joint GTM Panel: Google Cloud + leaders from MongoDB, Tackle.io, and Quantum Metric on co-sell strategies that scale

• Partner Ecosystem Panel: Google Cloud + leaders from Palo Alto Networks ($2B+ in GCP Marketplace sales), TD SYNNEX, and Optiv on channel acceleration and ecosystem growth

• Marketplace Operations Playbook: Deep dive on automation, private offers, and operational excellence with ZoomInfo and Tackle

📅 Join us on March 24, 9–11:30 AM PT

In just 2.5 hours, 10+ leaders will break down how to turn Google Cloud Marketplace into your growth engine for 2026

Save Your Spot

Thanks to our Ecosystem partner for supporting this event:

TD SYNNEX accelerates cloud marketplace growth for ISVs and channel partners by combining marketplace expertise, operational support, and scalable routes to market.

Their Cloud Marketplace team helps partners simplify procurement, attach services, and maximize access to committed cloud spend. A Google Cloud Premier Partner and 2025 Google Cloud Partner Award winner, they help vendors expand globally and enable partners to win more software opportunities faster.

Oracle’s Q3: The $553B Proof That Partner-Led AI Demand is Real

$553B customer commits. 531% multicloud database growth. 243% AI infra growth. Oracle just showed what partner-led AI-cloud growth really looks like.

For months, Wall Street questioned whether this was real demand or just AI narrative. Oracle’s last quarter performance gave a clear answer.

Oracle’s organic revenue and non-GAAP EPS both grew 20%+ for the first time since 2009. But the real signal sits below the headline beat.

Oracle now has two engines accelerating at once:

1️⃣ High-margin multicloud database business powered by hyperscaler partnerships

Revenue grew 531% YoY. CEO Clay McGork put the reason plainly:

“We created our multicloud partnerships with first Microsoft, then Google, and finally Amazon.... Those partnerships unlock an enormous backlog of demand.”

That demand is now being activated at scale with all 3 clouds.

• 33 regions live with Microsoft

• 14 with Google

• AWS scaling from 2 live regions at the start of Q3 to 8 by quarter-end, with 22 expected by the end of Q4

The economics make the story stronger too. Oracle said the multicloud database business runs at 60-80% margins, vs 32% gross margin on AI capacity delivered in Q3.

2️⃣ AI infrastructure business creating enormous backlog and pulling the rest of the stack with it

AI infra revenue grew 243% YoY. Oracle tied the $553B RPO directly to that demand: “Demand for AI infrastructure, both GPU and CPU, continues to exceed supply.”

The operating model matters here.

Oracle secured 10+ GW of data center capacity over 3 years, with 90%+ funded through partners. It also signed $29B in contracts using bring-your-own-hardware and upfront payment models — scaling without shouldering the capital burden alone.

But infrastructure is the wedge, not the endpoint.

Mike Sicilia said these deals now drive “ecosystem automation” conversations across OCI, database, applications, and industry suites. AI opens the door — then the full stack walks through it.

3️⃣ The next layer: agents

Oracle already has 1,000+ AI agents embedded across its applications. Larry Ellison made clear they will not build every vertical agent: “We do not think we can build all the application agents for a banking system or a health care system. A lot of our partners are going to do that.”

This also explains Oracle’s hard push back on the SaaS apocalypse thesis.

Mike Cecilia: “I have not yet met a customer who tells me they are ready to give away their core banking system, their electronic health records... and some cobbling together of niche AI features are going to replace all of that overnight.”

Oracle’s view: AI makes complex, mission-critical SaaS more valuable — not less.

Takeaways for alliance leaders:

• AI infra may win the headline, but data and application layers follow and capture the better economics

• Agentic AI will create new partner surface area closest to mission-critical data and workflows

Is Oracle becoming the most partnership-focused growth story in enterprise tech?

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In this week’s edition:

• Okta hit ~$750M in TCV on AWS Marketplace in a single year — with Cloud GTM growing ~4X faster than total revenue. Partners were in 18 of its top 20 deals. The playbook behind it.

• CrowdStrike crossed ~$1.5B on AWS Marketplace last year, still growing ~50% YoY. Then Satya Nadella joined George Kurtz to address CrowdStrike’s GTM team as it opened up on Microsoft marketplace. Co-opetition at its most explicit.

• Anthropic just launched Claude Marketplace — turning AI commits into a software distribution channel. The same mechanic hyperscalers used to reshape SaaS buying, now one layer higher in the stack.

But before we dive in:

📅 March 24: Google Cloud Marketplace — Your Growth Engine for 2026

$240B in Google Cloud commits. Triple-digit GCP marketplace growth YoY.
In 2 weeks, Jay McBain (Chief Analyst, Omdia) and Dai Vu (Managing Director, Google Cloud Marketplace) are keynoting our biggest GCP online event of the year — alongside leaders from Palo Alto Networks, MongoDB, Optiv and more.

Save Your Spot

Now, let’s dive in.

Okta Hit $750M on AWS Marketplace/ year. Partners in 18/20 Top Deals

Okta closed ~$750M in TCV on AWS Marketplace last year growing 45%+ YoY.

Their total revenue grew 12%. Marketplace grew ~4X faster. That gap tells you a lot about where enterprise software distribution is heading.

Okta’s results just beat Wall Street expectations

Record $1.3B in total contract value (TCV) in Q4. New products ~30% of Q4 bookings. $3B+ in annual contract value. The growth engine is clearly firing.

But the real story is how they’re growing.

AWS Marketplace as a strategic GTM channel

Okta’s CFO called AWS Marketplace a “strategic go-to-market channel” as the company shared a ~$750M annual TCV milestone on AWS.

The context makes this even more striking.

Okta crossed $1B cumulative in AWS Marketplace sales in Jan 2025. Now they’re doing $750M in TCV in a single year.

That kind of acceleration at scale shows what’s possible when marketplace becomes embedded in how a company sells.

Partners in 18 of top 20 deals

Channel partners were involved in 18 of Okta’s top 20 Q4 deals.

And as Brett Tighe put it: “When our partners are involved, the average deal size is bigger, and the close rates improve.”

But here’s what’s interesting:

Okta is deliberately shifting more professional services work to global system integrators — a move that management said creates about a 1% impact on FY27 revenue guidance.

Why give up revenue?

Because customers need GSIs more than ever for change management around agentic AI, and Okta is betting that deeper GSI relationships will drive larger enterprise subscription growth over time.

It’s a classic long-term partner trade-off: sacrifice short-term PS dollars to build an ecosystem that can scale the platform.

Agentic is landing as enterprise deals

Okta’s new AI agent products had their first real bookings quarter.

Todd McKinnon, CEO, said Q4 “translated into real dollars and real bookings,” even if it is still small relative to the overall business.

Brett Tighe added that the deals “have been larger” because they are “more tilted toward larger companies.”

The company also said agentic identity should be accretive to growth in FY28 and FY29 — not a one-quarter story. For anyone evaluating AI-related investments, that helps clarify the timeline: plant seeds now, harvest in 12–24 months.

One more point worth noting

Despite all the industry talk about AI replacing people, Okta said it has been adding quota-carrying sales capacity starting in Q2, and continued through Q4 and into the current Q1.

When GTM is working — including partners and marketplace — you often need more people to capture the demand, not fewer.

3 lessons for alliance leaders:

• Treat marketplace as a strategic GTM system

• Pull SIs closer when the product requires real transformation and change management

• Build for agentic now, even if the revenue curve is still ahead

How are you seeing the marketplace and partner dynamics shift in your own organization?

Share

$240B in Google Cloud commits. Dai Vu and Jay McBain on what’s next for GCP Marketplace

$240B in Google Cloud commits. Triple-digit Google Cloud Marketplace growth YoY, billions in transaction value annually.

Managing Director leading GCP Marketplace is sharing what’s next. Joined by the top analyst who tracks where the market is going.

On March 24, Jay McBain (Chief Analyst at Omdia) and Dai Vu (Managing Director of Google Cloud Marketplace) are keynoting in our deep-dive online event “Google Cloud Marketplace: Your Growth Engine for 2026”.

Save Your Spot

Jay McBain has been the most accurate analyst of marketplace growth.

His forecast has nearly doubled 3 times in under 3 years: $45B → $85B → $163B. Each time, the industry is catching up to where he already was.

Five signals from Jay I keep coming back to:

1. Marketplaces projected to reach $163B by 2030

2. By 2027, 5 out of 10 marketplace deals will be partner-led

3. For GCP partners: up to $7 of partner revenue for every $1 of GCP consumption

4. Partner opportunity around AI is on track to $267B by 2030

5. AI is shifting toward micro-consumption and outcome-based selling — and marketplaces are the distribution layer that makes it work

Dai Vu leads the global teams behind Google Cloud Marketplace — business development and P&L, partner and platform strategy, co-sell and field GTM models, partner engineering and enablement.

If you sell software through or alongside Google Cloud, Dai Vu is shaping how that entire market works.

Under his leadership, GCP Marketplace has been growing triple-digits YoY for multiple years, driving billions in transaction value annually.

Google Cloud momentum is hard to ignore

• Revenue grew an incredible 48% YoY last quarter

• Annual run rate crossed $70B

• Cloud commitments jumped to $240B — customer spend that can be used on its marketplace to buy ISV partner products

• Revenue from AI solutions built by partners grew ~300% YoY

• Commitments from Google’s top 15 software partners increased 16X+ YoY

His keynote on March 24 is the closest you’ll get to Google’s Marketplace strategy before Next season.

The all-star lineup (10+ speakers in 2.5h):

• Keynotes from Dai Vu and Jay McBain

• Leaders from Palo Alto Networks ($1.5B+ in GCP Marketplace sales), MongoDB (3X GCP Partner of the Year), Google Cloud, Optiv and more

• Two panels on co-sell strategy + channel ecosystem growth, plus a deep dive on marketplace ops & automation to scale revenue

📅 March 24, 9–11:30 AM PT

Save Your Spot

This event is 4 weeks before Google Next — your chance to hear from the leaders shaping GCP Marketplace distribution, and lock in where to focus for 2026 before Next starts.

Thanks to our partner Tackle for supporting this event

Tackle (now part of AppDirect) is the Cloud GTM platform built to help software companies win in the cloud. As the category creator and leader in Cloud GTM, Tackle enables ISVs to list, transact, and scale through the hyperscalers.

Tackle streamlines every stage of the cloud marketplace journey with deep co-sell automations, private offer management, and real-time marketplace analytics.

Together with AppDirect’s global subscription commerce platform, Tackle is building the first truly unified solution for software companies to reach buyers across every route to market: cloud marketplaces, direct sales, and the channel.

Anthropic turns AI commits into software distribution

Anthropic just turned its committed AI spend into a new distribution channel for software. Meet Claude Marketplace — same idea as cloud marketplaces, different spelling.

But does Anthropic already have enough commits to make this work?

Anthropic just copied one of the most effective cloud GTM mechanics of the last decade

Claude Marketplace lets enterprises buy partner software against a share of their existing Anthropic commitments, with Anthropic handling all invoicing.

GitLab, Lovable, Replit, and Snowflake are already listed.

The implications are significant.

For 5+ years, AWS, Microsoft, and Google have taught the market that pre-committed budget can become a growth engine for third-party software.

They used commits to remove vendor friction, speed up procurement, and make SaaS easier to buy — while accelerating their own cloud consumption.

Anthropic is now applying that same mechanic one layer higher in the stack.

Claude as a mini-ecosystem

This potentially changes Anthropic’s role. It’s becoming an orchestrator around Claude — for budgets and 3rd-party software distribution.

This move also says something important:

The best application layer still matters. Anthropic’s own pitch is essentially: Claude is the intelligence layer, but Harvey, GitLab and others add the domain workflows, governance, and context enterprises need. A strong signal that frontier model vendors don’t think raw models alone will capture all enterprise value.

Anthropic also distributes Claude through Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, and Microsoft Foundry. Now it’s also running its own marketplace.

How much in Anthropic commits are we talking about?

Anthropic doesn’t disclose its backlog, but a few data points help estimate it:

• $19B annual revenue run-rate as of March ‘26 (Bloomberg)

• 500+ customers spending over $1M annually

• Business subscriptions to Claude Code up 4x since the start of 2026

So Anthropic’s commitment pool is likely already in the hundreds of millions to low single-digit billions.

Not hyperscaler-sized yet — AWS alone has $244B in backlog — but those commitments will grow fast if Anthropic continues on its recent trajectory.

