How to sell on Azure Marketplace!

The software market has evolved from a standard ‘boxed product’ with a ‘perpetual license’ to a ‘grab it online’ and ‘pay as you go’, model. Previously, the software was categorized broadly into products or services.

Nowadays, with everyone moving to the cloud, the ways how software is delivered or made available to end-users is evolved too.

For example, a simple Human Resouce or Payroll application can be made available as a pre-installed product on a Virtual Machine (Infrastructure as a Service), or the entire application made available as just a Software-as-a-Service (or SaaS) on a per-user or per-seat basis.

With this approach, discovery, purchasing or procuring, and deployment of these software products became a challenge.

Microsoft has addressed these concerns with Azure Marketplace!

It is a one-stop shop for individuals, startups, small or medium businesses, or even enterprises to discover, find, search, purchase, procure, and deploy solutions on top of the Microsoft cloud (Azure, Office 365, Dynamics, etc…).

Having said that, publishing solutions on Azure Marketplace can be a daunting task if you’re new to Microsoft world. It could be overwhelming.

I’ve curated a list of videos, which should help you to kickstart your journey with Azure Marketplace and deploy your solutions over there.

I wish you happy selling :)

Introduction to Azure Marketplace
Microsoft Partner Center Walkthrough
Collecting Customer Leads
Technical Flow for APIs
Azure Marketplace API Integration

Microsoft Innovation Summit

On 2nd April, Microsoft hosted Microsoft Innovation Summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia & I got an opportunity to talk about Microsoft Azure Platform services which set up the foundation for AI services. For example, using Platform Services to host applications powered by Cognitive Services. This is just one scenario and I see endless possibilities. It was a pleasure to talk about and demo these services.
Here, I’m sharing the slide deck used for this talk.

Namaste,
Mayur Tendulkar (MAY10)