There was once a time when the number of vendors in the IT conversation was largely confined to how many were represented within the four walls of a data center. Times have changed.

With the widespread adoption of cloud computing, the number of vendors available to supply products and services is now seemingly infinite. Software-as-a-service and the vast array of offerings from cloud hyperscalers mean that IT procurement has been transformed for good.

“Today, more than ever, the conversation with customers is about the ecosystem of partners that they use,” said Todd Lieb (pictured, left), vice president of strategic cloud partners at Dell Technologies Inc. “It used to be in the data center; that ecosystem was different vendors or whatever was on the data center floor. It is dramatically broader than that now.”

Lieb spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Rob Strechay at the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Allison Johnson (right), senior manager of worldwide channels, AWS Marketplace at Amazon Web Services Inc., and Raphael Meyerowitz (center), vice president of technology solutions and strategic partnerships at Presidio Inc., and they discussed how cloud spending and procurement decisions are being reshaped across the IT landscape. (* Disclosure below.)

Leveraging trusted advisors

One of the key influences in how IT organizations procure services today is AWS Marketplace, a centralized resource for cloud customers to find third-party software, data and services that run on AWS. Marketplace has evolved for more than a decade, with participation from global digital solutions and services advisors such as Presidio.

“Marketplace started 11 years ago, and as we evolved from a full price self-service mechanism to more of a platform where customers could buy discounted software, almost immediately our customers were requesting: ‘This is a great platform, but if I can’t buy through trusted advisors like Presidio, I’m not going to be able to use it,’” Johnson said. “In 2018, we rolled out our Channel Partner Private Offer program, which enabled partners like Presidio to be able to work with their customers and procure software. Then, in 2020, we added Professional Services to that catalog.”

The result has been to create a resource for customers seeking to build an infrastructure tailor-made to meet business needs. This has provided Presidio with additional opportunities to serve its own customer base.

“The Marketplace has become a much easier mechanism to procure the infrastructure that customers do need,” Meyerowitz said. “One of the things that customers still want to try to understand is: ‘Will I have on-premises backup or storage or infrastructure that I need to figure out how to bring to the cloud or leverage the cloud for?’ Maybe it’s AI; maybe it’s production workloads. That is where Presidio can come in and provide engineering expertise around that.”

Managing cloud spend

That expertise can extend to financial efficiencies as well. Presidio found that as clients used AWS Marketplace, they also sought cost benefits in cloud spend, according to Meyerowitz.

“The first private offer that we did with a customer over five years ago was procurement that came to us and said: ‘We want to purchase software from you, but we want to leverage our electronic data processing that we have with AWS,’” Meyerowitz said. “That’s very important, because customers do have existing contractual obligations with AWS. This is the way they can draw down on those.”

Benefits such as these translate into opportunities for hardware providers as well. Dell has seen how its customers are leveraging Marketplace to deploy multicloud models within IT environments.

“Let’s just take that software IP and let’s drop it into AWS and allow our customers to take what they’re already using and apply it into the Marketplace of AWS,” Lieb said. “You get the benefit of taking that budget, wherever that budget exists, and bringing it into their cloud business so you now have a true multicloud story that expands from whatever they’re using today into those new deployments in the cloud. You think about all the models we use in the data center; we’re bringing that same model into AWS.”

The reliance on services such as AWS Marketplace has expanded procurement’s role. Because of cloud spending commitments and a steady increase in the number of vendors within IT organizations, procurement has more influence in infrastructure management.

“Years ago, maybe procurement wasn’t as important to involve in the equation,” Johnson noted. “Our average enterprise customer is managing 600 vendors a year. Today, since procurement does own that spend commitment with AWS, I think it’s critical that these business units that are looking to buy on Marketplace tap into that spend. It’s critical to involve procurement and show them how Marketplace works.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the “Supercloud 5: The Battle for AI Supremacy” event:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE