If you’re a software company with a desire to sell your software on multiple Cloud Marketplaces, it’s time to rejoice: Tackle has announced support for Azure, GCP, and AppSource, joining our current offering for Amazon Web Services Marketplace.
We’ve always specialized in helping our customers take full advantage of what selling through Cloud Marketplaces has to offer, both by aiding the listing creation and management process and by giving them greater visibility into their marketplace performance with our reporting platform. But now, after months of requests from ISVs, these SaaS platforms can be used to help companies reach additional customers across multiple Cloud Marketplaces, not just AWS Marketplace.
This evolution in Tackle’s product offering wasn’t a decision driven by top down edict to grow for the sake of growth; it was driven by our customers who expressed interest in working with Tackle to expand their reach to new customers who buy through the Azure and GCP marketplaces. “We are a customer-focused company and our customers have consistently asked for multiple marketplace support,” said John Jahnke, CEO of Tackle.io. “They have buyers who operate with one, two or three of the clouds, and as marketplaces become more of a shift in the way customers purchase software, they want the ability to have their products available to be easily consumed.” Tackle founder and CTO Dillon Woods added, “We would have a lot of success getting an ISV into the AWS Marketplace, then they’d be happy with what we did for them. Their next question would be: ‘Could you do the same in Azure?’ or ‘Could you do the same in GCP?’ so I really felt it was important to meet the needs of the software vendors.”
Cast a Wider Net With the Tackle Platform
With the addition of Azure, AppSource, and GCP, Tackle’s Cloud Marketplace Platform can now be used to streamline the process of listing on the Cloud Marketplaces on a larger scale. Tackle’s solution ensures that much less time and internal resources need to be dedicated to adapting software to be viable on the Cloud Marketplaces; we handle the pain, you get the gain. This is perfect for ISVs with the goal of listing on multiple marketplaces yet do not have the resources or time to focus on the engineering challenges that come with that process. In partnership with Tackle, ISVs can be listed in a fraction of the time on Azure, GCP, AppSource or AWS with a guaranteed listing launch vs the unknowns and potential failure that comes with doing it alone.
Tackle has always simplified the data collection and reporting of AWS listings, as well as enabling ISVs to easily submit metering records for their pay as you go customers. Now with Tackle’s support for Azure, AppSource, and GCP, we can expand the scope of those reports to encompass ALL of our customers’ listings across all four marketplaces, collecting all of their sales data in one easy to use dashboard. Instead of engineering your own platform and individually adding each marketplace’s data, we handle it all for you. This data can be exported to a CSV, or directly integrated with software you already use like Slack, Marketo, and more, dramatically simplifying the reporting process for your finance and sales teams.
Evolving Together
To help jumpstart our efforts on GCP Marketplace, we partnered with our friends at ZData to launch their Cloud Enablement Services on the platform. “We began investigating the GCP Marketplace when one of our enterprise customers was interested in leveraging GCP for a large order,” said Dan Feldhusen, President and CEO of ZData. “At first we were worried about meeting our customer’s speedy deadline, but we partnered with Tackle.io and used their platform to list quickly and processed our first order within 10 days of going live.”
Partnering with the team at Microsoft, we worked with Augmentir as an early implementation of Tackle’s Azure Marketplace efforts. “We had a goal of listing Augmentir in the Azure Marketplace prior to the 2019 Microsoft Inspire conference, but our engineering team didn’t have any spare cycles to work on the integration,” said Chris. “We chose to use the Tackle Upstream Platform at the suggestion of Microsoft and in the end we were glad we did, as Tackle did a great job of supporting us throughout the entire listing process.”
Bold Moves, Clear Value
Tackle’s multi-marketplace solution benefits everyone looking to sell on the cloud: ISVs interested in one specific marketplace, ISVs looking to expand into new marketplaces, and ISVs already in marketplaces that want easily accessible data from all of their listings. “We focus on driving value for our customers and that value is driven by helping them execute on their strategies,” says Jahnke. “Ultimately their strategy is about generating revenue, so we are excited to help our ISV customers execute on that. It will drive growth for Tackle, which will allow us to continue to grow the team, and continue to innovate on how to help software companies generate revenue in this new cloud era, which is really our long term vision and focus.”
The benefit to our customers is clear, but what does this evolution mean for Tackle itself? “I think it will affect the company really positively,” said Woods. “It is going to change our marketing strategy and the way we approach the market because now instead of just being an AWS company, we are going to be a multi-cloud company. Now we’re much more approachable for all types of software vendors. I think it will really allow us to grow and expand as a company, as we reach more software vendors that want to use these marketplaces.”
The Sky’s the Limit
As we move into our new future as a multi-Cloud Marketplace company, Tackle won’t be resting on our laurels. We will continue to evolve our platform to make selling on the cloud as simple and seamless as possible, no matter which marketplace you transact on. “Right now, we are limited because of the capabilities of different marketplaces: not all of the same listing types are available in the different marketplaces or not all of the same reporting capabilities are available,” said Woods. “I want to try to bridge that gap in a couple ways: first by working with the Cloud Providers to inform their roadmaps and on the other side, have Tackle’s engineering team build out product and software to help bridge those gaps. When a vendor is listing through Tackle across those marketplaces, they won’t even need to know the differences.”