The marketplace is one way to accelerate that growth and make the platform stickier. Plus, Anthropic is waiving transaction fees at launch to attract partners.

However, a big part of successful Cloud GTM with hyperscalers is co-sell — tapping into thousands of cloud sellers to bundle your product into large enterprise deals.

What this means for Cloud Alliance leaders:

• Multi-listing will matter more — across cloud and AI platforms

• AI commitments are becoming a new budget path. Route-to-budget is now as important as route-to-market

• If Anthropic adds real co-sell, or if agentic AI changes buyer behavior, this can get big fast

First, clouds turned commits into SaaS distribution. Now frontier AI vendors are doing the same.

Are you integrating marketplaces in your GTM strategy?

Subscribe now

CrowdStrike: $1.5B AWS Marketplace/ year, +50% YoY

CrowdStrike hit ~$1.5B in TCV on AWS Marketplace last year, growing ~50% YoY.

Even at scale, marketplace revenue isn’t slowing down. It’s compounding.

The company just reported a stellar year: $5.25B ARR (+24% YoY) and record net new ARR of ~$331M (+47% YoY).

But the marketplace + partnerships story was the real highlight.

1️⃣ AWS Marketplace is still accelerating at $1B+ scale

“This past year alone, we did nearly $1.5 billion of total contract value on the AWS Marketplace, growing nearly 50% year over year.” - George Kurtz, CEO

Cloud marketplaces can stay a high-growth route to market… even at >$1B/year scale.

This milestone makes CrowdStrike one of two ISVs that reached this scale (Snowflake crossed $2B/year on AWS MP).

2️⃣ Microsoft Marketplace + MACC eligibility = a real distribution unlock

“Satya Nadella and I spoke to CrowdStrike’s go-to-market team together.

We are now open for business on the Microsoft marketplace, and customers can use their Microsoft Azure consumption commitment dollars on Falcon.

This is a watershed moment…”

3 takeaways:

1. Executive alignment is explicit (Satya + George with the GTM team).

2. Marketplace is positioned as the default path to burn committed cloud spend.

3. For a company that used to directly compete with Microsoft in security, this is a striking co-opetition move

Context: After mastering AWS Marketplace, CrowdStrike went from 0→$150M on Google Cloud Marketplace in its first year (FY25). Now they’re bringing that playbook to Azure to capture MACCs.

3️⃣ MSSPs are becoming the second growth engine alongside marketplaces

“In just over three years, we have gone from a sub-$100 million MSSP business to more than $1.3 billion…”

• Marketplaces + services partners reinforce each other:

• Commits drive faster buys. MSSPs drive faster outcomes.

That growth spans partners like Kroll, Pax8, and NinjaOne — and shows how quickly a services-led route to market can scale.

4️⃣ The best answer to “AI and hyperscalers will compete with you”

“Over the years, as cloud was maturing… I heard a lot about the hyperscalers actually providing all the security services.

Well, that did not happen… we transact billions through these platforms, and they are a great partner… So we see the same thing happening with what I call AI hyperscalers.”

The CEO framing is unambiguous:

“In summary, we did not just have a great partner year, we built an ecosystem to win the next decade.”

Lessons for Cloud GTM leaders:

• Marketplace compounds even at scale. $1.5B and still ~50% YoY. Plan for it as a key channel, not a side bet.

• Co-opetition is the new normal. CrowdStrike competes with Microsoft in security and sells through their marketplace.

• Pair marketplace motion with partners who can deliver outcomes fast.

• Multi-cloud marketplace expertise transfers: master one hyperscaler, then replicate fast on others.

How is your Cloud GTM strategy changing your sales conversations?

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s edition:

• AvePoint grew SaaS revenue 37% YoY in a market where many SaaS vendors are slowing. Their fastest-growing motion? Channel now drives 57% of ARR

• Google Cloud commits jumped $155B → $240B in Q4 alone. Revenue from partner-built AI solutions grew ~300% YoY. Dai Vu, who runs GCP Marketplace, joins our event on March 24 to share what's next for partners.

• 75% of enterprises want service providers to build their key Agentic AI use cases. Not internal teams. Partners. C-suite is also 2X+ more likely than mid-management to buy from partners.

• Everyone says you need CEO buy-in for partnerships. Workiva’s CEO just showed what it actually looks like — and it’s more deliberate than most realize.

But first — if you sell through or alongside Google Cloud, don’t miss our biggest GCP online event of 2026:

Google Cloud Marketplace: Your Growth Engine for 2026 (March 24)

Dai Vu, Managing Director leading Google Cloud Marketplace, will share where Marketplace is heading next, what’s working for partners who are scaling, and how AI and co-sell motions are evolving in 2026. He’ll be joined by Jay McBain (Omdia), leaders from Palo Alto Networks, MongoDB, Optiv, Tackle and more. 10+ speakers. 2.5 hours.

Save Your Spot

Now, let’s dive in.

37% SaaS growth. 57% channel. AvePoint’s GTM playbook

AvePoint grew SaaS revenue 37% YoY to $88.9M in a market where many SaaS vendors are slowing.

Their fastest-growing motion? Channel now drives 57% of ARR

AvePoint builds data governance + protection software used by 28,604 customers across cloud platforms.

They hit $416.8M ARR (+27% YoY), with RPO at $508M (+36% YoY).

These are standout numbers, especially as market debates if AI will disrupt SaaS.

But the real story is how they sell.

Their GTM breakdown

• Enterprise (52% of ARR): primarily direct sales

• Mid-market (28%): increasingly channel-led

• SMB (20%): primarily through channel/MSPs

Channel growth in the last 3 years tells the story:

• Channel ARR share: 47% (2022) → 57% (2025)

• Channel partners: 3,403 → 5,859

• MSP ARR: $19M → $62M (48% CAGR)

CEO Dr. Tianyi Jiang (TJ) last week:

“Our channel, focusing on MSPs, still our fastest-growing segment, unlocking SMB and mid-market. We have not seen slowdown in SMB, as some other vendors have seen.”

Channel isn’t just scale — it’s operating efficiency

Sales & marketing as % of revenue fell from 34.3% in FY24 to 31% in Q4 (and 32% for FY25).

AvePoint attributes this directly to scaling the channel strategy. They also hit Rule of 46 (ARR growth + operating margin), up from Rule of 31 two years ago.

Migration is the partner “tip of the spear”

AvePoint deliberately pushes services revenue to partners on migration projects, then retains the recurring software revenue on day-two governance, protection, and cost control.

Textbook land-and-expand through channel.

The hyperscaler GTM is expanding

AvePoint sells through Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS marketplaces, maintains strategic partnerships with all three clouds, and is moving beyond Microsoft 365 into multi-cloud workload governance across compute infrastructure.

They also signed a $340M five-year IT services consumption commitment (2026-2030) — a signal of how deeply embedded they are in hyperscaler economics.

AI doesn’t reduce their customer needs — it amplifies them

LLMs don’t eliminate security, backup, compliance, and policy control. They raise the stakes.

AvePoint is leaning into that with agent control / AI governance and pricing that mirrors hyperscaler economics: a blend of seat + consumption.

3 takeaways for alliance leaders:

1. Map partner strategy by customer segment. Clarity on “who sells to whom” prevents conflict and lets each motion scale.

2. Channel drives margin improvement, not just reach. Track S&M % of revenue as your channel matures — it’s the cleanest proof point for your CFO.

3. Treat hyperscalers as ecosystem opportunities for GTM: align marketplace procurement + co-sell + partner delivery into one motion

What’s your experience — does driving partners revenue accelerate customer adoption and stickiness?

Share

Dai Vu, Who Leads Google Cloud Marketplace, Keynotes Our Biggest GCP Event of 2026

Google Cloud customer commits jumped $155B → $240B in Q4 alone. Revenue from partner-built AI solutions grew ~300% YoY.

Dai Vu, Managing Director leading their Marketplace, will share what’s next in our biggest GCP event of 2026.

If you sell software through or alongside Google Cloud, Dai Vu is shaping how that entire market works.

His keynote in our GCP online event on March 24 is the closest you’ll get to Google’s Marketplace strategy before Next season.

Dai Vu leads the global teams behind Google Cloud Marketplace — business development and P&L, partner and platform strategy, co-sell and field GTM models, partner engineering and enablement.

Under his leadership, GCP Marketplace has been growing triple-digits YoY for multiple years, driving billions in transaction value annually.

Save Your Spot

This will be Dai Vu second keynote at our event. A lot has changed since last year.

Google Cloud momentum is hard to ignore

• Revenue grew incredible 48% YoY last quarter

• Annual run rate crossed $70B

• Cloud commitments (RPO) jumped to $240B — committed customer spend that can be used on its marketplace to buy ISV partner products

On the partner side, the signals are even more striking

• Revenue from AI solutions built by partners grew nearly 300% YoY

• Commitments from Google’s top 15 software partners increased 16X+ YoY

Customer adoption is impressive

• New customer velocity doubled in Q4 vs Q1

• $1B+ customer deals in 2025 exceeded the previous 3 years combined

• Existing customers are outpacing initial commitments by 30%+

• ~75% of Google Cloud customers have used their vertically optimized AI – from chips, to models, to AI platforms, and enterprise AI agents

The ecosystem around Google Cloud is expanding fast — and the co-sell + marketplace math is changing for every ISV and partner on the platform.

Dai will share where Marketplace is heading next, what’s working for partners who are scaling, and how AI and co-sell motions are evolving in 2026.

The all-star lineup joining him

• Jay McBain, Chief Analyst at Omdia — the most accurate voice on cloud marketplaces, who forecasted $85B marketplace opportunity years before the industry caught up. Jay sees marketplaces reaching $163B by 2030 with 59% of deals flowing through channel partners

• Leaders from Palo Alto Networks ($2B+ in GCP Marketplace sales), MongoDB (3X GCP Partner of the Year), Google Cloud, Optiv, Tackle and more

• Two panels on co-sell strategy and channel ecosystem growth, plus operations deep dive focused on marketplace automations and scaling revenue efficiently

• 10+ speakers. 2.5 hours. Entirely free.

This event is just 4 weeks before Google Cloud Next. This is your chance to learn directly from the people leading the distribution on GCP marketplace platform — and know exactly where to focus in 2026 before the big Next announcements start.

March 24, 9:00–11:30 AM PT

Save Your Spot

See you on March 24th.

Thanks to our partner Tackle for supporting this event

Tackle (now part of AppDirect) is the Cloud GTM platform built to help software companies win in the cloud. As the category creator and leader in Cloud GTM, Tackle enables ISVs to list, transact, and scale through the hyperscalers.

Tackle streamlines every stage of the cloud marketplace journey with deep co-sell automations, private offer management, and real-time marketplace analytics.

Together with AppDirect's global subscription commerce platform, Tackle is building the first truly unified solution for software companies to reach buyers across every route to market: cloud marketplaces, direct sales, and the channel.

C-Suite Is 2X+ More Likely to Buy & Deploy Agentic AI with Partners

75% of enterprises want service providers to build their key Agentic AI use cases. Not internal teams. Partners.

And C-suite is leading the charge, 2X+ more likely than mid-management to buy from partners.

Everyone’s asking the same question: will Agentic AI gut tech services revenue? BCG just surveyed 190+ execs on both sides - enterprise buyers and partners - and the data tells a very different story

This isn’t a shrinking market

BCG projects Agentic AI will unlock up to $200B in net new demand for tech services over the next 5 years (6–8% CAGR through 2030).

AI efficiency-led losses in traditional contracting are real but localized. The new value pools — building, deploying, running, and governing AI agents — are much larger for partners to grasp.

Winning service partners are orchestrating ecosystems

“More than 90% of providers report delivering Agentic engagements leveraging ecosystem partners. The competitive advantage lies in orchestrating these partnerships to accelerate deployment, standardize patterns, and scale proven use cases.”

Winning service partners aren’t just reselling or implementing. They are orchestrating multi-partner ecosystems — hyperscalers, SaaS platforms, and emerging agentic-native players — into repeatable, scalable deployments.

What’s the state of Agentic AI deployment by enterprises right now?

• 40%+ of large enterprises are already scaling Agentic AI beyond pilots. Banking, financial services, and insurance are leading. “2026 is shaping up to be a pivotal year” from experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment.

• Agentic AI investment has grown 60%+ annually since 2023, with over 55% flowing into agent platforms and orchestration layers — the infrastructure that hyperscalers and their partners are building together.

