VMware Marketplace: How We Built a One-Stop Shop for All Ecosystem Solutions – VMware Cloud Community

With over 2,000 solutions from more than 800 partners, the VMware Marketplace is booming. And it keeps getting better, with a raft of new features on the horizon. Discover how we pulled this massive consolidation project off and see what’s coming up.

This September, we announced the official launch of VMware Marketplace – a one-stop shop for all ecosystem solutions from VMware’s partners. VMware Marketplace is the result of a consolidation between the erstwhile VMware Cloud Marketplace and VMware Solution Exchange products, with the combined catalog including solutions across all types, formats and VMware product compatibilities.

For customers, this large-scale consolidation effort brings VMware ecosystem-related information into one central place. Now, you can find, try and use ecosystem solutions at various VMware endpoints across public, private and hybrid environments – all from one location. For our Technology Alliance Program (TAP) partners, VMware Marketplace offers a single, standardized location to showcase, serve and hear from our joint customer base.

In the two months since our announcement, we have seen great traction on VMware Marketplace from both customers and partners alike. As of mid-November, we have over 2,000 solutions on the Marketplace, published by over 800 partners. Moreover, we have seen more than 120% growth in our thousands-strong user base during this time.

Overcoming the challenges in consolidating marketplaces

Like any consolidation project, ours wasn’t without its challenges. The VMware Marketplace engineering and product teams planned diligently and reacted efficiently to overcome a range of issues. Here’s how they did it:

Infrastructure & planning

• Proactively determined the process and potential pitfalls related to migrating thousands of solutions from VSX in an iterative manner
• Built a scalable framework that can handle the scaling and resiliency required for at least a five-fold increase in traffic and data over the network

Solution migration

• Compared and standardized the metadata across the two major solution sets – from VSX and from VMware Cloud Marketplace
• Incorporated important, net-new metadata from VSX such as compatibilities, validation certifications and TAP pillars
• Rationalized and de-duplicated listings that may have been present in both solution sets

Publisher migration

• Planned out the migration of the publishers associated with these solutions – including the movement of publisher orgs and information on customer relationship management tools

Post-consolidation: Tying up loose threads

As noted above, we successfully completed the bulk of the marketplace consolidation activities in mid-September, and have since seen phenomenal use of the new VMware Marketplace from customers and partners alike. However, as with any SaaS product, we are invested in continuously improving the user experience. 

Over the past month, the engineering team has been working on great new features such as the introduction of a unique identifier slug for each solution. They have also been fixing compatibility issues with datasets, setting up audit workstreams to further streamline our publish process, and addressing other issues noted by our regular users.

What’s next?

Looking ahead, we have more big-ticket items on the cards. As the single source of all VMware ecosystem solutions, VMware Marketplace is now set up for rapid growth. To further support this growth, we are planning two new projects:

• UI/UX and publisher workflow revamp – In the near future, we plan to improve the categorization, filtering and search capabilities in our catalog to better represent the much larger set of solutions now in the VMware Marketplace. In conjunction, we plan to streamline the publisher workflow to reflect these changes across our user interface and user experience.
• Commerce enablement – Above, you may have noted that the VMware Marketplace currently offers find, try and use capabilities. In the near future, we plan to incorporate the buy functionality as well – so  you can purchase paid licenses directly from the VMware Marketplace. 

In addition to these two major projects, we are also fine-tuning our internal processes related to administration, legal and other pieces, so that we can better serve our much larger (and growing) customer base. Stay tuned for more details in future blog posts!

Want to know more?

For more information on VMware Marketplace:

If you have further inquiries, or would like to learn more about publishing your solution on VMware Marketplace, please get in touch.