Channel budgets are starting to follow a different kind of partner. Tackle’s State of Cloud GTM report finds that marketplace revenue made up about 20 percent of software sellers’ total revenue over the past year, with respondents expecting that share to reach 32 percent next year, a jump of more than 60 percent in dollar contribution. Co-sell, deals where a hyperscaler’s own sales team helps close the business, is rising alongside it: partner-influenced pipeline is expected to climb from 22 percent of net-new deals to 30 percent. Eighty-three percent of respondents already sell through AWS, just over half sell through Microsoft, and more than a third sell through Google Cloud.
The scale behind that shift is hard to overstate. Omdia puts combined AWS, Azure and Google Cloud commitments at roughly 470 billion dollars, and Canalys expects more than half of all marketplace sales to run through channel partners rather than direct by 2027, according to Crossbeam’s review of both firms’ research. Forrester found that companies transacting on Microsoft’s marketplace saw a 587 percent return on the work it took to get listed and operating there, the same review reports, and names CrowdStrike, Snowflake, Palo Alto Networks and Splunk as vendors that have each passed 1 billion dollars in revenue through AWS Marketplace alone. Part of the appeal is procurement speed: a marketplace purchase draws down against cloud spend a customer has already approved, which skips a separate vendor security review and a new purchase order.
Real companies are already banking the difference. Zscaler told investors it has booked close to 900 million dollars in total contract value through cloud marketplaces so far this fiscal year, more than double the prior year’s pace. Impartner spent five years listed on Microsoft’s marketplace with little to show for it, then rebuilt its motion around co-selling and closed more than 2 million dollars in marketplace transactions within six months while engaging over 500 Microsoft account teams, Crossbeam reports.
None of this is a plug-in, which is the part the revenue projections leave out. Winning on a marketplace means knowing which hyperscaler a buyer already has budget parked with, pre-wiring the deal among the software vendor, any systems integrator involved and the cloud provider before a customer conversation starts, and designing for hyperscaler incentives like rebates and credits instead of filing for them after the fact. That is a heavier lift than running a co-op ad campaign, and it quietly hands three companies, AWS, Microsoft and Google, more influence over how software gets sold than any single reseller or agency network ever had.
Sources referenced in reporting: Tackle, State of Cloud GTM 2025 Report, Crossbeam, What It Actually Takes To Win On Cloud Marketplaces in 2026 and Beyond, Yahoo Finance, Zscaler Q3 2026 earnings coverage.