Co-Sell Guide
ISV Cloud Strategy
How an ISV picks its clouds, sells through their marketplaces, earns co-sell from their field teams, and prices so customer commitments pay for the deal.
Written by Ali Chehab for ISV and SI teams running Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud co-sell. See also stages, UDL, and the hyperscaler co-sell knowledge graph.
What an ISV cloud strategy decides
An ISV cloud strategy answers four questions: where the product runs, where customers buy it, which cloud field teams sell it, and how the price lands against the customer's cloud commitment. Engineering answers the first. Revenue depends on the other three.
A product can run on all three hyperscalers and still sell on none of them. The strategy only pays when the customer can buy on the cloud bill and a cloud seller has a reason to bring the product into an account.
Pick clouds by where buyers' commitments sit
Choose the first cloud by the commitment your target buyers already carry. An enterprise with a Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment has approved budget that only Azure-eligible purchases can retire. The same holds for an AWS private pricing agreement and a Google Cloud commitment. A product that transacts against that commitment skips a budget cycle.
Add the second cloud when lost or stalled deals show the pattern: procurement asks to buy through a cloud you are not listed on, or a seller on that cloud brings you an account you cannot transact in. Two reference customers and a working private offer motion on the first cloud come before the second listing.
Treat the marketplace as the procurement path
A transactable listing with private offers lets the customer buy at a negotiated price on the cloud invoice. On Azure, an offer marked Azure benefit eligible counts in full against the customer's MACC. On AWS and Google Cloud, the customer's commitment agreement sets how much marketplace spend it accepts.
Each marketplace takes a transaction fee on private offers. Price it into your margin and keep the customer's net price the same as a direct deal, so procurement never has a reason to route around the marketplace.
Earn co-sell in the field
Program status opens the door: Azure IP co-sell eligibility on Microsoft, ISV Accelerate on AWS, and Partner Advantage with marketplace listing on Google Cloud. Microsoft sellers receive quota credit when an eligible solution transacts through the marketplace, which gives them a direct reason to bring you in.
The field engagement comes from an IP play a seller can repeat in one sentence: the workload, the buyer, and the consumption it creates. Register the opportunity, then pre-wire the account executive with a seller-ready brief before you ask for a meeting. The pursuit flow and acceptance gate on this site walk that sequence.
Price so the commitment does the selling
Offer annual or multi-year private offers whose term ends on or before the customer's commitment end date, so every month of your contract retires committed spend. A ramped commit that grows with adoption fits consumption forecasts better than a flat three-year number.
Price in a unit the customer can forecast against the cloud bill. Seats, workloads, or capacity units that map to the infrastructure your product drives make the consumption case easy for the cloud seller to defend to their own manager.
Run multi-cloud without three times the work
Build one private offer template, one pricing structure, and one pursuit record per deal with the cloud as an attribute. Each cloud then adds a listing and a field motion, not a new commercial model.
Data and AI products often add a second meter. A workload on Databricks consumes both Databricks units and the underlying cloud, so the pursuit has two field teams to align and two commitments to retire. Plan the co-sell for both before the first meeting.
Where ISV cloud strategies stall
Four failures recur: a listing that cannot take private offers, a co-sell registration with no seller-ready brief behind it, a price unit the customer's commitment cannot absorb, and a launch on all three clouds before any one of them produces repeatable wins.
Each one has a repair. Make the listing transactable, write the brief before the next registration, re-paper the unit inside a private offer, and narrow to the cloud where the commitments and the sellers already are.