Friday, October 22, 2021

VMware Marketplace Launches Third-Party Commerce Capability

Originally published on VMware Tech Alliance Partners (TAP) Blog

Authored by Ajay Patel

VMware users can now purchase third-party partner solutions from the VMware Marketplace and deploy these solutions directly to VMware endpoints. Plus, we are delighted to announce a host of upcoming VMware Marketplace portfolio capabilities and services that will accelerate our customers’ cloud adoption journeys and our partners’ go-to-market strategies with VMware.

Recent innovations in digitization have had deep impacts in almost every aspect of our life, from food and healthcare to personal finance and manufacturing. Core to this are innovative IT applications that are more intelligent and powerful than ever before. In part, this is fueled by the wide gamut of tools available to build applications, and the breadth available in multi-cloud computing infrastructure to run these applications. Hence, it is vital for organizations across all industries to empower their development and technology teams with access to the most expansive software tool set to build, run and manage these applications. All actors across the stack, from IT Administrators to DevOps Engineers, to Developers, and Business users, need easy and quick access to the tools to innovate quickly, build effectively and manage efficiently.

The need for an accessible ecosystem

At VMware, we seek to empower our users by giving them the ability to choose the right set of tools for their unique goals. We build deep, meaningful partnerships with industry peers to support our customers’ choices across their full technology stacks. We also make the discovery and usage of these partner solutions simpler through the VMware Marketplace. The VMware Marketplace is that one-stop shop – with over 2,100 solutions spanning categories such as security, storage, networking and more, where customers can discover and deploy validated and certified ecosystem solutions for all VMware products.

Discover, try, buy, deploy

Today, we are proud to announce the launch of commercial capabilities on VMware Marketplace – making it the single location to discover, try, purchase, and deploy VMware ecosystem solutions!

We launched the initial phase of our commercial transactability journey with our design partners at Catchpoint, LicenseFortress, and One Convergence.

In future phases, we plan to expand our commerce capabilities to include other forms of payments and offer types including pay by invoice, credit fund based transactions and usage based billing.

Easing our customer’s digital innovation journey

The VMware Marketplace houses a robust catalog of validated and certified artifacts and images that assures users of interoperability with their choice of VMware platform. VMware Marketplace reduces customer consumption friction, through its easy filter / search functionality and an in-product experience with various VMware products (for example, the VMware Cloud Director App Launchpad).

With the addition of commerce, VMware Marketplace further smoothens that customer journey. Users can discover the right ecosystem solution, try it out, purchase it directly if they are satisfied with the trial, and then deploy that file directly to vSphere or other VMware locations – without ever leaving the Marketplace user interface.

And that’s not all

Apart from this keystone commercial capability, we also announced a few exciting forthcoming capabilities at VMworld 2021:

  • We plan to launch image building capabilities, that will enable any user – whether a VMware customer or a VMware partner – to provide us with code or a package that we can build, package, verify, customize, and publish for them in the format of their choice and deployable on the platform of their choice.
  • We plan to enable deployments of solutions directly from VMware Marketplace to native cloud endpoints such as AWS, Azure and Google Cloud Platform by packaging solutions in the applicable formats (for example, Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) for AWS).
  • We intend to launch VMware Application Catalog that expands on the capability of Tanzu Application Catalog and enables curation and customization of VM-based images in addition to container images supported today.

Together, these changes will provide our customers with the ability to create a curated catalog of open source, ISV content and their own private images that are compatible with the cloud of their choice.

Next steps

If you are a VMware ecosystem partner and would like to enable sales of your solution through VMware Marketplace, please contact us at VMwareMarketplace@vmware.com.

If you would like to publish a paid listing on VMware Marketplace, please contact us at VMwareMarketplace@vmware.com. If you’d like to start purchasing through VMware Marketplace, head to our catalog page! To learn more about VMware Marketplace, please visit our webpage.