• Agentic components now show up in 40%+ of enterprise sourcing cycles across IT applications, BPO, and CX services.

Pricing model mismatch favors marketplaces

One gap remains: >70% of enterprise buyers want output- or outcome-linked pricing for agentic services. Yet ~60% of providers still contract on time-and-materials or fixed-price.

It seems cloud marketplaces — with consumption-based and usage-linked commercial models — are naturally positioned to close this gap.

Three lessons for alliance leaders:

1. Treat Agentic AI as a new growth category to capture WITH your ecosystem — new offers, partners, new routes to market — not just a margin or efficiency play

2. The competitive edge isn’t building agents alone. It’s orchestrating hyperscaler, ISV, and SI partnerships into packaged use cases that enterprises can deploy fast

3. The buyers who matter most — C-suite — are choosing partners over internal builds and are betting on ecosystems. Your sales and marketplace motions should match those executive-level buying patterns

What’s your take — is Agentic AI a threat to existing revenue, or an expansion of your TAM?

Source: Research.

Subscribe now

CEO Buy-In for Partnerships: “I only highlight wins that involve our partners”

Everyone says you need CEO buy-in for partnerships.

Workiva’s CEO just showed what it actually looks like — and it’s more deliberate than most realize.

Last week I published an analysis of Workiva’s strategy. They’re growing 21% YoY with partner-driven GTM.

Every single one of the 14 enterprise deals their CEO mentioned in Q4 earnings call involved a partner — co-sold, sourced, or implemented.

The post got traction. But what happened next was even more interesting.

Workiva’s CEO Julie Iskow commented directly:

“It wasn’t just 14 out of 14 in our recent earnings. Every earnings call I only highlight wins that involve our partners. It’s intentional. Our high-performing partner ecosystem is key (and vital) to our success”

Let that sink in.

The CEO of a public company approaching $1B in revenue deliberately chooses to ONLY spotlight partner-involved wins on the most visible public stage of the quarter.

This is not a partnership slide in a board deck.

This is the CEO using the earnings call — the moment when Wall Street, customers, and employees are all listening — to send an unmistakable signal about what matters.

And signals like that cascade

When a CEO consistently highlights partners publicly, it shapes:

• how CROs build sales motions

• how sellers prioritize co-sell

• how marketing tells the story

• how product thinks about ecosystem leverage

• how the company allocates resources

Example:

Workiva new CRO, Michael Pinto (ex-AWS and Databricks), was brought in with an explicit mandate to strengthen their partner ecosystem. That hire doesn’t happen without top-down commitment.

Julie also added a second point most partnership narratives miss:

“Our partners don’t just “help us close deals, find opportunities and own implementations”. They also help our customers get more value from our platform ... and ultimately other solutions (a win-win-win: for our partners, our customers and Workiva).”

This framing matters.

At Workiva, partners aren’t just a distribution channel — they’re customer success drivers. And In the AI era, that distinction is everything: partner-led implementations and services accelerate time-to-value, increase adoption, and unlock expansion — making outcomes stickier and relationships harder to unwind.

The takeaway: C-suite commitment to partners isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s one of the highest-leverage inputs into ecosystem-led growth.

3 things alliance leaders can take from this:

1. CEO buy-in isn’t a one-time decision. It’s a repeated, visible signal — every quarter, every earnings call, every internal moment.

2. Ecosystem depth is the moat in the AI era. Partners who implement, enable, and expand your product drive stickiness that features alone rarely do.

3. Watch what executives highlight publicly, not just internally. Earnings calls, keynotes, and analyst days reveal real priorities.

Do partners show up in your company’s most visible internal and external narratives?

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s newsletter:

• Workiva’s CEO highlighted 14 key enterprise wins. Every single one ran through a partner. The company is on track to cross $1B ARR with 21% growth — here’s how they’re running GTM so partners are the default, not the exception.

• A practical SPIF framework to get your reps transacting on marketplace in 90 days. Nicole Napiltonia (VP Alliances at TeamDynamix, ex-Barracuda) shares the exact phase-by-phase incentive structure — copy and adapt it.

• JFrog’s cloud engine is accelerating: cloud revenue hit $243M (+45% YoY) and now represents 46% of total — with “deeper marketplace partnerships” called out as a growth driver.

• Tomorrow: Michael Levy — the AWS Marketplace leader who helped scale Salesforce from $0 → $2B+ in marketplace revenue in 18 months — is joining our online workshop. He’ll share how top partners scale, and how AI is reshaping marketplace motions.

Before we dive in:

Join our free, tactical workshop tomorrow Feb 24, 9–10 AM PT — we’re covering the leadership alignment playbook for CEO/CFO buy-in, comp design, what top companies are doing differently in 2026 to scale marketplace revenue, and 5 templates you can implement this quarter.

Save My Spot

Workiva: 14/14 enterprise key wins ran via partners

Workiva is the type of SaaS company AI could disrupt. Reporting + compliance + governance is where AI is moving fast.

Yet they just delivered 21% growth YoY with partner-driven GTM. They are on track to cross $1B ARR.

What’s accelerating their growth?

One pattern jumped out in their recent earning call:

Every single enterprise deal the CEO highlighted involved a partner.

Not “most.” Not “the majority.”

All 14 out of 14 — co-sold, partner-sourced, and/or partner-implemented.

Big Four. Regional advisory firms. Technology platform partners.

This isn’t accidental. Workiva lists the partner ecosystem as a core growth pillar, and calls out 250+ advisory, technology, and service partners that extend reach and accelerate delivery.

What’s interesting is how partners show up in the mechanics of the wins:

• Co-sell + implemented by a Big Four firm” (repeated across multiple deals)

• Sourced and implemented by a regional advisory partner”

• Co-sell with a technology platform partner”

• Even competitive rip-and-replace deals (legacy GRC) routed through partners

In other words: partners aren’t just helping close deals. They’re finding opportunities and owning implementation at scale.

Workiva is also designing the business model around this leverage:

“We shifted lower-margin setup and consulting services to our partners.”

Translation: more delivery capacity through the ecosystem, better margins for Workiva, and more attach opportunity for services partners.

And they’re aligning leadership to it

Their new CRO, Michael Pinto (ex-AWS and Databricks), was brought in with an explicit mandate to “strengthen our partner ecosystem” and deepen Workiva’s position in the data ecosystem.

Now back to the AI disruption question

Workiva’s CEO Julie Iskow addressed the threat directly: “AI does not replace this foundation. It depends on it.”

Their bet: as more content becomes AI-generated, buyers care even more about data being trusted, traceable, defensible, and audit-ready — the “system of truth” layer underneath automation.

Cloud dependence + spend alignment

On the cloud infrastructure side, Workiva’s platform is built primarily on AWS.

They also disclosed $121.4 M in non-cancelable cloud infrastructure commitments through 2029 — a real signal of deep hyperscaler dependency and spend alignment.

3 lessons for alliance & marketplace leaders:

1. Design GTM so partner involvement is the default path to enterprise deals.

2. Treat services-to-partner migration as a scale + margin strategy (not just coverage).

3. Hire and promote partnership/cloud native sales leaders to bring cloud ecosystem instincts and accelerate co-sell/marketplace GTM

In your org, are partners involved in every enterprise deal — or only after the deal is already real?

Speaker Reveal: Michael Levy (AWS Marketplace) — How Top ISVs Scale Marketplace Revenue

$0 → $2B+ in AWS Marketplace revenue in 18 months. That’s how fast the Salesforce partnership scaled — and Michael Levy led the marketplace strategy behind it.

Many ISVs never get past seven figures on marketplace. Michael knows exactly why.

He’s joining our Feb 24 workshop to share what he’s learned about what separates marketplace revenue engines from strategies that go nowhere.

Save My Spot

Michael is a Senior Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, where he leads feature launch and adoption — the team driving business outcomes on AWS marketplace for partners and customers.

He also designed the engagement framework that AWS uses to scale its most strategic marketplace partnerships into repeatable revenue.

What makes Michael’s perspective unique:

Michael works directly with top ISVs and technology partners to accelerate their GTM execution on AWS Marketplace.

He knows what “good” looks like from AWS’s vantage point — what gets support from AWS field teams, what gets prioritized, what stalls.

He also leads GTM strategy for AI agents and tools in AWS Marketplace. This means he’s at the intersection of the fastest-growing category in cloud and the fastest-growing procurement channel.

If you’re wondering how AI-native companies are approaching marketplace differently — or how traditional ISVs should position AI capabilities on marketplace — Michael is tracking this closer than almost anyone.

Before AWS, he spent 10+ years at Bloomberg LP building enterprise technology solutions for financial services.

That combination — strategic partner scaling, AI marketplace trends, product-led adoption, and deep enterprise experience — is exactly why his insight in this session is a must

Join us Feb 24, 9–10 AM PT as we break down:

What top companies are doing differently in 2026 to scale marketplace revenue

• The leadership alignment playbook that gets CRO and CFO buy-in

• How to structure your marketplace motion so sellers actually use it (not work around it)

• Partner engagement patterns: what AWS sees top partners do differently when they scale

• Templates you can implement this quarter

Michael Levy will be joined by:

• Drew Zurek — Senior Director, Global Cloud Marketplaces at Qlik (ex-AWS)

• Trunal Bhanse — CEO, Clazar

• Fabrizio Chen-Cataldo — Business Development & Partnerships, Supabase

• And myself

If you want to hear directly from the person who helped build one of the largest marketplace partnerships in AWS history — and who now shapes how AWS launches AI agents and scales marketplace features for partners — this is the session.

Save My Spot

Marketplace Incentive Framework: Fast-Track Sales Adoption

Many companies are still debating whether marketplace should be comp neutral. Top alliance leaders—backed by their exec team—have moved past that.

They design short-term SPIF programs to build the sales muscle fast.

Nicole Napiltonia just helped list TeamDynamix on Microsoft Marketplace. As VP of Alliances, she brings serious marketplace muscle — she previously scaled Barracuda into one of the top partners across hyperscalers.

She shared a practical incentive framework to fast-track marketplace adoption across the sales org. It over-rewards early deals on purpose — then tapers as the behavior becomes habit.

Here’s the structure (copy / adapt):

PHASE 1: “FIRST DEAL” (30–60 days)

1. First deal = overpaid on purpose

• $1,000–$2,000 SPIFF for the first marketplace deal per rep

• 2.0x quota credit (one-time)

• +10–20% commission kicker (stacked)

Use competition: reps don’t want to be the last one to get their first deal.

2. “Any deal counts” rule (lower the barrier)

• No minimum ACV (even $1–5K counts)

• New logo, expansion, renewal — all qualify

• Pilot / POC / partial workload qualifies

• Co-sell encouraged, not required

3. Fast money guarantee (speed builds trust)

• SPIFF paid within 14 days of close

• No revenue recognition dependency

• Simple validation: marketplace invoice submitted

• If finance can’t support this → reduce amount, not speed.

PHASE 2: “MOMENTUM MULTIPLIER” (next 2–3 deals)

1st deal → 2.0x quota

2nd deal → 1.5x quota

3rd deal → 1.25x quota

Then move to steady state plan.

Optional: cap at 90 days to create urgency.

PHASE 3: Leaderboard + social proof

Post every first deal win internally (rep name + deal size)

Leaderboard (first rep, second rep, etc.)

15-second exec shout out at all-hands for first-deal reps

Personal note from CEO/CRO for first deal reps

PHASE 4: “WHITE-GLOVE FIRST DEAL” support

Dedicated marketplace deal desk

Pre-approved contract language

Cloud AE intro offered automatically

One-page checklist: “How to close your first {hyperscaler} deal”

Reps should feel like the company wants them to try.

Early success metrics (don’t focus on revenue initially)

• Reps with ≥1 marketplace deal

• Time to first deal per rep

• % of pipeline now Marketplace-eligible

• Target: 50–60% of reps transact in the first 90 days.

Launch language (internal):

“For the next 60 days, your first Microsoft Marketplace deal earns a $1,000 SPIFF, 2x quota credit, and a commission accelerator — regardless of size. No minimum ACV. We are intentionally over-rewarding first deals to help everyone build momentum.”

Here is why I think it’s worth it:

Often hyperscaler MDF can offset the SPIF cost.

Every marketplace deal you close today compounds into access to billions of cloud budgets tomorrow. ROI on a short-term SPIF is hard to argue against.

