Jun 14, 2024
6
 min read

How to list on the Google Cloud Marketplace

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Samhita Suresh
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What is the Google Cloud Marketplace?

The Google Cloud Marketplace is a digital storefront allowing tech buyers to find, procure, and deploy business solutions hosted on the Google Cloud. Buyers get single source access to a wide catalog of enterprise-grade software curated, vetted and hosted by Google, that can be seamlessly absorbed into their existing tech environment using pre-existing commits.

The Google Cloud Marketplace, in the company of the two other cloud hyperscaler marketplaces (AWS and Microsoft Azure), has reshaped the SaaS sales and procurement landscape.

Let’s zoom out and look at the macro trends that brought us here.

In 2022, Deloitte’s Future of Cloud survey of executive-level leaders showed the transition of product workloads to the cloud, with respondents saying that only 25% of their workload remained on-prem, with a planned reduction to 15% or less. The digital transformation movement has since transitioned from being a market disruptor to the industry norm, with worldwide cloud infrastructure services expenditure growing 19% year on year in Q4 2023 to reach US$78.1 billion.

Of the three hyperscalers, Google Cloud saw the strongest revenue growth of over 25%. With organizations of all sizes moving their workloads to the cloud, over 60% of the world’s thousand-largest companies and 90% of funded gen AI startups are Google Cloud customers.

The natural progression of a cloud hosted industry is to transact on the environment they live in, which brings us to the emergence of cloud marketplaces as the preferred procurement channel. The seeds for this were sown back in 2022 when the number of new cloud marketplace buyers grew 200% from Q1 to Q4.

According to Canalys, cloud marketplaces have now gone from a forward-looking trend to a “strategic and actionable routes-to-market” accelerated by the pandemic-enforced shift to sellerless procurement interactions. Canalys also predicts that global sales of third-party vendor software and services through cloud marketplaces will hit US$45 billion by 2025.

Why sell on the Google Cloud Marketplace ?

While the advantages for buyers to transact through the marketplace are clear and sellers are responding to the buyer demand for this route-to-market, ISvs are aligning their orgs towards marketplaces sales for a host of other listing benefits. Selling on the Google Cloud Marketplace, or any cloud hyperscaler marketplace, gives you access to millions (or even billions) in buyer commits. The simplicity and standardization of contracting and invoicing through the marketplace also makes this route attractive, slashing deal closure times and facilitating quick renewals.

GCP marketplace deal improvement stats

The economics of selling on the Google Cloud Marketplace offers even more benefits for sellers-

  • Cohort access - Listing on the GCP marketplace helps you build awareness among new customer groups, particularly increasing your access to enterprise customers building their solutions with and on Google Cloud. By actively driving your partnership with the Google Cloud Marketplace, you increase the chances of having your solutions “presented to customers with AI-powered recommendations and alongside popular services while they're building”.
  • Simplified listing management - Google Cloud Marketplace's management portal serves as a single source destination for listing, monitoring, and updating your offering along with tracking usage and offering customer support. The GCP marketplace also offers standardized user agreements that can be plugged into contracts
  • Association with the Google brand - Listing on the GCP marketplace gives you the benefit of being associated and vetted by a globally trusted brand like Google. Additionally, as your association with the GCP marketplace grows, you can begin leveraging co-marketing and co-sell opportunities to drive inbound interest and access Google's vast seller pool.
GCP Marketplace advantages for buyers and sellers

What are the listing incentives and resources offered by Google Cloud Marketplace?

Google Cloud’s vision for the Google Cloud Marketplace is to offer its end customers solution completeness – the ability to source holistic and instantly compatible solution ecosystems with rapid time-to-value. Parallely, Google Cloud’s ultimate goal is to drive and increase workload consumption through these transactions. This is the core reason why Google Cloud treats  listings that have direct parity with first party services, with consistency and consideration for the customer’s need to make a fully informed choice.  They win the workload either way.

To drive transaction volume, the GCP Marketplace offers a series of programs, offers and resources to help you succeed.

  • The Google Partner Advantage Program, which is a prerequisite to listing on the GCP Marketplace (we’ll speak about this soon), offers multiple tiers of benefits ranging from access to events and training material to discounts and partner incentives.
The Google Partner Advantage Program benefits
  • Partners eligible for co-marketing initiatives benefit from GCP’s expertise in position and messaging support to help you drive organic traffic and generate inbound interest for your listing. There are also multiple eligibility-based partner advisory services to help you define your joint value proposition with Google Cloud and access the wider seller network
  • The GCP Marketplace recently introduced a Customer Credit Program which offers ISVs GCP credits on a percentage of the Annual Contract Value (ACV) of new cloud workloads brought in by them. ISVs can use these credits on their own cloud consumption invoices or pass along the benefits to their customers on the marketplaces during deal negotiation conversations.

Learn more about the Google Cloud Marketplace opportunity for ISVs from Dai Vu, Managing Director, Cloud Marketplace and ISV GTM Initiatives at Google Cloud

How to list on the Google Cloud Marketplace

The process to  list and begin transacting on the Google Cloud Marketplace can be split into two parts, each with their set of steps.

Part I - Achieving partner eligibility

  1. Enroll in the Google Partner Advantage Program
  2. Achieve Build Partner Status
  3. Sign the Marketplace Vendor Agreement

Part II - Setting up the listing

  1. Go the DIY route, or
  2. Let Clazar do the heavy lifting
Path to setting up your GCP listing

Part I - Achieving partner eligibility

1. Enroll in the Google Partner Advantage Program

Like we saw a little earlier, the Partner Advantage program provides ISVs with the tools and resources to build or distribute solutions within the Google ecosystem to improve outcomes for joint end users. To enroll for the program, you will need to submit company details, your (owner of the initiative) details and then accept the program agreement and terms.

