The Marketplace Concept

The Exoscale Marketplace is a portfolio of curated, third-party vendors that enables our customers to conveniently source software and platform as a service. Vendors on the Exoscale Marketplace benefit from the opportunity to reach developers and enterprise customers in Europe with a special focus on CEE, the home market of A1 group.

The marketplace concept covers not only direct sales through our website exoscale.com and our Portal, but also indirect sales in the A1 group markets, leveraging a powerful installed customer base of 400,000 business customers and 1,500 sales employees. Additionally, our cooperation with Lenovo in Germany gives us and all marketplace vendors direct access to over 700 business partners in Germany, targeting SMEs as well as enterprise customers.

At Exoscale, we believe in trustful relationships and simplicity. Partners are an important component of our strategy and ecosystem. Therefore, we have a simple and standardized way of setting up your products and services on our marketplace so they can be offered in our markets after a short onboarding and implementation phase.

Exoscale Marketplace Products

For software developer or cloud service providers, there are 2 different types of products you can sell via the Exoscale marketplace.

Templates

A template on the Exoscale Marketplace is your software packaged in a .QCOW2 virtual disk image, including an operating system and additional software and data. The template can either be provided by the software developer itself or through a template maintainer, who takes over the responsibility for creating, publishing, maintaining and supporting the image. Exoscale Marketplace supports a bring-your-own-license (or BYOL) model as well as a pay-as-you-go (or PAYG) model for billing and metering.

Templates can be provisioned on the Exoscale Portal and the API, as well as on the Exoscale Marketplace itself, where the templates each have an individual product page. The infrastructure costs that result from running any templates will be billed to the end user.

Managed Services

Managed services are third-party services or products offered to Exoscale end users via the Marketplace.

Managed services are not provisioned by OS images (templates) and do not – in general – run in the end-user infrastructure. A formal provision mechanism providing synchronous and asynchronous provisioning is in place after the user subscribes to the managed service in the Exoscale Marketplace.

Infrastructure costs that result from running products in the form of a managed service will be billed to the service provider. The service provider can either include these costs in the pricing model of the product, or re-invoice the costs to the end user.

Vendor Program Overview

In general, our onboarding program for Marketplace vendors consists of three phases:

Contracting Phases

Phase I - Evaluation

To register as a vendor on the Exoscale Marketplace, send an email to support@exoscale.com with an outline of your products or services and your contact details. The Exoscale Marketplace business manager will contact you and guide you through the onboarding process.

Next in the evaluation phase is to check the technical and commercial fit of your products and services with the Exoscale Marketplace. We will have an initial call with you to give an overview of the Marketplace and the different product types you can choose from.

You can find details on product types and requirements for templates and managed services on their respective documentation pages:

After you confirm the technical feasibility and match billing and metering requirements with us, you will receive the Exoscale Marketplace Standard Contract.

Phase II - Onboarding and Implementation

After successfully signing the Exoscale Marketplace Standard Contract, we begin onboarding and technical implementation on the Exoscale Marketplace. This phase includes the setup the product page and implementation of the billing model.

At the end of the onboarding and implementation phase, your product is published on the Exoscale Marketplace, and your product is available in the Exoscale Portal and the API (template).

Phase III - Growth

After the successful launch of your service on the Exoscale Marketplace, you get to set the appropriate sales strategy and promote your service. Together with our sales and marketing experts, we define suitable measures with target-oriented implementation. That could be, for example, sales enablement activities, online communication in social media channels, blog posts, et cetera.

Program Benefits

Exoscale Marketplace is a great market and sell your product or cloud service running on Exoscale. A few benefits include:

  • (1) The brand - we serve a huge number of existing customers throughout several markets and countries due to the high level of brand awareness of A1 Group and its affiliates.

  • (2) The payment - the entire payment process with the customer is provided by Exoscale. Pay per invoice; non-paying customers are no longer your problem. You can concentrate on your core business and put the entire focus on your product.

  • (3) The customer base – we serve 400,000 business customers in A1 Group, in addition to the 10,000 developers and system administrators who use Exoscale on a daily basis.

  • (4) The salesforce - we offer you various possibilities to place your products in the best way. Which distribution channel is most suitable for your target group? Whether direct or indirect sales channels, over 1,500 employees in sales and 700 IT partners in Germany help you grow your product.