Subscribe now

JFrog’s Cloud GTM Playbook: Marketplace as a Growth Lever

JFrog’s cloud business crossed $243M in revenue (up 45% YoY) driving overall growth to 24%.

Cloud partnerships and marketplace were called out as key growth drivers.

Here is what alliance leaders should study.

The shift to cloud is structural

Cloud now represents 46% of JFrog’s revenue, up from 39% a year ago.

Q4 cloud revenue: $70.2M = 48% of total

What stands out is how CEO Shlomi Ben Haim framed the drivers:

“We drove a higher volume of security deals in the cloud, strong new logo wins, and deeper marketplace partnerships.”

Marketplace partnerships named as one of the growth pillars.

JFrog further explained its Cloud GTM strategy:

“Specifically with public cloud providers, we believe that enhancing our partnership relationships and channel strategy may be a significant contributor to JFrog’s growth.”

This language signals board-level commitment.

JFrog is backing words with dollars

The company revealed $310M in commits “primarily for hosting services” - that’s JFrog’s own obligations to hyperscalers.

They will spend $56-73M per year on cloud infrastructure in 2026–2030. This is ~10% of their revenue locked into cloud spend.

CEO also noted they “strengthened partnerships with all major cloud providers, improved commercial terms, and established a stronger long-term growth margin strategy.”

When your own cloud spend crosses $300M in commitments, you earn negotiating power to improve commercial terms.

Buyer demand is shifting to multi-cloud (pulled by AI)

CEO noted: “Customer purchasing decisions changed in 2025, as CIOs were less focused on mega-cloud migration initiatives and instead increasingly emphasized building fit-to-purpose, hybrid, and multi-cloud architectures as they adopted new AI solutions.”

This signals that the era of “all-in on one cloud” may be giving way to multi-cloud by design.

Speaking of AI:

JFrog sees what the CEO calls a “tsunami of binaries” driven by coding agents. Millions of developers powered by millions of AI agents creating far more software artifacts. That consumption tailwind is real. JFrog is even preparing for a “business-to-agent” market where AI agents interact directly with its platform via MCP servers.

Three lessons for alliance leaders:

1. Cloud GTM is a board-level priority

JFrog describes its cloud partnerships as a growth strategy. That is the level of commitment that unlocks real resources and executive alignment.

2. Your own cloud spend is a partnership asset

Millions of commits give JFrog commercial leverage with hyperscalers. If you are spending tens of millions on cloud infrastructure, use that as a starting point for partnership negotiations.

3. Prepare for business-to-agent

If B2B shifts to B2A as CEO predicts, are your products and marketplace listings ready for agent-driven procurement?

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s newsletter:

• Dynatrace crossed $1B in AWS Marketplace sales — with ~90% channel transactions and 50%+ co-sell across all three clouds. The alliance playbook behind it is what matters.

• Who actually sources Marketplace deals? IDC data shows ISV AEs open 45% of opportunities — yet sellers who co-sell report 2X sales growth. Why the gap is the strategy.

• Speaker reveal: Drew Zurek (ex-AWS, trained hundreds of CROs on marketplace sales; now leads marketplaces at Qlik) joins our free Feb 24 workshop to share how top ISVs activate sellers to scale marketplace revenue.

• Partnerships hit board level: 79% of CEOs plan strategic alliances in 2026, up from 62% in 2025 — because transformation can’t wait and AI capability gaps are forcing ecosystem bets.

Before we dive in:

The pattern is clear: marketplace winners aren’t waiting for hyperscalers to source deals—they’re building the internal muscle to convert pipeline with them.

That’s exactly what we’ll break down on Feb 24 (9–10am PT) in a free, tactical workshop: seller activation frameworks, CRO/CFO alignment, comp design, and 5 templates you can implement this quarter—led by operators who’ve done it at AWS and at scale.

Save My Spot

Inside Dynatrace’s GTM: 90% Channel, 50% Cloud Co-Sell

90% of transactions through partners. 50%+ co-selling with all three hyperscalers.

That’s the GTM playbook behind Dynatrace’s $1B AWS Marketplace milestone - and one that alliance leaders should study.

Dynatrace just crossed $1B in lifetime AWS Marketplace sales, with triple-digit marketplace growth still accelerating.

The company beat guidance across every metric last quarter, raised its full-year outlook, and is about to cross $2B ARR.

But the milestone isn’t the story. The playbook behind it is.

Dynatrace has built one of the most partner-centric GTM strategies. 50%+ of new logos were partner-originated in a recent quarter. The company has passed 50% co-sell with all three hyperscalers.

Today, partners aren’t optional

CEO Rick McConnell stressed in a recent earnings call:

“In an agentic world, engaging in and integrating with an ecosystem of partners, including global system integrators and hyperscalers, will be mandatory. And we are investing to deepen and broaden those relationships.”

Jay Snyder, SVP of Partners & Alliances, laid out the strategy:

“As the company has now close to 90 percent of transactions through the channel… our goal is about 75 percent of our business be co-sell, and a good portion of that be through the marketplace.” (CRN)

Dynatrace isn’t just co-selling — it deeply integrates with all three clouds.

CEO: “In Q3, we announced deeper technical engagements with all of the major hyperscalers.

We’re integrating with Amazon Bedrock Agent Core, embedding Dynatrace with Azure’s SRE agent, and serving as the launch partner for GCP Gemini command line interface extensions and Gemini Enterprise.”

Partners are a productivity multiplier

And it’s showing up in seller economics.

CFO James Benson: “We’ve continued to get significant traction with leveraging our partner channels, notably GSIs, and the hyperscalers continue to be a source of continued improvement in productivity per rep.”

Partners and hyperscalers also pull the company into deals earlier:

“By working more closely with strategic partners, our objective is to participate in digital transformation projects earlier in the purchasing cycle.”

That’s why Dynatrace is committing to “invest in our strategic partner ecosystem”.

Meanwhile, the company disclosed $702.8 million in internal cloud commits...

What alliance leaders should take from this:

1. Co-sell and marketplace are one motion, not two. Dynatrace didn’t build separate marketplace and co-sell plays. They run them together as one strategic GTM.

2. Agentic AI creates new partnership surface area. Dynatrace is embedding into each hyperscaler’s AI agent infrastructure. Every new AI integration becomes a new co-sell trigger.

3. Partners are a productivity multiplier. If your alliance team can’t show that math internally, you’ll keep fighting for headcount.

When partner strategy shows up in earnings calls — not just alliance decks — it’s no longer a channel play.

It’s a corporate strategy.

Subscribe now

Speaker Reveal: Drew Zurek (ex-AWS, now Qlik) — Activating Sellers to Win Marketplace Revenue

Most ISVs agree marketplace matters. But marketplace and ecosystem revenue doesn’t scale on intent — it scales when your sales team knows how to position it, sell it, and win with it.

That’s the gap Drew Zurek has spent his career closing- first as a sales leader driving enterprise growth, then inside AWS, now as an operator at Qlik. And he’s joining our Feb 24 webinar to share exactly how.

Drew is Senior Director, Global Cloud Marketplaces at Qlik, leading marketplace and ecosystem sales and strategy for an organization serving 40,000+ customers globally (and a 15-year Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in Analytics & BI).

Save Your Spot

What makes Drew’s insights unique for this session:

During 4 years at AWS, Drew was embedded in the partner growth machine.

He helped architect marketplace strategies for hundreds of ISVs while developing and running the CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) / Head of Sales Fellowship—hands-on sessions designed to teach revenue leaders how to operationalize and expand their co-sell relationship with AWS and Marketplace.

Those Fellowship cohorts trained hundreds of leaders to scale marketplace GTM across their sales teams and accelerate growth.

Having impacted thousands of partners, he’s seen the full spectrum: which companies turn co-sell into a revenue engine and which ones stall at the listing stage.

Now he’s executing that same methodology on the operator side at Qlik.

Drew understands the complete picture.

He knows what hyperscalers want to see from partners.

And he knows what it takes internally—leadership alignment, seller activation, comp structure, deal mechanics—to make marketplace and ecosystem sales work at scale.

That’s exactly what this online workshop is built around.

🗓️ Join us Feb 24, 9–10 AM PT as we break down:

• How to structure your marketplace motion so sellers actually use it (not work around it)

• The leadership alignment playbook that gets CRO and CFO buy-in

• What top companies are doing differently in 2026 to scale marketplace revenue globally

• Templates you can take back to your team and implement this quarter

Drew will be joined by an AWS leader, Trunal Bhanse (CEO, Clazar), Fabrizio Cataldo (Business Development & Partnerships, Supabase), and myself.

We’ll cover this from multiple angles: the key industry drivers, strategic growth patterns we’re seeing working across the market, the hyperscaler perspective, and the automation/ops layer.

If you want to learn from someone who built the playbook inside AWS, trained hundreds of CROs across the industry, and now runs it at a 40K-customer enterprise—this is the session.

Save Your Spot

Thanks to our partner Clazar for supporting this workshop

Clazar is the leading Cloud Sales Acceleration Platform for Go-to-Market teams to scale revenue on AWS, Azure, and Google cloud marketplaces. From listing to co-selling to revenue reconciliation and recognition, our platform helps companies streamline and automate their entire cloud sales journey from a single, unified platform—with zero operational overhead.

Clazar integrates seamlessly with leading CRMs, offers robust governance controls, and fully complies with industry-leading security standards. Top companies like Pinecone, Perplexity, Confluent, Cursor, and Replit trust Clazar to power their success on cloud marketplaces.

To learn more, please visit www.clazar.io

Who Actually Sources Cloud Marketplace deals?

And if hyperscalers “only” source 10–20% of deals, are Marketplace and co-sell overrated?

IDC’s recent AWS Marketplace study breaks down the numbers:

• ISV AEs open most opportunities: 44.8% sourced by ISVs

• Joint discovery (co-sell) with AWS: 16.7%

• AWS-only sourced: 10.1%

• The rest: APN partners 15.0%, self-serve/PLG 13.3%

At first glance, it looks like ISVs “do all the work” on marketplaces, while hyperscalers get the credit.

Here’s my read of the report—and why that interpretation misses what’s actually driving the 2X growth numbers.

The misconception killing marketplace strategies:

Many alliance leaders list in marketplaces expecting hyperscalers to source opportunities. When they get only a handful of deals, it feels like a failed promise. But origination and co-sell are fundamentally different jobs, and confusing them leaves the biggest growth lever unused.

Reality: co-sell + Marketplace are force multipliers after origination.

Most ISV-sourced opps become co-sell later to accelerate the cycle, retire commits, and speed procurement/legal via Private Offers.

Why Co-Sell and Marketplace drive faster growth (report data)

Sellers who co-sell report 2X software sales growth vs. those who don’t.

75% of surveyed sellers co-sell with AWS and see that lift. If you’re not co-selling, you’re leaving the biggest lever unused.

Marketplace businesses accelerate 41% faster

AWS Marketplace revenue grows ~41% faster than the rest of software for surveyed sellers.

Private Offers are the enterprise default (>50% of MP transactions)

More than half of AWS MP transactions are Private Offers; over a third of sellers’ reps have executed at least one

Marketplace KPIs are superior

Sellers cite shorter cycles (45%), faster cash collection (43%), more reliable payouts (48%), and stronger renewals (33%) vs. traditional motions.

Result? 23% of revenue through MP

Companies listed 55% of their portfolios. With nearly a quarter of revenue via MP, it’s now a core driver.

So what? Sourcing and co-sell are different jobs

Sourcing = open the door. Your AEs still generate most pipeline—by design.

Co-sell = finish the job. Pull AWS in to add account intel, credibility, learn about customer commits, get exec cover, and transact with a PO. That’s where the 2X shows up.

Yes, only ~10% of deals are sourced by hyperscalers and ~17% are jointly sourced.

Yet co-sell and Marketplace remain the growth engine because they change the outcome of the other 70% you sourced yourself.

Generate the pipeline; use AWS and MP to accelerate, de-risk, and close. That’s how companies already drive 23% of their revenue and growing.

Source: Research

Want the Marketplace Operator Playbook?

On Feb 24 (9–10am PT, online) we’ll break down how to turn cloud commits into Marketplace revenue - seller activation, CRO/CFO alignment, and templates you can implement this quarter.

Save Your Spot

79% of CEOs plan to pursue strategic alliances and JVs in 2026 — up from 62% in 2025

17% jump in a year means that partnerships are now a CEO-level transformation lever, not a side program.