2. Achieve Build Partner Status

Once you become a Google Partner, you will need to fulfill a set of requirements to become either a Service, Sell or Build Partner. SaaS ISVs selling own and operated solutions “that are built with and run on Google Cloud; are an extension for a Google Cloud or Google Workspace product; or integrate with a Google Cloud or Google Workspace product,” need to achieve Build Partner status by fulfilling its requirements.

You can do so by logging into the Partner Advantage Portal and creating a new authorization request and accessing and completing activities in the program requirements section.

GCP Partner Advantage Portal activity status

3. Sign Marketplace Vendor Agreement

Once you have achieved build partner status, you will need to work with your Google Cloud representative to sign the Marketplace Vendor Agreement before you gain access to the Producer Portal from where you can list and manage your offering. In order to proceed to part 2 of this process, you will have to meet the below eligibility criteria.

You can do so by logging into the Partner Advantage Portal and creating a new authorization request and accessing and completing activities in the program requirements section.

Organizational requirements
SaaS product requirements
Operational requirements
Partner Advantage Member
Be production-ready (not alpha or beta) to be publicly listed and sold through Cloud Marketplace
Products on Cloud Marketplace must have the same capabilities and features as any versions offered outside
Incorporated in supported regions
Must not include professional services
Any critical security issues must be updated and resolved before listing
Have at least US $1,000,000 in annual revenue
Must not include known vulnerabilities, viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, or other malicious code
Must be willing to commit resources to create and maintain the listing
Verified to Google Cloud through an approval process during onboarding that product is primarily hosted on Google Cloud
Must commit to providing timely support to your customers

Part II - Setting up the GCP Marketplace listing

Now you’re ready to start creating your listing. There are two ways to do this - 1) go the DIY route, commiting engineering and operational bandwidth to list and run your GCP marketplace operations, or 2) hand over the heavy lifting to a cloud GTM automation like Clazar to manage and scale your GCP marketplace listing for you.

1. DIY-ing  your Google Cloud Marketplace listing

There are four parts to creating your listing.

Stage
Steps
Partner Advantage Member
  1. Complete the Cloud Marketplace Project Info Form to access to Producer Portal, where you will find the Cloud Commerce Partner Procurement API and the Service Control APIs to begin integrating your product
  2. Go to the Cloud Resource Manager and create a new project in the format <your_company_name>-public.
  3. Grant role permissions to Google at the project and service levels
  4. Add product information in the producer portal with product, pricing and technical integration details
  5. Create your product with ‘SaaS’ as the solution type
  6. Fill the Product Details tab of the Product details section - this includes all marketing information, and links to documentation.

The steps for this stage are available in detail here.
Pricing set-up
Choose between Free, Subscription-based, Usage-Based or Combined pricing plans by going to the Overview page of your product in the producer portal and clicking EDIT in the Pricing section. Once you enter this, your model will be submitted for review, which will take up to 4 business days.
The steps for this stage are available in detail here.
Product integration with Google Cloud
Ensure that your Partner Engineer has enabled access to the Cloud Commerce Partner Procurement API as detailed in step 1 before you begin.
This stage is where the technical engineering lift begins. You will have to commit your engineering team’s bandwidth to perform the following -
  1. Backend integration with the requisite Google APIs and services
  2. Frontend integration
  3. SSO integration (non-mandatory)
  4. On completion, your Partner Engineer will grant you access to the Partner Procurement API

The steps for this stage are available in detail here.
Publish product to GCP Marketplace
At this final stage, you will have to verify all information submitted in your Producer portal and then submit your listing for review. Once this is complete, you can Publish your listing and begin your Google Cloud Marketplace Journey!

2. Accelerating your Google Cloud Marketplace motion 
with Clazar

Or…..begin your cloud marketplace journey with Clazar. By leveraging our expertise of getting hundreds of customers transacting on cloud marketplaces, and our game-changing automation platform, you can bring down listing time from over 6 months to as low as 20 days. Not to mention the hours in engineering bandwidth and operations costs you will save per week. Here’s how you can list and begin transacting on the Google Cloud Marketplace with Clazar.

Stage
Steps
Clazar set-up
  1. Complete the Cloud Marketplace Project Info Form and create a new project as detailed previously.  
  2. Parallelly go to the Cloud Setup section and initiate the setup process by clicking on GCP  
  3. Once the project is created, go to Cloud Overview -> Dashboard, copy the Project ID and Project Number from the Dashboard, and fill and save them in the Clazar Platform.  
  4. Make sure that you have linked an active billing account to the project.
Marketplace set-up
Grant Clazar the required permissions to manage your marketplace activities on your behalf. To do so, copy the command blocks from your Clazar platform and run them in your Google Cloud Shell (from where you can manage your infrastructure and develop your apps)
Run your GCP Marketplace motion seamlessly with Clazar
With the required permissions, Clazar uses GCP Deployment Manager to automate the creation of the bulk of the required resources to help you speed through the technical integrations, submit your product for review and publish your listing!
You can find details on these steps right here.

Listing is just the beginning. Manage your operations, build transaction volume, tap into the GCP seller network through Co-Sell – and scale to multi-cloud operations – with Clazar as your co-pilot.

“Cloud providers qualify your solution before listing you on their marketplaces so your buyers don't have to. So, you always carry a stamp of approval from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud in front of your buyers just by being listed. That ultimately translates into better buyer conviction at the decision-making phase.”
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