A blog by Oleg Shilovitsky
Information & Comments about Engineering and Manufacturing Software

Can I buy PLM app via Microsoft Azure Marketplace?

Can I buy PLM app via Microsoft Azure Marketplace?
Oleg
Oleg
8 August, 2019 | 2 min for reading

Marketplace is an interesting concept and it seems to be progressing well in a modern cloud-based and internet aware economy. Moving forward even more software and manufacturing vendors are moving into subscriptions business. Check my recent articles about XaaS – What is the right system for maintenance BOMs and what is the role of online Bill of Materials in future maintenance and support operation.

I’m learning more about Microsoft Commercial Marketplace these days and how vendors can sell services to using this marketplace. A marketplace seems to be a good place for how to make it easier for customers to discover, try, and buy cloud-based software and services from our partners.

Enterprises, governments, and organizations of all sizes find business solutions, innovative technology, and enablement services through the Azure Marketplace and AppSource web stores, Azure portal’s in-product experience, Cloud Solution Providers, and Microsoft Sales teams.

Partner Center is the hub of a Microsoft partner’s experience. For organizations who go to market with Microsoft and take advantage of the marketplace, Partner Center is the portal through which publishers create and manage offers, provide test drive demonstrations, and view analytics on offer performance.

It made me think that this is a good place to sell SaaS to address the needs of manufacturing companies. Especially smaller and mid-size companies that are looking how to consume cloud / SaaS applications with limited IT resources by using applications available on demand.

I navigated to the marketplace and tried to make a search for PLM services (apps). Marketplace sells applications and consulting services.

Search for PLM gave me 84 results for application and consulting services, which in fact only 3 have something to do with PLM.

None of these applications is available on-demand, which means everything I can do is to get sales to contact me. Even Aras PLM link says “Get it for 0.10$ per hour”, it is not clear what does it mean and what you can get for this price.

What is my conclusion? The marketplace is a great idea. I’m very much interested to learn about the advantages of buying via marketplaces vs buying from vendors websites. I can see a group of potential customers looking on how to get SaaS applications tailored together with infrastructure services and consulting services as a single package. This is can be an opportunity for places like Azure Marketplace. But it is not happening (yet) as I can see. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg

Disclaimer: I’m co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM developing cloud-based bill of materials and inventory management tool for manufacturing companies, hardware startups, and supply chain. My opinion can be unintentionally biased.

Recent Posts

Also on BeyondPLM

4 6
21 April, 2012

The discussion around the cloud is heating up. At the time, the competition gets stronger, the debate around the cloud...

15 April, 2011

The first day at COFES 2011 over. I hope, you had a chance to follow COFES 2011 via twitter (COFES2011). If...

3 August, 2010

Collaboration is a widely used term, and I found it sometime even overused. Collaborative development, Collaborative PDM, Collaborative PLM, Collaborative...

10 January, 2011

Hi Everyone. I never posted New Year Resolution before. However, I decided to make this change and post Beyond PLM...

19 June, 2014

This week is very fruitful for PLM events. PTC Live 2014, Siemens PLM connection, GrabCAD media event. Twitter and other...

28 April, 2009

There is no doubt a search changed the way we work today on the Internet. Remember how looked for  information...

11 March, 2015

It looks like CAD industry was too busy with Onshape for the last two days and forgot about Apple Watch...

20 September, 2010

I want to share an interesting list of 50 top Open Source alternatives for expensive software. From the standpoint of...

19 July, 2010

If you listened to the news stream from Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference last week, you probably had a chance to get...

Blogroll

To the top