That’s data from the EY-Parthenon CEO Outlook 2026 — a survey of 1,200 CEOs across 21 countries conducted in Nov–Dec 2025.

The backdrop explains the urgency

97% of companies are undergoing a significant transformation or are about to start one.

“The majority of CEOs now report that they are either in the midst of a significant enterprise-wide transformation initiative (52%) or plan to begin one in 2026 (45%).”

At the same time, “61% of CEOs anticipate higher operating costs in 2026.”

The pressure is real: transform faster while spending more carefully.

What are they optimizing for?

“Globally, 43% of CEOs identify optimizing operations and improving productivity, including digitalization, as their top desired outcome.”

40% prioritize “improving customer engagement and retention”.

It’s telling that customer retention is now higher priority than accelerating growth (36%).

Now the partnership spike makes sense

Companies need to transform, digitize, engage customers and grow faster.

79% of CEOs plan to pursue strategic alliances and JVs in 2026, up from 62% in 2025 — a “sharp rise that underscores the appeal of partnerships in unlocking access to new capabilities.”

Why? Because “these collaborations offer a pragmatic route to accelerate innovation and share risk.”

It concludes: “Alliances and JVs are emerging as critical levers for speed, flexibility, and adaptability in an environment where transformation cannot wait.”

AI technology is no longer experimental

Reflecting on AI impact, 20% of CEOs say that AI outcomes are “significantly above expectations”, and 58% “somewhat above” — 78% above expectations in total.

But scaling AI enterprise-wide requires capabilities most companies don’t have in-house.

As we discussed before, strategic alliances—whether with hyperscalers, technology vendors, or implementation partners—are becoming the default path to close that gap.

The EY data suggests we’re in a new phase: one where alliances are essential infrastructure for transformation and growth.

What’s your read—are you seeing the same urgency from your customers and partners?

Source: research.

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s newsletter:

• $531B → ~$900B in cloud commits — AI just pulled enterprise cloud budgets forward faster than anyone projected. What it means for your marketplace deals.

• Google Cloud’s killer quarter — 48% revenue growth, $240B backlog, and partner AI revenue up nearly 300%.

• AWS beat every estimate — 24% growth (fastest in 13 quarters), $244B in commits, and $44B in new backlog added in a single quarter.

Before we dive in:

Join us on February 24, 9-10 am PT for a tactical online workshop on turning these cloud commits into your marketplace revenue. You’ll walk away with frameworks for CEO buy-in, sales comp design, co-sell scripts, and more.

Save My Spot

$531B → ~$900B in cloud commits AI just pulled cloud budgets forward

Cloud commits across AWS, Azure and GCP jumped to nearly $900B last quarter - up from $531B just one quarter prior.

AI demand is rewriting enterprise procurement faster than anyone projected.

Here’s what each hyperscaler reported for the last quarter (Q4 CY2025):

Amazon Web Services (AWS):

$244B cloud commits (+40% YoY, +22% QoQ)

Revenue reaccelerated to 24% on a $142B run rate — the fastest pace in 13 quarters.

CEO Andy Jassy described a “barbelled market” with AI labs consuming massive compute on one end and enterprises deploying cost-saving workloads on the other. Both sides are pulling forward commitments.

Google Cloud

$240B cloud commits (+100%+ YoY, +55% QoQ)

The standout mover this quarter.

Revenue grew 48% to a $70B+ run rate — the fastest growth among the big three.

Backlog more than doubled year-over-year, jumping $85B in 90 days. Sundar Pichai, CEO, noted: “The number of deals over a billion dollars in 2025 surpassed the previous three years combined.”

Existing customers are outpacing initial commitments by 30%+.

Microsoft

Reported $625B total commercial RPO (+110% YoY), that spans all Microsoft Cloud products, not just Azure.

But this quarter brought an interesting new data point: 45% of the $625B — roughly $281B — comes from OpenAI (that runs on Azure).

If we apply the 45% of Azure share we used previously to the remaining non-OpenAI backlog, we’ll additionally arrive at up to $155B in diversified enterprise Azure commits.

This would put the total Azure backlog at $436B total, inclusive of OpenAI share.

In a recent call, CFO Amy Hood highlighted that the non-OpenAI part of their total backlog is also growing quickly: “Roughly $350 billion is related to the breadth of our portfolio... larger and more diversified than most peers.”

That diversified base grew 28% YoY — the organic demand signal beneath the headline.

Why include large OpenAI deals in the combined total of ~$900B commits calculation?

AWS and Google Cloud backlogs likely also include undisclosed large AI lab commitments — Anthropic and others. Microsoft is simply the first to disclose the customer concentration.

What this means for your marketplace strategy:

All three clouds remain supply-constrained and locking in bigger, longer deals. These are pre-allocated budgets enterprises must consume — and cloud marketplaces remain the fastest path to capture that spend.

• Map which of your target accounts hold cloud commits and with which provider

• Align your offers and co-sell to where those commit dollars sit

• Use commit drawdown timelines to create deal urgency with procurement

How are you factoring this rapid cloud commit growth into your marketplace deals?

Pro Tip:

Hyperscalers will prioritize partners who help customers turn committed spend into measurable AI ROI. If your offer accelerates AI adoption (and proves outcomes), your co-sell attention goes up fast.

Share

Next, I’ll break down each hyperscaler’s growth drivers and what they signal for partners. But first — if you want the templates to turn commits into marketplace revenue:

$900B Cloud Commitments: 5 Templates to Convert Spend into Marketplace Revenue

Cloud commitments just reached ~$900B — a roughly 2X increase in 12 months. Translation for alliance leaders: customers have pre-allocated cloud funds they must spend. You can tap into these commits selling your software on cloud marketplaces.

But here’s the gap: most ISVs list on marketplaces, but stall between “listed” and actually “growing.” Their sellers don’t know when or how to route deals via marketplaces. Their leadership hasn’t fully bought in. Their ops can’t scale it.

We’re fixing that — with templates you can copy.

Join us February 24 (9–10 AM PT) for a tactical 60-minute session where we’ll break down what’s changed in 2026 and hand you the playbooks to capture the opportunity.

We’ll cover:

• Market drivers: why the $900B milestone changes the math for every ISV on marketplace

• How top teams set up and execute marketplace growth — from leadership buy-in to seller activation

• 5 ready-to-use frameworks and templates (CEO pitch, sales comp design, co-sell scripts, seller enablement checklist, automation playbook)

• How to automate the motion and remove friction — so your team scales without adding headcount

Learn from operators who’ve built the motion

• Drew Zurek, Senior Director, Global Cloud Marketplaces at Qlik, brings 20+ years across cloud, SaaS, and enterprise tech — including leadership roles at AWS and Salesforce.

• He’ll be joined by Trunal Bhanse, CEO of Clazar, on the execution and automation layer

• Plus additional speakers, including AWS to be announced shortly.

You’ll walk away with a Marketplace Template Pack.

Save My Spot

If you’re leading alliances, marketplace activation, sales enablement, or RevOps — this is the session that turns the $900B commits milestone into your pipeline and closed revenue.

Google Cloud’s killer quarter: 48% growth + 240 backlog

Google Cloud revenue up 48% YoY. Cloud’s backlog jumped from $155B to $240B in just 3 months.

But the partner signals are what deserve real attention.

Google reported Q4 last week. Here’s what matters for Cloud Alliance and tech leaders

Revenue hit $17.7 billion, up 48% year-over-year.

Annual run rate crossed $70 billion. Operating margin expanded to 30.1%, up from 17.5% last year.

The SaaS adoption is striking

95% of top 20 SaaS companies now use Gemini. Over 80% of the top 100. Salesforce. Shopify. More than 120,000 enterprises use Gemini, including AI unicorns like Lovable and OpenEvidence.

Sundar Pichai framed it directly: “Gemini is becoming the AI engine for the world’s most successful software companies.”

Partner revenue is accelerating fast

Revenue from AI solutions built by partners grew nearly 300% year-over-year.

Commitments from Google’s top 15 software partners increased more than 16X compared to last year.

That’s not incremental growth. That’s a strategic pivot toward ecosystem-led AI distribution.

The enterprise motion is working

New customer velocity doubled compared to Q1.

Deals over $1 billion in 2025 exceeded the previous three years combined.

Existing customers are outpacing their initial commitments by over 30%.

AI customers behave differently

“Nearly 75% of Google Cloud customers have used our vertically optimized AI – from chips, to models, to AI platforms, and enterprise AI agents”

They use 1.8X as many Google Cloud products as non-AI customers.

In December alone, 350 customers each processed over 100 billion tokens.

8 million paid Gemini Enterprise seats sold across 2,800+ companies.

This creates natural expansion paths for ISVs who integrate with AI workflows.

The infrastructure bet is massive.

Google announced $175-185 billion in CapEx for 2026.

Sundar acknowledged they remain “supply constrained” even at this scale.

Demand is outpacing capacity.

The $240 billion backlog represents committed customer spend

And an increasing share of customer wallets can flow through Google Cloud Marketplace — where customers can buy ISV partner products with their cloud commitment.

When partner revenue triples and billion-dollar deals multiply, the co-sell math changes.

Is Google Cloud Marketplace part of your 2026 growth plan?

Subscribe now

AWS beat all expectations: 24% growth, $244 backlog

Wall Street underestimated AWS.

21.4% growth expected → 24% delivered + added $44B new cloud backlog in a single quarter.

If you run cloud alliances, this is your 2026 major demand signal from the world’s biggest cloud.

Here’s what the Q4 call just revealed:

Growth accelerated further on a massive base

“AWS growth continued to accelerate to 24%… the fastest we’ve seen in 13 quarters.” That’s “up $2.6 billion quarter over quarter… and nearly $7 billion year over year.”

AWS is now “a $142 billion annualized run rate business.”

“Our backlog is $244 billion… up 40% year over year… up 22% quarter over quarter.”

This isn’t only AI — core migrations are back

“We’re… seeing strong growth in core non-AI workloads as enterprises return to… moving infrastructure from on premises to the cloud.”

Finance was explicit: acceleration was “driven by both core and AI services.”

Partners were named as part of the edge

AWS highlighted its “most vibrant partner ecosystem,” then listed new agreements (OpenAI, Accenture, HSBC, CrowdStrike, Adobe, Salesforce, and more).

They also claimed “more of the top 500 US startups use AWS… than the next two providers combined.”

Bedrock is scaling because buyers want choice

“Most sophisticated AI applications leverage multiple models.” “Bedrock is now a multi-billion dollar annualized run rate business,” with customer spend up “60% quarter over quarter.”

And customers want AI “where the rest of their applications and data are.” AWS even pushed custom models earlier in the lifecycle (Nova Forge), calling it “a potential game changer.”

AI expands the rest of the footprint

“As customers run large AI workloads on AWS, they’re adding to their core AWS footprint as well.”

The next battleground is AI agents

Enterprises are “apprehensive about deploying to production” until agents can connect to “data, tools, memory, identity, policy, governance…” But Bedrock Agent Core is now “unlocking deployments.”

Demand is ahead of supply (still)

“We could actually grow faster if we had all the supply that we could take.” AWS added “3.9GW of power” in 12 months, “1.2GW” just in Q4, and expects to “double it again by the end of 27.”

CFO: AWS “added more data center capacity than any other company in the world.”

AWS plans “about $200B” in capex, “predominantly in AWS,” while “monetizing capacity as fast as we can install it.”

Silicon + economics are becoming GTM levers

AWS says chips (Graviton + Trainium) are “over $10B” run rate. Trainium2 has “over 1.4 million” chips landed; Trainium3 supply is expected to be “committed by mid 2026.”

And the principle is simple: “we have to make the costs of inference lower.”

$244B is customer cloud commits

If $244B is the committed demand pool... are your AWS partner + marketplace GTM positioned to capture it?

PS. I covered the full Microsoft earnings breakdown in last week’s issue.

PPS. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s newsletter:

• ServiceNow’s partner focus is wild: one SI drives 11% of revenue; ServiceNow also disclosed $4.7B in cloud obligations. We’ll break down their scaling playbook (>20% growth) and why “indirect” can become the default in some segments.

• Co-sell is a math problem: cloud sellers often carry $50–$100M books and don’t have time for everyone. Use this 5-Minute Intro to stop getting ignored.

• Microsoft hit $625B in total commercial backlog (+110% YoY) with Azure growing 39%—plus why Satya is betting agents become the new apps.

• AI is shifting TAM from 1% of GDP (software) to 20% (labor)—and why partners become the rollout moat in an agentic world.

