Cloud Marketplaces Review: Ingram Micro, Salesforce AppExchange, More

Cloud marketplaces have been around for more than a decade. You’ve no doubt heard of many of them. They come in many flavors.

Channel partners may be most familiar with those offered by their distributor partners; for example, D&H Distributing, Ingram Micro, Synnex and Tech Data. Pax8 emerged as a modern distributor for cloud services, arriving with no legacy product baggage. Then there are vendor marketplaces, most notably Salesforce’s AppExchange. SaaS marketplaces are also available from AWS, Google, Microsoft, and ServiceNow. AppSmart is another partner-led shop for B2B technology services.

There are hundreds of technology vendors offering B2B marketplaces, according to Forrester.

Despite being around, in some shape or form, for more than 10 years, the stars may finally be aligning for these marketplaces. Why? There’s digital transformation and the shift to cloud; plus, the convenience, vetting, lower cost and risk that cloud marketplaces offer.

Still, cloud marketplaces are an emerging entity with a very small percentage of spend, probably no more than 5%. And that varies by the category of product, as well as by the size of the business.

Scroll through the slideshow above for a closer a look at for a breakdown of some of the most notable cloud marketplaces.