Amazon AWS Marketplace: One-Click Access to Big Name Vendors

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) is at it again. This time the news from Seattle is Amazon Web Services’ new AWS Marketplace, an online app store that gives customers one-click access to software and technical services for creating products and running businesses. Billing is variable, the cloud standard, and users can choose an hourly or monthly basis for payments.

The other stakeholder in the AWS store is, of course, software developers and SaaS providers. The benefit for them, Amazon asserts, is increased customer awareness and simplified deployment and automated billing, all on a platform leveraging Amazon online retail technology with exposure to lots (as they’d like you to notice) of active users.

Amazon also claims that the AWS Marketplace has a wide selection of IT and business software, both free and commercial, including software infrastructure, developer tools and business applications, coming from firms such as 10gen, CA Technologies, Canonical, Couchbase, Check Point Software, IBM, Microsoft, SAP AG, and Zend, as well as open source offerings including Drupal, MediaWiki and WordPress.

“AWS Marketplace brings the same simple, trusted, and secure online shopping experience that customers enjoy on Amazon.com’s retail website to software built for the AWS platform, streamlining the process of doing research and purchasing software,” said Terry Hanold, AWS vice president of New Business Initiatives, in the press release. “AWS Marketplace makes it even easier to run software on AWS because you can find a wide variety of AWS ecosystem providers’ solutions, in one place, where much of the work involved in building and deploying solutions on top of AWS has already been done for you by these solutions providers.”

Jeff Bezos and Co. have certainly been active on the cloud front this past week: Amazon Web Services announced CloudSearch, a fully managed, scalable cloud service that permits businesses to integrate search capabilities into their applications: and the AWS Partner Network, which may be a way for Amazon to better to manage the complexities of its partner ecosystem (and also may be a response to increasing competition from OpenStack).

Talkin’ Cloud readers can click here to visit the AWS Marketplace web page.