March Madness
If you are a college basketball fan, March Madness is the time of year when champions are crowned. The NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament, also known and branded as NCAA March Madness, is a single-elimination tournament played each spring in the United States.
A quick look back in time, I had the privilege to go to two schools with very opposite basketball histories – UMBC (University of Maryland Baltimore County) and UNC (University of North Carolina). For a stretch of 3 years, both teams made their way into the headlines. During my tenure at UNC KFBS (Kenan-Flager Business School) from 2015-2017, the basketball team had a heartbreaking buzzer-beater loss to Villanova in 2016, then the following year UNC got their redemption by being crowned champions over Gonzaga.
In 2018, UMBC won the America East conference to land themselves a 16 seed against none other than the number one overall seed Virginia. It was the first time in NCAA Men’s basketball history that a 16 seed upset a 1 seed.
This year neither team faired so well, but the 2021 Champion will be crowned soon. We are down to the Elite 8 and it’s anyone’s game.
Marketplace Madness
Now it’s time for March Marketplace Madness with 6 competitors – AWS, Red Hat, VMware, Google, Oracle, and Azure. Last week, I posted a poll on LinkedIn to gather some feedback from the ecosystem. The question was simple – “Which marketplace do you feel is best aligned with your organizational goals?”
Here are the preliminary results after 65 votes:
I’ve learned a lot about the different Marketplace offerings by the different cloud providers over the last year. AWS Marketplace appears to be the clear winner with Azure Marketplace taking the runner-up position followed by Google Marketplace and Red Hat Marketplace coming in 3rd and 4th. I omitted VMware Marketplace from this list since they are just getting started with commercial transactions. For full disclosure, I personally haven’t had the opportunity to dive in too deeply on Azure Marketplace or Google Marketplace.
Reasons To Purchase Through Marketplaces
According to a 2019 Forrester report, U.S. business-to-business e-commerce transactions will account for $1.8 trillion, or 17% of all U.S. B2B sales by 2023.
There are benefits to all parties involved including ISV partners, Cloud providers, and customers. I’ll explore the benefits of the cloud marketplaces in a later post, but here are a few highlights:
- Accelerate Deal Velocity
- Access Pre-Committed Spend
- Burndown committed Spend
- Consolidate IT Spend
- Fast access to tools
- Simplify finance, legal, and procurement
Free Trial
If you are in the process of evaluating Spinnaker, Armory can help accelerate that process. We offer free trials on 3 Marketplaces today with more on the horizon. If you need a custom more white-glove evaluation, please contact us directly.