Want to be featured? Partner Insight newsletter reaches 5,000+ Cloud GTM leaders weekly—I’m opening a small Contributor Circle for operator playbooks + templates (details below).

Before we dive in — if you’re not a subscriber yet, subscribe (free). And if this issue is useful, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Subscribe now

ServiceNow playbook: one SI = 11% revenue; $4.7B commits

Rule of scaling in 2026: you don’t scale alone.

ServiceNow: one SI drives 11% of revenue; they have $4.7B in cloud commitments, while hyperscaler adoption is shifting their business mix.

ServiceNow still growing >20% at $15B+ scale — in a market that’s questioning whether non-native AI software can grow at all.

They just reported a better-than-expected Q4, 21% subscription revenue growth, and RPO up 25% (21% in CC). That’s a demand signal, not a narrative.

Here are the partnership lessons hiding in plain sight:

1️⃣ Partners are core to their revenue

ServiceNow discloses that an “increasing portion of revenue flows through partners”.

That’s a shift many companies talk about, but few admit in black-and-white.

2️⃣ Some segments are structurally indirect (& concentrated)

They explain that a substantial majority of U.S. government sales are indirect via distributors, resellers, and service provider partners.

One U.S. federal channel partner / systems integrator represented 11% of total revenue.

This is the part alliance teams often underestimate: in some segments, the partner isn’t just helping close deals - the partner is the buyer-facing GTM default.

3️⃣ Hyperscaler adoption is so strong, it changes business mix

They specifically called out a mix shift from on-prem to hosted that was “partially driven by strong adoption of hyperscaler offerings.”

That reframes hyperscaler GTM as more than distribution: It changes how customers buy and consume your platform.

4️⃣ ServiceNow itself is living in the “commit economy”

ServiceNow disclosed $4.7B in non-cancellable cloud services obligations — and $2.8B of that sits in 2030.

Even at $15B+ scale, ServiceNow isn’t just selling through hyperscalers — they’re also a massive, long-dated buyer in the same commit economy.

And the spike in 2030 shows how multi-year cloud commitments concentrate.

5️⃣ Their “platform pitch” is really an ecosystem pitch

CEO Bill McDermott: “AI doesn’t replace enterprise orchestration. It depends on it.”

AI isn’t eating the enterprise platform. It’s eating “feature” vendors.

Real value happens when models are built into workflows where real decisions are made.

His definition of a modern platform is not “we have AI.” It’s: the platform has to work with language models, hyperscalers, data lakes, and systems of record — and stitch them into something coherent.

For alliance leaders, that’s a strong signal that the ecosystem is becoming part of the product.

Partnering with all the power centers at once

ServiceNow expanded partnerships they called out this quarter include Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, NTT DATA — and they explicitly highlight relationships with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and NVIDIA.

Question for alliance leaders:

In your GTM, are partners and hyperscalers still ‘supporting’… or are they becoming the operating system for growth?

Share

Co-Sell Challenge: Why Your Pitch Gets Ignored

Cloud account managers at AWS, Azure, and Google carry quotas that would make most CEOs sweat - often $100M+ a year.

When you ask for their time, you’re competing against hundreds of partners and thousands of accounts.

Ask yourself: If you had a $50–100M quota, how much time would you spend on a pitch with an unclear benefit?

That’s not cynicism—it’s math. And it explains why most first co-sell calls go nowhere.

What actually works: the 5-Minute Intro

The formula: Customer outcome → Cloud outcome (specific services) → Your outcome.

What’s your one-liner use case?

Skip features and jargon. Focus on customers.

“We reduce <metric> by <X%> in <N> weeks for <buyer persona>.”

“In <industry/geo>, we delivered <ROI/time-to-value>. Two recent examples: <1> and <2>”

Why should a seller care?

Translate how this makes the cloud provider win and tie it to consumption.

Does it drive new workloads? New line of business? Expansion of specific services? Helps with their AI story? Be explicit about their benefit, not yours.

“Workloads run on <Service>. Deal drives < e.g. AWS Bedrock> usage and <> hours.”

Emphasize that you transact through the marketplace - tied to their comp, helps customers burn commits, etc.

Who is your sponsor at this customer?

Prove you’ve done the work - already have traction in the customer and aren’t fishing.

What have you already done?

Champion mapped. Security review complete. Buyer path aligned to marketplace workflows.

What’s your ONE ask?

Account intel? Customer’s spend commitment? Help with POC? Procurement intro?

One ask per touch. Many asks = no action

3 principles that make this stick

About-YOU, not about-me

Swap features for customer and cloud benefits. Refine to 2–3 short sentences.

Narrow scope

Start with one deal + one vertical + one region + one repeatable use case. Don’t boil the ocean.

Right pitch, right room

AEs care about revenue and speed. Engineers care about fit and risk. Procurement cares about time and terms. Keep the outcome constant; adjust the angle.

What kills your credibility

Generic pitches across clouds

Say the wrong service name and you’ve signaled you’re not serious.

Broad account-mapping sessions

Unless you’ve already closed together, sellers won’t spend hours theorizing. Show up with a qualified opportunity.

Assuming your sales team “gets it” instinctively

Even seasoned enterprise reps need training on hyperscaler economics and marketplace mechanics, if they don’t have previous cloud experience.

Most successful alliance leaders personally join the first seller calls to frame and de-risk the conversation. Then they hand-hold the first five to ten wins.

What’s your co-sell process?

Subscribe now

Want to be featured in Partner Insight? Join our Contributor Circle

Each week this Partner Insight newsletter reaches 5,000+ Cloud GTM leaders.

I’m opening a small Partner Insight Contributor Circle for senior operators in Cloud GTM / Alliances / Marketplaces who are willing to share their practical playbook or case study this quarter.

I’m looking for operator field notes — the playbook you used, the metrics that moved, the template that saved hours.

• Get featured across Partner Insight newsletter and LinkedIn insight

• A direct line to me + the Partner Insight network

What I’m looking for

• Cloud GTM Strategy or marketplace deal breakdown

• Marketplace execution playbooks: steps, metrics, timelines.

• Templates you use: co-sell intros, one-pagers, checklists.

• AI workflows/prompts with impact: what you automated → output → result

Interested?

Reply to this email (or email newsletter@partnerinsight.io) with:

1. Your name, role, LinkedIn

2. What you can share (2-3 sentences on why it’s compelling).

We’ll follow up shortly.

Microsoft: Azure +39%, $625B Backlog + Agents Are the New Apps

$625B. That’s Microsoft’s total commercial cloud backlog (RPO) this quarter (+110% YoY).

Yes, OpenAI is a big chunk — but even excluding it, the commitments still grew 28%.

Cloud momentum in addition to the mega-deals

CFO Amy Hood said ~45% of total RPO is driven by OpenAI. The remaining ~$345B (+28%) reflects what she called “ongoing broad customer demand across the portfolio.”

Azure itself grew impressive 39% YoY, beating guidance.

Microsoft Cloud revenue crossed $51.5B this quarter. Using my previous conservative 45% Azure share proxy, that implies ~$90B+ Azure revenue annualized.

But Azure growth could have been even higher. With demand still exceeding capacity, Microsoft is rationing compute across M365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, R&D, Teams, and Azure.

Satya Nadella was clear on the strategy: “We don’t want to maximize just one business... [we want to] build the best LTV portfolio.”

Amy Hood noted that if the GPUs that came online were allocated entirely to Azure, growth would have been “over 40.”

The bigger strategic play: agents as the next platform

Satya suggested to “[think of] agents as the new apps” and laid out the full stack requirements: model catalog, tuning, orchestration, context engineering, safety, observability, and security.

Side note (maybe I’m biased): that stack description reads a lot like what marketplaces do at scale — catalog + distribution + governance + trust — just applied to agents.

Agent adoption is already meaningful:

• Over 80% of Fortune 500 companies have active agents built using Microsoft’s low-code tools.

• M365 Copilot hit 15 million paid seats, with seat adds up 160% YoY.

• Larger deployments are accelerating — the number of customers with 35,000+ seats tripled, including one deployment at 95,000 seats.

The control-plane move is particularly interesting.

Microsoft introduced Agent 365 to extend governance, identity, and security controls to agents — even those running on other clouds.

Adobe, Databricks, SAP, ServiceNow, and Workday are already integrating.

As Satya framed it: “We are the first provider to offer this type of agent control plane across clouds.”

Governance is scaling alongside AI adoption

One datapoint shows the governance layer is growing with usage: 24B Copilot interactions audited by Purview (+9x YoY).

This signals where enterprise AI spending will increasingly concentrate: not just model access, but compliance, auditability, and risk management tooling.

AI infrastructure buildout is remarkable

Microsoft spent $37.5B on CapEx this quarter. That’s ~$150B annualized pace if continued — though management expects CapEx to step down sequentially next quarter.

Still, Microsoft is compounding two engines at once: strong cloud growth and a rapidly expanding infrastructure layer.

This accelerates its ecosystem — more production workloads, more partner attach, more marketplace motion.

Are you leveraging it?

Share

Biggest AI TAM shift: IT budgets to Operating Spend (+ Partner Upside)

Software captures 1% of US GDP. White-collar payroll is 20% - that gap explains why the world’s largest VC, a16z raised $15B and now all-in on AI.

But what does this mean for partners?

Andreessen Horowitz put it plainly:

AI isn’t just expanding the SaaS market — it’s now benchmarked with a much larger spend pool: labor.

New TAM math is staggering:

Even if most AI value flows to customers (a16z rule of thumb is 90% of software-driven value goes to customers, 10% to vendors), 10% of a market that’s 20X larger is still enormous.

You’ve probably heard what makes this cycle different

• AI adoption spreads >5X faster

• Costs collapse as model capabilities ~2X every 7 months

Infrastructure buildout is being funded primarily by hyperscalers spending ~$400B annually on AI capex. They bear the burden — and, as a result, they also become the gravity wells for ecosystems where partners capture value.

Here’s the part that matters most:

New rules of software

1️⃣ Systems of action will matter more than systems of record

Software that only stores data becomes less compelling. The new moat is agentic capability layered on top of workflows — software that can do the work, not just track it.

As we move from systems of record to systems of action, the winners won’t be the ones that help store the truth — they’ll help execute it.

2️⃣ Defensibility becomes operational

Models will swap out via API. What doesn’t swap easily is everything around them: integrations, rules, approvals, security, governance, and trust. Stickiness shifts from UI to embedded process.

3️⃣ Pricing shifts from seats to outcomes

Seat-based pricing starts to break when software replaces tasks. The direction of travel is clear: buyers want to pay for value created, not the number of logins.

What this means for partners + Cloud GTM leaders

The partner ecosystem becomes the moat — because the bottleneck is change

Bottleneck isn’t an AI model choice. It’s org change: data readiness, workflow redesign, governance, security, and adoption.

Models are swapping out via API. What doesn’t swap easily is change management. That’s why partners become the moat.

Trust + access become GTM advantages

In an agentic world, “who can run in production” matters more than “who demos best.” Partners who can deliver safe rollout, controls, and proof become power brokers.

Marketplaces become the rails for outcome buying + governance

If significantly more software is built and used by more people, more often, companies will desperately need rails to evaluate, buy, govern, expand, and measure.

Marketplaces help to experiment safely and turn into repeatable purchase — with packaging, commits, and expansion built in.

They will be a governance layer for agentic software: approved vendor, billing, terms, and usage controls in one place.

Net:

Software market may feel threatened — but the bigger story is software moving into work, expanding the pie, and creating a new layer of value.

What’s your take?

P.S. Thanks for reading! If this issue sparked an idea, please forward it to your alliance lead or cloud counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

P.P. S. Have a killer playbook like the Co-Sell guide above? Check our Contributor program above to get featured.

In today’s newsletter:

• AI spend jumps to $2.52T in 2026 (up from $1.76T in 2025) — and the real signal is where the money moves: $401B more into infrastructure + $149B into AI services (what this Gartner forecast means for your partner stack).

• Seller adoption of marketplaces isn’t a “motivation” problem — it’s incentives + enablement + measurement (5 field-tested levers to drive seller behavior and scale Marketplace-driven revenue).

• Tech services are getting squeezed and expanded at the same time — McKinsey flags 20–30% compression in “manual” services while agentic AI creates up to $400B of new ecosystem opportunity by 2030.

