Tackle has built the software and processes to make it easy to sell your software in Cloud Marketplaces and leverage this new channel to drive significant revenue. Tackle’s Cloud Marketplace Platform drastically reduces your time to list and sell products on the Marketplaces, while providing granular transaction reporting, with zero engineering resources required. We enable your Sales, Business Development, Operations, and Finance teams to easily interface with the Cloud Marketplaces and leverage them to drive revenue fast. We’re constantly iterating on the Tackle platform based on customer feedback and best practices to make it easier and faster for you to transact on Cloud Marketplaces.
In this Cloud Marketplace Innovation Update, we’re excited to share some brand new functionality like Private Plan Acceleration for Azure Marketplace, Azure Easy Metering, and our latest enhancements to Smart Onboarding.
“Digital sales, global distribution, and cloud integration has never been more important for software companies, and Microsoft’s commercial marketplace connects ISVs with customers who can easily add purchases to their Microsoft contract and Azure bill,” said Brian Levenson, Business Program Manager for Microsoft’s commercial marketplace. “Private plans and metered billing provide flexibility to meet your business and customer requirements, and Tackle’s Private Plan Acceleration for Azure and Azure Easy Metering enhance Tackle’s Cloud Marketplace Platform and empower software companies to execute a fast and agile Cloud Marketplace strategy.”
Scale your revenue with Private Plan Acceleration for Azure Marketplace
Private plans allow ISVs to pass their custom pricing and terms to each buyer and more closely align their selling system and process with Azure Marketplace. This feature makes it easier for sellers to sell their products and sell them fast. With Private Plan Acceleration for Azure, sales leaders will love the ease at which they can send private plans, the ability to track the plan as it moves through the stages, and the granular visibility they will now see with each private plan. Finance and operation leaders will celebrate how simple it is to create a quote or invoice and attach it to the private plan inside of Tackle.
Tackle provides one dashboard that serves a single source of truth to view the status of all your private plans. Keep track of the full lifecycle of private plans with order tracking and see the offer creation, association to Tackle, purchase instructions, buyer opening instructions, buyer viewing of the plan in Azure Marketplace, and buyer acceptance of the plan.
In addition, Tackle allows all team members to receive email updates right to their inbox when a private plan status changes to eliminate any manual back and forth. The Azure Marketplace team can also be alerted with real-time notifications to private plans to reduce any confusion. At the end of the day, Private Plan Acceleration for Azure Marketplace gives you everything you need to manage a private plan in one place and provides all stakeholders greater visibility.
Evolve your business model towards consumption-based pricing with Azure Easy Metering
As software companies have moved towards consumption-based business models, there are more and more options for metering that are being created. We think it’s complicated enough to build metering inside your own product, let alone extend your metering system to support a Cloud Marketplace. Tackle addressed this problem by creating a metering interface to turn metering into a business operations function instead of an engineering function that requires technical expertise and API integrations.
With Azure Easy Metering, ISVs can instantly send metering records for an individual customer or a batch of customers at the same time. This makes it simple to facilitate overages, monthly true-ups, and percent-of-spend billing. There are also options to audit past metering events to see the amount and status. Now, as your business evolves toward metered business models you’ll be enabled across Azure Marketplace.
Stay tuned for API Metering for Azure which will allow ISVs to bill overages within their own SaaS application – coming soon from Tackle!
Customize your pricing, keywords and product categories to enhance Smart Onboarding
You might remember reading about the launch of Tackle’s Smart Onboarding a few weeks ago. We built Smart Onboarding to drive alignment between all cross-functional stakeholders to accelerate ‘Time-to-Marketplace’ and enable sellers to sell faster and create a new revenue channel across the Cloud Marketplaces. Good news, we’ve already added some new bells and whistles to Smart Onboarding to make it even more powerful!
ISVs can now publish their own pricing information on their Marketplace product page. There’s also added functionality to add your own keywords and product categories to help potential buyers find your listing on Marketplace. Let each functional department provide their relevant pieces of required information and save time internally going back and forth on communication. All of this information can be input in Tackle’s configuration form and completed in any order to accelerate time to go-live.
Questions about our latest updates? Let us know! The Tackle team is here to build a platform that our customers love and are excited to use, and we want to hear from you.
Want to see any of these features in action? Contact your Tackle Guide with any questions. If you’re not yet a Tackle customer, schedule a demo today or check us out on AWS Marketplace, Azure Marketplace, and Google Cloud Platform Marketplace.
