Cloud partnerships: The force multipliers driving innovation and revenue

In today’s economic climate, where efficiency and innovation must go hand in hand, cloud partnerships are quietly becoming one of the most effective force multipliers for B2B software businesses. More than just co-marketing or shared logos, high-functioning cloud partnerships have evolved into dynamic ecosystems that fuel faster revenue cycles, deeper customer insights, and scalable go-to-market motions.

At Clazar’s Catalyst 2025 panel, held as part of Partnership Leaders’ conference, this theme took center stage. Leaders from top-performing ISVs like UIPath and Confluence joined forces with AWS and Clazar to delve into the operational realities and opportunities of partnership-led growth.

From access to acceleration

Historically, partnerships with hyperscalers like AWS, Azure, and GCP were viewed as strategic checkboxes—beneficial for credibility or co-sell but not central to the revenue engine. That paradigm is shifting dramatically.

According to Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to total $723.4 billion in 2025, up from $595.7 billion in 2024. This represents a 21.5% year-over-year growth, driven by the accelerated adoption of AI technologies and the expansion of cloud use cases across distributed, hybrid, cloud-native, and multicloud environments. This significant growth underscores the expanding opportunities for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) within cloud ecosystems, as businesses increasingly rely on cloud services to support their operations and drive innovation.

When executed well, these relationships don't just support sales. They accelerate them. Co-sell pipelines close faster, budgets get unlocked through committed cloud spend, and sellers gain access to deals that might otherwise be out of reach.

What the best do differently

Insights from the Catalyst 2025 panel revealed a clear pattern: top performers don't treat partnerships as standalone functions. Instead, they embed partnership thinking into product, sales, marketing, and customer success.

Some of the winning motions discussed include:

Designing for partner attach from day one

Ensuring that product integrations or marketplace listings aren't afterthoughts but integral to the GTM blueprint. Too often, ISVs approach cloud marketplaces and partner programs as add-ons after GTM and product development are already in flight. Top performers flip this sequence. They bake cloud partnership considerations into the early stages of product, pricing, and packaging decisions.

This might mean:

• Building native integrations with hyperscaler technologies (e.g., AWS S3, Azure Synapse) to increase co-sell potential.
• Structuring SKUs to be compatible with marketplace procurement paths.
• Aligning product milestones with partner program tiers and solution validations (e.g., AWS Competency or Co-Sell Ready status).

When partner attach is embedded from the outset, companies create a natural flywheel for ecosystem growth. Sales motions become smoother, technical alignment with partners improves, and credibility in the market increases, especially with buyers already invested in specific cloud platforms.

A great example of a partnership and marketplace-first organization is cybersecurity leader Wiz. Launched in 2020, Wiz prioritized native integrations with AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud from the outset. This strategic alignment is in no small part behind their meteoric growth to $100 million in ARR (the fastest SaaS company to hit this milestone). The coolest part? Wiz generates over 70% of its total revenue through the marketplace.

Tapping commited cloud budgets

Particularly during economic tightening, channeling marketplace transactions in a frictionless way to close deals faster is vital. Enterprises are increasingly allocating larger portions of their IT spend through committed cloud consumption agreements with hyperscalers. These budgets, often pre-committed and underutilized, present a strategic opportunity for ISVs.

High-performing vendors learn to:

• Frame their solutions as budget-neutral when transacted through the marketplace, making it easier for buyers to say yes.
• Work backwards from the customer’s committed spend to position their product as a way to optimize cloud value realization.
• Engage cloud account teams to uncover which accounts have burn pressure or upcoming budget review cycles.
  
  

This tactic not only unlocks faster procurement cycles but also builds stronger alliances with cloud sales teams, who are incentivized to help burn down committed spend.

Collaborative marketing

While joint webinars and press releases still have value, modern cloud partnership marketing requires deeper collaboration. Top ISVs move beyond surface-level branding and build co-owned demand programs that align with both partner objectives and pipeline goals.

Examples include:

• Co-branded solution briefs that tell a joint value story, especially in verticalized or use case-specific formats.
• Partner-led customer events, roundtables, or workshops that drive direct engagement with target buyers.
• MDF-backed paid campaigns that are run in lockstep with hyperscaler partner marketing teams and co-funded through joint GTM programs.

The key is to ensure marketing is not just a brand exercise but a revenue-generating engine, tied to shared pipeline goals and mutual accountability between the ISV and the cloud provider.

Supporting these strategies, Forrester Consulting reports that partners building marketplace practices achieve a 234% return on investment, with 50% faster deal closures and 4-5 times larger deal sizes.

More than revenue: A platform for innovation

While co-sell wins and accelerated deal cycles are often the headline benefits of cloud partnerships, the most mature ISVs see something deeper: a platform for continuous innovation. These companies don’t just transact through the cloud—they build with it, on it, and alongside it.

By developing natively on cloud platforms, ISVs gain access to a rich ecosystem of services that can fundamentally shape product roadmaps. This includes everything from scalable infrastructure to proprietary AI/ML models, data services, and security frameworks. Leveraging these capabilities not only reduces development time and cost, but also ensures tighter alignment with customer environments—especially those already standardized on hyperscaler stacks.

Michael Musselman, cloud marketplace expert and co-founder of PCAN, has emphasized how forward-thinking companies increasingly view cloud partnerships as a way to stay close to the innovation curve. As he put it in a previous discussion with Clazar, “The most strategic partner teams aren’t just working on deals—they’re shaping the product direction by working hand-in-hand with cloud platform teams.” Whether that means joining early beta programs, piloting new APIs, or co-developing solution architectures, top ISVs position themselves as innovation allies, not just sales beneficiaries.

This approach pays dividends beyond technology. It helps ISVs tighten relationships with hyperscaler product teams, opens doors to high-value co-marketing and launch opportunities, and creates differentiation in crowded markets. Instead of chasing the roadmap after the fact, these companies help define it, often securing early-mover advantages and greater visibility within partner ecosystems.

In this way, cloud partnerships become a force multiplier not only for revenue, but for long-term innovation and market leadership. 

Looking ahead

As more enterprise software revenue flows through cloud marketplaces and partner-assisted selling becomes the new standard, the companies that will win in the long run are those that stop treating cloud partnerships as a standalone function. Instead, they treat them as a force multiplier—deeply embedded across every go-to-market motion, from demand generation to sales execution to customer success.

This mindset shift is already underway among the most mature ISVs. For them, partnership strategy doesn’t begin and end with a partner manager—it’s woven into how products are packaged, how sellers are trained, how deals are forecasted, and how marketing campaigns are run. Cloud marketplaces aren't just another procurement channel; they're a strategic revenue engine. Co-sell isn’t a reactive coordination task—it’s a core part of pipeline planning. And partner marketing isn’t just about brand alignment—it’s a demand-generation lever tied to shared revenue goals.

By building this muscle early, companies create systems that scale. They align more naturally with how buyers now want to buy: through trusted cloud platforms, with pre-committed budgets, and in ways that reduce procurement friction. They also position themselves to ride the continued investment hyperscalers are making in partner ecosystems—whether that’s through marketplace incentives, co-marketing programs, or product co-innovation.

In this new era of cloud GTM, partnership isn’t a department. It’s the connective tissue that amplifies every other part of the business. And those who recognize and operationalize that reality early will outpace the rest, not just in revenue, but in resilience, reach, and relevance.

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