In 
In a recent survey of over 800 cloud buyers, IBM identified companies which are high cloud adopters –and which are also achieving superior financial success. These ‘pacesetters’, say IBM, are using cloud to do three important things: reinvent customer relationships, use analytics extensively to drive better decisions, and collaborate effectively across their extended ecosystems. It was from these important findings that IBM Marketplace emerged and they launched ‘Cloud Marketplace’ recently.
This cloud vendor is not the first company to come up with this idea. In fact, Oracle launched their Cloud Marketplace back in 2013 and some of their customers include Siemens, Reliance Finance, etc. And then there are other vendors who embraced the same model, including SAP and Sify.
Why this cloud marketplace
The marketplace brings together portfolio of cloud capabilities meant to serve three key user groups, say IBM ─IT managers, business leaders to try and buy software and services and its global partner ecosystem.
While the as-a-service portfolio offers applications from mobile messaging for marketing, to customer cross-channel behavior insight, to shopper insights and beyond, the marketplace isn’t yet popular enough amongst IT managers’ community.
“This marketplace is more tuned towards SME markets and won’t make much sense for large enterprises with customized requirements.”--Abhishek Bhattacharya- VP, Technology, Sapient Global Markets
Line of cloud-based solutions-as-a-service
'Cloud Marketplace' represents IBM's next step in cloud journey, says Vamsicharan Mudiam, Country Manager, Cloud Solutions, IBM India/South Asia. The IBM-as-a-Service suite, says Mudiam, has 100 SaaS applications, BlueMix platform-as-a-Service and the SoftLayer Infrastrture-as-a-a-service and third party cloud services.
Oracle Marketplace is not limited to IT-centirc applications, they offers apps in many business categories, including marketing, sales, and service, say Oracle.
While the good thing is that those services are not only vendor-based, they are also inviting companies who have built apps on their platforms. IBM’s SoftLayer Platform-as-a-Service cloud, for instance, offers a platform for developers to build and test applications before offering them for sale in the IBM Cloud marketplace. This makes the place more heterogeneous and richer.
“The feature which I would like to see is solution for mobile and solution for DevOps. However, we are already using business application hosting on cloud to offer SaaS to our clients,”--Dinesh Singh, CTO, Quest Informatics
When asked about what drove this move, increasingly cloud users across the enterprise are looking for easy access to a wide range of services to address new business models, say IBM’s Cloud country manager.
What do CTOs and IT managers think of it
We spoke to a few IT managers to get their perspective and interestingly, most of them are not familiar with this new concept, at all. However, we have a few CTOs view on this.
Exit policy is important: The CIO, of Sanjaya Mariwala group, Jawed Ahmed, cites exit policy as a feature he would like to see in the marketplace. Like all other cloud services, there is a general trend to create apps which have closed architectures and are not very conducive for an end user enterprise to shift away.
As an end user, we would prefer a marketplace which provides a convenient way to move away from the cloud as well, says Jawed. If you do sample check if you will find that all cloud apps have a very simple and well defined procedure regarding how to get into the cloud, but none that provides guide for going the other way, he adds.
Ecosystem of applications: For any marketplace to succeed there have to be a large number of apps. Currently, the service providers seem to have the marketplace rather as an after-thought after putting in the cloud platform instead of a cloud marketplace on its own. It’s still some distance away from maturing to a full fledged market, argues Ahmed.
Abhishek Bhattacharya- VP, Technology, Sapient Global Markets, feels this marketplace is more tuned towards SME markets and won’t make much sense for large enterprises with customized requirements.
”With more businesses getting onto the Cloud, this marketplace will simplify embracing it for business benefits.“-- Himanshu Shah, CTO of Adarsh Credit
“The feature which I would like to see is solution for mobile and solution for DevOps. However, we are already using business application hosting on cloud to offer SaaS to our clients,” say Dinesh Singh, CTO, Quest Informatics.
One stop shop for all: When asked will it be useful for IT managers and developers as they can find all cloud apps under one roof, Dinesh says, yes, provided it is cost effective, collaborative, and secure and there is no degradation in the response time.
In the long term, this will lead to better choices for customers and better returns to developers. But on the flip-side, it will also lock down the customers into a specific platform, says jawed.
Simplifying embracing cloud: This will spur innovation, says Himanshu Shah, CTO of Adarsh Credit. With more businesses getting onto the Cloud, this marketplace will simplify embracing it for business benefits.
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