• Cohort 14 of our Cloud GTM Leader course just kicked off — and it’s a signal of where Cloud GTM is headed: teams are shifting marketplaces from an “end-of-quarter scramble” to a cross-functional growth system.

Before we dive in — if you’re not a subscriber yet, subscribe (free). And if this issue is useful, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart — it’s how this community shares what works.

Subscribe now

AI Spend to Hit $2.52T: 3 Growth Drivers in 2026

AI spend is projected to jump from $1.76T (2025) to $2.52T (2026). The number is big. But the shape of the growth is what matters.

I rebuilt the Gartner forecast into a 2025 → 2026 view, and three things stand out for alliance leaders.

1️⃣ Services is the most interesting signal: AI adoption is becoming partner-led at scale

AI Services is the #3 biggest absolute growth bucket — adding $149B in 2026 alone.

That’s Gartner highlighting what most operators already feel:

AI success is less about a “feature launch” and more about implementation — integration, governance, security reviews, data readiness, change management, and ongoing optimization.

This is where partners win.

SIs/MSPs aren’t an add-on. They’re the adoption engine that makes AI usable inside real companies.

If you lead alliances, this should inform your partner strategy: your “AI partner stack” is becoming a repeatable delivery motion.

2️⃣ Gartner’s bigger message on SaaS: incumbents have a winning path — if they prove outcomes

There’s a loud narrative that “SaaS is disrupted by AI.” Gartner pushes back:

“Because AI is in the Trough of Disillusionment throughout 2026, it will most often be sold… by their incumbent software provider…”

In plain language: buyers still prefer familiar vendors — but only when ROI is defensible.

My view: both outcomes will likely happen.

• Some legacy software companies will accelerate (distribution, budgets, procurement paths, installed base).

• Others will get disrupted (if they can’t ship real outcomes, or AI collapses differentiation).

The key takeaway: the default outcome isn’t “SaaS dies.” It’s “SaaS gets re-ranked by outcomes.”

3️⃣ Infrastructure is the gravity — turning cloud into the distribution layer for everything else

Infra shows the biggest dollar increase. Gartner calls out providers “building out AI foundations,” with infrastructure adding $401B in 2026.

When infrastructure becomes the largest and fast-expanding pool, the cloud becomes the distribution layer for everything else — software procurement, services delivery, and the operating model around it.

If you’re not aligned to hyperscaler motions, you’re not aligned with the strongest pull.

Fastest % growth (small bases, loud signals):

• AI Data grows ~3x (data readiness is key)

• AI Cybersecurity nearly doubles (governance and risk budgets are catching up fast)

• AI Models also grow quickly, though from a smaller base than infra/software/services.

What this means for marketplaces

Put those signals together and the implication is clear. If the fastest-growing spend pools are infrastructure + software + services, the winners will be the companies that can:

• attach to hyperscaler infrastructure budgets (cloud consumption, committed spend, procurement convenience),

• sell AI software as an expansion of existing buying paths (like marketplaces)

• and package services so adoption doesn’t stall after purchase

PS. Source

Share

5 Seller Incentives To Drive Marketplace Revenue

Marketplace adoption by field sales teams is not a “motivation” problem. It’s an “incentives + enablement + measurement” problem.

Marketplace is one of the few GTM levers that can materially change outcomes — bigger deals, faster closes and less procurement friction. Yet many field sellers are slow to adopt them.

Recently we discussed how to drive Marketplace adoption & revenue in a webinar with AWS + ISV leaders.

Here are 5 incentives they see working:

1️⃣ Start with comp neutrality

Juston Salcido (then Sr. Partner Development Specialist at AWS) put it plainly:

“If your reps don’t get the same comp for deals that go through Marketplace that go direct, they’re gonna naturally just gravitate back towards the path that compensates them the most.”

Translation: Marketplaces need the same comp treatment + integrated into the sales process/CRM, not bolted on at the end.

2️⃣ Run a temporary comp-positive SPIF (to drive behavior change)

Comp neutrality removes the penalty. SPIFs create momentum.

In practice: time-box it (6–12 months), trigger when deals are transacted via Marketplace, and tier it by deal size so you’re not overpaying on small deals.

Kyle Heisner (Head of GTM & Alliances, Suger) shared what happens when a company removed it too early:

“He dropped his SPIF program… and he saw a 40% drop in the next quarter… [and] immediately went back and implemented it.”

3️⃣ Add recognition + competition

Prashant Pai (EVP, Strategic Alliances, KnowBe4) explained how they reinforce behavior at scale:

“We have an internal leaderboard… and we share that all the time on our revenue cadence calls. These reps have done the most deals through marketplaces, these reps have done the largest deals… We do that for our direct sellers, for our renewal folks, and for our channel folks as well.”

This works because sellers are competitive — and it makes Marketplace visible inside the revenue org.

4️⃣ Pay sellers to become internal evangelists

Mike Marzano (Global Head of Cloud Alliances, Contentsquare) described my favorite “second-order” incentive he implemented for his field:

“By going through the marketplace, you’ll get a SPIF. But if you go and put a story out on our global sales channel about why you co-sold, how you did it… what went well… what you’d do better… and you share that out… I’ll pay you more.”

That’s how you turn one win into a shared playbook.

5️⃣ Make Marketplace measurable

Juston’s conclusion was simple:

“You really gotta start tracking… the average deal size for direct deals, the average deal size for deals that go through Marketplace and have a co-sell influence.”

This helps sellers see faster cycles / bigger deals, Finance (and the rest) to see time-to-cash, and why Marketplace fees are worth it.

If you don’t measure it, the program becomes opinion — and may get cut when priorities shift.

Subscribe now

AI Reshapes Tech Services as Outsourced IT Spend Set to Rise (McKinsey)

Traditional IT budgets are tightening, yet agentic AI and outsourcing spending 📈 are expanding. How do you square that circle?

Let’s look at the tech service market, where partnerships are now crucial and compression and expansion happen at the same time.

McKinsey & Company frames the shift as we move from creating code to agentic AI—software that can take actions across systems.

Rules for service providers, SIs, ISVs and hyperscalers are changing.

⬇️ Where the market is compressing

A lot of work that used to justify headcount or long service engagements is getting cheaper:

• routine execution is increasingly automated

• more teams are building capability in-house

• repeatable delivery is harder to price by the hour

Pure-play AI startups and platform providers will sometimes go direct, bypassing parts of the traditional SI motion.

McKinsey estimates this could contract parts of traditional Tech Services by 20–30%. Services aren’t dying — but services tied to manual execution face the most pressure.

⬆️ Where the market is expanding

At the same time, scaling agents creates new spend. McKinsey estimates $100B–$400B of incremental opportunity by 2030, including:

• Workflow services ($200B): designing the architecture, governance, and security for agents. Making agents work in the enterprise requires complex integrations, permissions, monitoring, and exception handling—problems most teams can’t solve alone.

• Business function transformation: redesigning how departments (HR, support, ops) run with “human + agent” workflows.

Partnerships and ecosystems matter more than ever

Historically, companies scaled first, then partnered. In the agentic era, many will need to partner before scale to offer a complete solution.

No single vendor delivers end-to-end agentic AI. Real deployments demand a best-of-breed mesh across models, orchestration layers, SaaS platforms, data, and security. In practice, the fastest path to production is usually an ecosystem play—not a single-vendor promise.

That shifts market dynamics:

Service providers increasingly productize delivery (“service-as-software”) by building reusable IP, not just selling hours.

Marketplaces matter more as packaging and procurement rails for repeatable solutions—especially when integrations and controls are proven.

Hyperscalers are foundational, but partnerships become less about resale mechanics and more about deep technical integration and shared delivery patterns.

What winners tend to do

Winners won’t be the broad generalists. They’ll be specialized builders who:

• bring real domain expertise (you can’t build a healthcare claims agent without claims expertise)

• align pricing to outcomes

• treat ecosystem readiness as a first-class product requirement, not a late-stage GTM add-on

The market is adjusting for those who sell effort. It’s expanding for those who can reliably deliver outcomes.

PS. Source

Share

Insights from Cloud GTM Leader Cohort 14 launch

Cohort 14 of our Cloud GTM Leader course just kicked off — and what stood out was the cross-section of partner operators being pulled into marketplaces from different directions inside the partner org. This tells you where Cloud GTM is going next.

Leaders who run partner sales, partner ops, regional channels, and teams building the alliance motion from zero all shared the same conclusion:

Marketplace GTM may start in alliances, but it’s too strategic and too consequential for revenue, so it scales through the cross-company efforts.

They’re converging on the same problem: turning the marketplace from an end-of-quarter scramble into the default buying path. For some it’s about learning; for others it’s about scaling; for a few experienced operators it’s also about giving back.

Here are 5 signals you can learn from:

1️⃣ Marketplace is no longer a “nice to have”

Multiple leaders said customers, partners and field teams have shifted from being curious about marketplace… to actively demanding it.

2️⃣ Private offers are driving most of the value

One mature operator shared their early thesis was “public offers + product-led.”

What actually moved (massive) revenue: private offers + repeatable co-sell motions.

And the pressure is now coming from the field: where marketplace flows exist, sellers want them; where they don’t, they complain.

3️⃣ The biggest bottleneck is still internal

A consistent pattern came up across roles: the cloud side is workable… but internal alignment often takes months.

Comp neutrality was mentioned repeatedly as the hinge point — without it, marketplace becomes “special handling,” and AEs avoid it. Several described extended internal evangelism just to get a reliable “yes” from Sales leadership.

4️⃣ Global + multi-cloud scaling isn’t copy/paste

Leaders working across hyperscalers highlighted how different each hyperscaler motion feels. You need to learn and adapt substantially.

It’s equally hard to replicate one-geo success across the full GTM org. In some markets you can’t even go direct; distribution structures and local rules can change the strategy.

5️⃣ Marketplace is becoming a cross-functional operating system

This isn’t just about listing. It touches comp models/incentives, deal desk, billing, product packaging, approvals, and CRM integration. That’s why partner ops and revenue plumbing are increasingly part of the conversation.

Net takeaway:

In 2026 Cloud GTM isn’t just “doing marketplace.”

It’s designing and implementing a scalable system where marketplace is an easy path for your buyers and sellers to transact — and it’s embedded operationally, financially, and culturally across the org.

Enterprise budgets, C-suite priorities, and hyperscaler focus are all tilting toward marketplaces. When buyers prefer to buy this way, companies and sellers follow the money.

Cohort 14 of Cloud GTM Leader course will be a deep dive into building that system. Excited to learn together over the next five weeks with 15+ incredible operators.

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share

In today’s newsletter:

• If your sellers ignore Marketplace, the fix is simple: translate co-sell + Marketplace into MEDDPICC language they already use every day.

• Firefighting may save a deal, but only systems scale a motion. Too many teams use Marketplace for last-minute closing—not as a repeatable Cloud GTM engine (the exact shift that drives adoption).

• 1-pager can speed Marketplace deals. A Partnerships leader with a FinOps background shares the customer-facing doc that turns “buy via Marketplace” into an easier internal yes.

• Alphabet hit $4T — and Apple chose Gemini (the new AI alliance playbook: “frenemies,” hybrid stacks, non-exclusive moats).

• A $2T divergence is reshaping software and Cloud GTM (hyperscalers added ~$2T in value while the SaaS basket fell ~13%).

But before we dive in:

Cloud GTM Leader Cohort 14 launches tomorrow (Jan 20 kickoff). If 2026 is the year you make Marketplace a real growth engine, this is your moment.
Join 300+ alliance leaders who’ve transformed their Cloud GTM motions on AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud.

Join Cohort 14 (Starts Jan 20)

Make Marketplace MEDDPICC-Native (So Sellers Actually Use It)

Marketplace doesn’t need a new sales motion. It needs to become MEDDPICC-native. Most sellers already have a language for qualifying and closing deals.

Alliance teams often introduce Marketplace + co-sell as a separate track: new forms, new steps, new stakeholders, new “ask alliances.”

So even when a customer can buy through Marketplace, the default path wins: the one sellers already know.

The unlock is simple: translate Marketplace + co-sell into MEDDPICC so sellers feel like they’re running their normal process — just with more leverage.

Here’s a mapping we discussed in our recent webinars:

Metrics - 𝐌

Quantify the value of your ISV solution and the advantages of buying via marketplaces (using cloud commits, consolidated billing, less admin overhead for the customer’s finance team).

For sellers, marketplaces can unlock faster growth, efficiency and deployment.

But don’t just say “efficiency.” Use hard industry/internal data (see my previous posts, etc).

