Last week at Parallels Summit 2010, our CTO Matt Domo gave a presentation that touched on the concept of Marketplace-as-a-Service (MaaS) as an emerging cloud category. This is a compelling concept and one I felt worth blogging a bit on.
What is happening:
-
Self-service catalogs (or marketplaces) are an emerging method for customers to purchase aggregated, integrated, and federated cloud services.
-
Service providers (and resellers) are tuning their categories to target their core customer base.
-
Marketplaces are seamless extensions of the sales process, offering great opportunities for upselling and cross-selling services.
-
Service providers are looking at automating the addition of services, plans, ratings and community reviews
Where this is happening: Examples abound. Here are a few meaningful ones:
-
Parallels Marketplace, available through Parallels Small Business Panel, enables service providers to monetize their customers through the sale of commercial applications. Providers can offer mers a variety of applications, without development effort, in a revenue-share business model.
-
Aflexi, a CDN provider, just announced something called FlexiMart, which is a marketplace for web hosts to buy, sell and trade bandwidth.
-
Google’s Solutions Marketplace was launched primarily as a place to promote and sell Google Apps, and in recent news, Google is expected to soon be announcing its plans to offer third party applications and services.
-
VMware has a marketplace for applications living on virtual appliances.
What hosters and cloud services providers can do:
-
Start building a community by allowing self-service partner contributions
-
Enable self-service product & service registration
-
Allow your resellers to brand and customize your services based on their capabilities
-
Create RSS feeds for changes and new additions to drive repeat traffic
-
Recognize the most widely adopted or purchased solution
-
Realize that many principles of ecommerce apply when designing, adopting, and leveraging a marketplace-as-a-service.
What do you think? Is MaaS worthy of a new cloud category of its own?
