From procurement pain to innovation gain: Why use the AWS Marketplace

Time is money. In today’s tech landscape, it’s no longer the big eating the small; it’s the fast eating the slow. 

Organizations are pushing their workforce to accelerate digital transformations. But antiquated purchasing processes often block the critical path between intent and execution. The result is stagnation, delays, and getting left behind.

Procurement as a service with tools like the AWS Marketplace can change that.

How much time do organizations waste on procurement? According to a study by Vertice, organizations spend roughly 100 days on new purchases and 60 days on renewals, wasting an average of 385 hours a year on procurement meetings. Government tech procurement takes three times longer. Ouch.

After spending 25 years in large enterprises followed by the past seven years scaling a start-up, I’ve seen how both sides of the coin are impacted by legacy buying practices. I’ve also experienced firsthand the power of the AWS Marketplace to overcome those challenges. 

Organizations that want fast innovation with agility need a software procurement solution. The AWS Marketplace is a digital storefront that gives customers around the globe the ability to “find, buy, deploy, and manage third-party software, data, and services to build solutions and run their businesses.”

The AWS Marketplace streamlines the procurement process. Rather than find, approve, and purchase solutions individually, organizations can do everything from one centralized place.

The AWS Marketplace enables innovation with speedy click-through purchasing and streamlined approvals, along with agile consolidated billing and standardized license terms. Organizations can even build a custom catalog of approved products that are pre-vetted for purchase and use those purchases to draw down from committed cloud spend contracts. 

There are more than 26,000 products and 5,500 vendors and AWS Partners like Pluralsight in the AWS Marketplace catalog. And it continues to expand every month.

For these reasons, the AWS Marketplace is more and more often the primary and preferred channel for doing business with enterprises—and for good reason. The AWS Marketplace enables customers to quickly select, subscribe, and deploy solutions in a matter of days instead of months. Less time procuring, more time innovating. 

When we were scaling A Cloud Guru, being part of the AWS Marketplace was instrumental to our success. It allowed enterprise customers worldwide to quickly access and deploy our cloud skills development solution to their entire workforce. 

Now that we’re integrated with Pluralsight, we’ve continued to leverage the AWS Marketplace and even expanded to support purchases by federal, state, and local public sector agencies. Most recently, a branch of the armed services was able to purchase Pluralsight for their personnel while cutting the average government procurement cycle time by over 80%.

Don’t let your innovation die in the hands of legal and procurement. To innovate in today’s rapidly changing landscape, you need frictionless access to the latest innovations, tools, and solutions—it’s purchase or perish. 

That’s why the AWS Marketplace is one of my favorite cloud computing solutions. Procurement as a service benefits both consumers and creators. Keep being awesome, cloud gurus!

Learn more about how we partner with AWS to build cloud skills.