Economic Buyer - 𝐄

Your champion might be in the business unit, but the budget authority often sits elsewhere.

Use hyperscaler reach to understand the buyer’s commercial strategy, cloud commits, and who owns them. Clouds can also help you access higher levels (CIO/CTO) when the case is clear.

Decision Criteria - 𝐃

Understand how your prospect reviews, shortlists, and finalizes purchases. Collaborate with cloud teams to align decision criteria with Marketplace benefits.

Example: if “cost reduction” is a key criterion (and the customer has commits), frame the deal not as new spend, but as a way to use committed spend that may otherwise go unused.

Decision Process - 𝐃

Teams lose time because they map the approval chain too late.

Co-sell helps here: hyperscalers see customer buying patterns across accounts and can guide sellers through the internal decision-making maze.

When you engage cloud teams, share your status and specific requests (e.g., “Help us validate the legal review timeline”), not generic “any help is appreciated.”

Paper Process - 𝐏

Marketplace workflows can bypass traditional signature delays and grant user access faster. Push for standard marketplace agreements to cut redlines and shorten legal cycles.

Also: educate sellers to identify who can accept private offers early, not at the last moment.

Identify Pain - 𝐈

Work backwards from the customer’s goals and constraints: modernization, migration, etc. to understand how your solution fits best.

Co-sell can help connect your solution to cloud (and AI) priorities and frame the pain in the customer’s language.

Champion - 𝐂

When you cultivate champion/s inside the customer org, use hyperscalers to map stakeholders in areas like Security, Apps, AI and Procurement to strengthen internal support.

If your internal champion goes silent, cloud sellers can sometimes help to re-engage the account from a different angle.

Could your sellers explain how Marketplace fits in MEDDPICC without asking alliances?

Share

Stop Firefighting Deals. Build a Cloud GTM System

If Marketplace only shows up at the end of the deal, it’s not a GTM motion. It’s firefighting.

It may feel productive, but it doesn’t compound.

And many teams stay stuck because they “perform” all quarter — and “train/build the system” one day at SKO/QBR.

Here’s the contrast I keep seeing across ISVs: firefighting vs building a repeatable Cloud GTM system.

Firefighting deals

• Marketplace comes up at Stage 5/6: “Can we push this through Marketplace?”

• Sellers ping alliances: “Need a private offer ASAP”

• Cloud rep gets a messy co-sell request: no buyer context, no clear ask

• Customer procurement involved in the last week: “Who can accept the private offer?”

• The “win” depends on one operator who knows the maze

It creates chaos:

• Unpredictable outcomes

• Sellers conclude: “Marketplace is extra work”

• Cloud teams get flooded with low-quality asks (“spray and pray”)

• Zero compounding: the next deal starts from scratch

Building a Repeatable System

• Marketplace identified as a default path early (Stage 2/3 check)

• Sales drives the motion; alliances enable + orchestrate where needed (not “save” deals)

• Sales talk track + checklists is MEDDPICC-native

• Deal sharing is structured: status + next step + specific asks

• Procurement + private offer approver identified before endgame

• Cross-functional support is pre-wired: Finance (comp neutral + rev rec), Ops (automations), Product (marketplace packaging), Marketing

It builds leverage:

• Faster cycles, less noise

• Higher adoption across the sales team

• Better co-sell response from hyperscalers

• Real compounding: every deal makes the motion stronger

Firefighting saves a deal. Systems scale a motion.

Don’t treat learning and system-building as the opposite of “performing.”

It’s the engine behind performance.

Scalable Cloud GTM system includes:

People: reps know the play; alliances enable and reinforce it; ops support it, finance/legal aren’t surprised later

Enablement: onboarding + refreshers + call templates + deal reviews that teach the motion

Process: stage rules, checklists, automation workflows

Cadence: enablement, co-sell rhythms + always-on channel for questions

Tools: CRM automations, templates, structured co-sell submissions

A simple gut-check:

• Most teams: 90% firefight / 10% build

• Scaling teams: 70% execute / 30% build the system

Reality check (baseline B2B):

Salesforce’s State of Sales says reps spend only ~28–30% of their week actually selling (the rest is admin + internal work).

Seismic found that without enablement, sellers spend ~10 hours/week just searching for content.

If that’s true in “normal sales,” it’s usually worse in Marketplace motions that don’t have a system.

Are you building your repeatable Cloud GTM system?

Ready to transform your growth on cloud marketplaces?

Join our 5-week course for Alliance and Cloud GTM leaders and build your repeatable marketplace + co-sell growth engine on AWS, Microsoft or Google Cloud.

Cloud GTM Leader Cohort 14 kicks off on Jan 20!

Enroll in Cloud GTM Leader (Jan 20)

1-Pager That Turns ‘Buy on AWS Marketplace’ Into a Yes

Some of the best Marketplace GTM templates come from… former finance leaders who learned Cloud GTM.

Because they know exactly what procurement needs to hear.

Because when you’ve lived in finance, you don’t describe Marketplace as “another channel.”

You describe it as what it really is: A procurement + budget unlock that can accelerate deals if the buyer can explain it internally.

One of our Cloud GTM Leader alumni, Gital Schneider, showed a great example.

Gital started at Sisense leading Cloud FinOps. Then she got pulled into Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace work, saw the momentum up close, moved into Alliances, and is now Head of Partnerships.

Sisense is an AI-powered embedded analytics company, currently expanding its ecosystem and growing on AWS Marketplace.

“Small” problem that blocks real Marketplace deals

A seller says: “You can buy us via AWS Marketplace.”

The customer asks internally: How does it work? Why would we? What changes for procurement and billing?

Most companies hand-wave this conversation.

But the champion is rarely a Marketplace expert. So the deal stalls. Not because the customer doesn’t want the product, but because they can’t explain this path with confidence.

Sisense’s fix: a one-pager that translates Marketplace into buyer language.

Gital built a one-page customer-facing doc that is basically a procurement/FinOps translation layer for AWS Marketplace.

It might sound trivial. It’s not. Because Sisense saw AWS Marketplace deals going >20% faster through the sales cycle.

What their one-pager covers (and what you can copy)

It’s written in customer procurement language, not partner language.

1️⃣ Use existing AWS commitments

Purchases count toward AWS spend commitments.

This makes finance people pay attention.

2️⃣ Faster procurement and onboarding

Often approved faster due to pre-approved vendor status, simplified terms, and streamlined onboarding.

Speed is key for everyone.

3️⃣ Consolidated billing

The subscription shows up on the AWS bill.

One invoice, one process, fewer vendor setup headaches.

4️⃣ AWS financing

Options like “buy now, pay later” and flexible terms, while still counting the full value toward commitments.

For many buyers, this is the bridge between “want” and “can buy now.”

5️⃣ Cloud credits and incentives

Eligible purchases may qualify for AWS deal credits and programs.

Pro tip (the line most sellers forget)

Ask if the customer has unused commitments or a “use it or lose it” dynamic. Marketplace can unlock budget and speed at the same time.

The takeaway for Alliance leaders

Most Marketplace content is written for sellers. This one-pager is written for the buyer’s internal teams: finance, procurement.

That’s why it works.

If you don’t have your own version of this one-pager, build one.

Because it’s deal plumbing - the kind of asset that turns Marketplace into a repeatable buying motion.

Subscribe now

Google Hits $4T. Apple Picks Gemini. The New AI Alliance Playbook

Alphabet Inc. crossed a $4T market cap last week and landed the kind of alliance that reshapes an ecosystem: Apple. This deal shows how platform alliances will be built in the AI era.

What happened

Apple signed a multi-year agreement where parts of Apple Intelligence (including a revamped Siri) will run on Google’s Gemini models and Google Cloud infrastructure.

Apple called Google’s AI the “most capable foundation” for future Apple Foundation Models.

The partnership is explicitly non-exclusive, leaving Apple room to rebalance with OpenAI and others—but Google just won the flagship slot in the world’s most valuable consumer ecosystem.

And it helped push Alphabet past the $4T market cap threshold, joining Nvidia, Apple, and Microsoft in the four-comma club.

What this deal means & what alliance teams can learn:

“Frenemy” alliances work when you decouple functions

Google and Apple are fierce rivals across mobile OS, browsers, and hardware.

Yet they were able to compartmentalize competition and partner where it mattered most: best-in-class AI models + infrastructure capability.

When the functional value is high enough, the rivalry becomes manageable.

Hybrid AI is becoming the dominant architecture

The biggest partnerships may not be pure cloud offloads. They’ll be split-stack: sensitive context stays on-device or in a private cloud, while heavy AI workloads run on hyperscaler infrastructure.

Control + privacy on one side, frontier capability + scale on the other.

The “default AI provider” narrative is weakening

The deal is framed as non-exclusive. Translation: even the largest platforms will run multi-model stacks.

In AI, you’re competing for workload share, not permanent exclusivity.

Privacy is table stakes, not a feature

Apple’s insistence on keeping core data processing local is the real constraint for many enterprise deployments too.

Winning large alliances increasingly requires flexible deployment options and credible privacy guarantees, not just raw model quality.

Platform leverage compounds

This is validation of Google’s vertically integrated AI stack: custom TPUs, Gemini models, and cloud infrastructure working as one system.

It also gives Google’s enterprise partner narrative a major credibility boost.

Alphabet’s $4T milestone reflects a sharpened AI focus, improving Gemini reception, and custom silicon — with the Apple deal as the capstone.

For GTM leaders, the takeaway is simple: build flexible, high-trust partnerships that can win in a hybrid, multi-model AI world.

$2T Divergence: Cloud Hyperscalers Up ~$2T While SaaS Struggles

If you feel like the last 12 months in SaaS have been hard, you aren’t imagining it. The market is uneven, and the data is stark so it feels like a major divergence.

I looked at public market performance over the last 12 months (Jan 2025 – Jan 2026), comparing the Hyperscalers against the BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index.

”SaaS Recession” feels real

The BVP Emerging Cloud Index—which tracks a composite of ~75 of the most promising public cloud SaaS companies (see logos) - is down ~13% over the last year.

While the broader Nasdaq rose ~20%, the cloud SaaS basket didn’t just lag; it actually shrank.

At the same time, the hyperscalers moved the other way:

• Alphabet Inc. +69%

• Microsoft +7%

• Amazon +7%

Quick math:

Today, Alphabet + Microsoft + Amazon are worth ~$10T combined.

Based on their 12-month stock moves, they added roughly ~$2T of market value over the last year.

Now compare that with the SaaS cohort: BVP’s index is down ~13%. That’s ~$0.3T erased.

So while the SaaS universe shrunk, hyperscaler platforms grew — massively.

In fact, they added value roughly equal to the entire BVP index, which represents the cloud SaaS universe with ~$2.1T of total market cap.

Not all hyperscalers grew equally. And yes, these are diversified businesses. Same with SaaS companies - some are really winning now. But the directional trend has been now consistent for a couple of years:

Markets are pricing in that AI and cloud are the two growth engines — and the value is accruing around the platforms that control distribution, drive AI adoption and host customer data.

And here’s the part we shouldn’t ignore:

Those same hyperscaler platforms are now reinvesting $300B+ per year into AI infrastructure.

So we’re not just looking at today’s market caps — markets are pricing the future scale of these ecosystems.

This also isn’t just “AI hype.” It’s wallet consolidation.

CIOs and CFOs are under immense pressure to rationalize their stacks. They’re cutting discretionary point solutions and doubling down on platforms where they already have committed cloud spend.

Does it all mean that SaaS is dying? Not quite.

SaaS is changing and realigning to an AI-first world:

• Buyers are consolidating spend

• Point solutions face more scrutiny

• Platforms that control data, distribution, and budgets have more gravity

• You need to become AI-first, and it’s actually non-trivial

The top alliance leaders know this.

They grow through hyperscaler marketplaces, attaching to budgets that keeps growing: $531B in cloud commits.

They’re treating cloud alliances and marketplaces as a core GTM motion to accelerate SaaS realignment and tap into AI/cloud boom.

If 2026 is the year when you want Marketplace to become a real growth channel - join our cohort starting on January 20.

During the 5 weeks we’ll break down top marketplace + co-sell growth strategies on AWS, Microsoft and GCP with 10+ top alliance leaders.

Join Cohort 14 (Starts Jan 20)

P.S. If you found these insights valuable, please forward this newsletter to your alliance lead or cloud/GTM counterpart - it’s how this community shares what works.

Share