The ‘everything store’ for software

AWS’ edge

AWS Marketplace is taking a page from parent company Amazon when it comes to curating its software store.

• Ten years after it started offering Amazon Machine Images, AWS Marketplace today provides third-party software that runs on its cloud, professional services from its partners, and data sets.
• It’s also added support for containers, algorithms, and models.
• Customers can buy an algorithm to run within Amazon SageMaker environments or a container image to run within ECS or EKS.
• “People buy from Amazon, because it’s the ‘everything store,’” said Chris Grusz, AWS’ general manager of worldwide ISV alliances and AWS Marketplace. “That concept of selection is now coming across to AWS in the form of Marketplace.”

AWS Marketplace channeled more than $1 billion in transactions last year, according to the cloud provider.

• Deal sizes started to rise after AWS introduced “private offers” in 2017, allowing software companies to negotiate custom end-user licensing agreements, pricing, and payment schedules with customers.
• “With the private offers, we started to see very big deals: six-figure, seven-figure-type transactions, now even eight-figure-type transactions,” Grusz said. “It’s really changed the trajectory of Marketplace.”
• Software vendors interviewed by Protocol say private offers are an integral part of doing business with enterprises.
• Joint customers can deduct their third-party software costs from their AWS cloud spending commitments, and the charges get consolidated onto their AWS bills.

But while AWS Marketplace helps speed transactions, some software companies say landing new customers through it is a challenge.

• AWS Marketplace features more than 2,000 ISVs, 260 data providers, and 900 consulting partners and some 12,000 listings in 65-plus categories.
• “We’ve tagged our listing with all the keywords that are relevant to us like ‘data management’ and ‘SaaS’ and things like that,” said Krishna Subramanian, co-founder, president, and chief operating officer at Komprise.
• “To be honest, finding new customers finding us on the marketplace has not been the biggest benefit for us,” she said. “It’s been more working with existing customers or working with customers we’ve already found through other ways. Making it easier for them to transact with us has been the bigger benefit.”

But while Grusz’s conversations with software vendors five years ago were focused on getting buy-in for AWS Marketplace, his conversations today center on how to better navigate it.

• “It’s really become an accepted way to sell software from an ISV perspective, and we’re starting to see more and more customers just default to buying all their third-party software for their AWS environments through AWS Marketplace,” he said.

Read Protocol’s full report on AWS Marketplace here.

— Donna Goodison ( email | twitter )

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Kicked in the tools

As tech earnings season has kicked off and chip company quarterly reports trickle in, it’s beginning to look more and more like the recent dip in consumer chip sales is being compounded by the Biden administration’s sweeping new rules on exports to China .

Lam Research, one of the world’s largest chip equipment makers based in the U.S., gave industry watchers a couple of numbers to chew over when it reported results late yesterday. First, CEO Tim Archer said in his prepared remarks that it would cost Lam $2 billion to $2.5 billion in lost revenue in 2023 — though it wasn’t clear from the call exactly what the impact for the remainder of this year would be.

To put that figure into context, Lam reported full-year revenue for fiscal 2022 of $17.2 billion , so at the high end of the range, that’s about 15% of the company’s revenue. Not exactly peanuts.

The second figure is related to the first: Archer said Lam now expects the overall market for chipmaking equipment to decline by roughly 20% in 2023 to roughly $70 billion, including the effects of the export restrictions. Memory is leading the charge there, as big memory makers such as Samsung and U.S. rival Micron have begun to suffer from a sharp drop in demand.

It’s a prediction that’s worth calling out — not in the least because Lam typically doesn’t offer that type of overall guidance until it reports its December quarter earnings (usually in late January).

When asked why Lam elected to give an early prediction, Archer, well, didn’t really explain it: “Let me take a start at that first, and then I’ll let [CFO] Doug [Bettinger] add in,” he said. “Obviously, our — we’ve contemplated that. Always, when we’re talking about the — what we think the industry is able to do from a ship perspective and ultimately from a revenue perspective. But — so that number next year, kind of think about it as a little bit of a like-for-like to this year.”

— Max A. Cherney ( email | twitter )

It’s not privacy vs. security anymore

In the last few years, the roles of privacy and security executives — and the budgets they control — have grown significantly as organizations have worked to stymie the growing threat of cyberattacks and navigate the ever-changing landscape of data regulation. But good privacy and security strategies are often as much about people as they are policy, and the push and pull between the two remits can sometimes create friction within an organization.

Join Protocol Enterprise’s Kyle Alspach for an event recorded live at KubeCon North America at 11 a.m. PDT on Thursday, Oct. 27. Kyle will be joined in discussion by Chris Burrows, chief information security officer, Rocket Companies; Jacob DePriest, vice president and deputy chief security officer, GitHub; Elise Houlik, chief privacy officer, Intuit; and Deepak Goel, chief technology officer, D2iQ. RSVP here.

Enterprise moves

Nick Degnan joined Axonius as global senior vice president of sales . Degnan formerly held roles at Dell EMC and Pure Storage.

Sharyl Givens was appointed chief people officer at Splunk . Givens formerly held human resources roles at Proofpoint, SanDisk, and Dolby Laboratories.

— Aisha Counts ( email | twitter )

Around the enterprise

Microsoft confirmed some customer data was left exposed due to a server configuration error.

Texas sued Google for allegedly collecting the biometric data of users without their consent.

A MESSAGE FROM CAPITAL ONE SOFTWARE

As companies scale in the cloud, they face new data management challenges. Join our webinar to learn how Capital One approached scaling its data ecosystem by federating data governance responsibility, and how companies can operate more efficiently by combining centralized tooling and policy with federated data management responsibility.

Register to attend