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:
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Self-service catalogs (or marketplaces) are an emerging method for customers to purchase aggregated, integrated, and federated cloud services.
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Service providers (and resellers) are tuning their categories to target their core customer base.
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Marketplaces are seamless extensions of the sales process, offering great opportunities for upselling and cross-selling services.
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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:
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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.
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Aflexi, a CDN provider, just announced something called FlexiMart, which is a marketplace for web hosts to buy, sell and trade bandwidth.
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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.
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VMware has a marketplace for applications living on virtual appliances.
What hosters and cloud services providers can do:
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Start building a community by allowing self-service partner contributions
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Enable self-service product & service registration
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Allow your resellers to brand and customize your services based on their capabilities
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Create RSS feeds for changes and new additions to drive repeat traffic
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Recognize the most widely adopted or purchased solution
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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?
About Joshua Beil
Joshua Beil (@joshbeil) is the Director of Market Strategy and Research for Parallels, the leading provider of automation and virtualization software to the web hosting community. Previously, Josh was the Director of Social Media & Technology at a Level 3 Communications [Nasdaq: LVLT] where he provided strategic and tactical sales support. Before that, Josh was CEO and cofounder of Skywave Broadband, Inc, the largest commercial WiFi service provider in Hawaii. He was named one of Pacific Business News' Forty Under 40 for 2006, and in 2005, he was named a High Tech Leader by the Pacific Technology Foundation. Before co-founding Skywave, Mr. Beil was VP of Research and Development for the market research boutique, Tier 1 Research, where he covered the Internet infrastructure sector as an analyst, and negotiated and sold subscriptions to Tier 1's research services. Josh has also previously served as the Senior Analyst for Exodus Communications as well as the internationally known market research firm, IDC. He holds a Certificate in E-Business from UCSC Extension, and he graduated with honors from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a major in Psychology.
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