Get on the Microsoft Marketplace in two hours

The Microsoft Marketplace presents ISVs with an unrivaled opportunity to reach 1 billion customers and connect with more than 100,000 Microsoft sellers and re-sellers.

“What we hear time and again from our partners is that they want to publish on the Marketplace but are put off by the complexities around the process” says Andreas Bergman, Global Microsoft Channel Director at SoftwareOne. “To those ISVs, we now say: ‘Talk to WeTransact. They make publication painless and help you get that first sale much faster’.”

WeTransact was founded in 2023 by Johan Aussenac who during his five years at Microsoft had seen up close how much ISVs struggled with publication and then with getting their first sale.

He was proved right. In little over a year since Aussenac left Microsoft to create this one-stop shop, WeTransact has signed up more than 100 subscribers and already has a headcount of 16, with Aussenac at the helm.

A number of those subscribers are part of SoftwareOne’s ISV Innovation Hub program and were “referred” to WeTransact by SoftwareOne as part of the symbiotic partnership between the two companies.

That partnership was recently extended to the APAC markets where WeTransact has already onboarded three “SoftwareOne ISVs” in as many weeks.

“One of those was a small AI marketing start-up,” says Aussenac. “I don’t think they would ever have considered embarking on a Microsoft Marketplace venture without SoftwareOne giving them that little push to get help from us. But they went live at the end of February.”

Like a lot of ISVs, this start-up would have struggled with the technological aspects of integrating with the marketplace. There are other hurdles to overcome with as many as five Microsoft teams involved in publication: legal, financial, technical, marketing, and Partner Center support. “For the APAC start-up this meant us getting down to the nitty-gritty of what language and even what logo would be acceptable for certification,” says Aussenac.

“Even though the Microsoft documentation is very comprehensive it can be very difficult to navigate and understand, but we reduce the noise. We negotiate that complexity for you, shrinking a process that can take as long as six months even for larger ISVs to two hours. Yes. Two hours spread over five days. So that’s the first metric.”

The Microsoft Marketplace is a transactional B2B site where deals are often “five to six figures if not seven figures”. What it is not, Aussenac emphasizes, is a space where what you post on the marketplace is going to generate leads. “ISVs can get caught out by this, and the typical publisher on Microsoft is unlikely to see a transaction in the first year. WeTransact brings that down to roughly three or four months. That is the sweet spot that we are achieving with our companies.”

An important aspect of that success is that in many ways WeTransact substitutes for the Microsoft Partner Center where ISVs publish their offers and manage their relationship with customers and Microsoft. “This is not always the best experience,” says Aussenac, “but we have made it more immediately useful and concise.”

A WeTransact subscription comes with a set of features that helps publishers target more precisely what they should be doing.

“For example, we direct them to data that is pinpointing who are the customers in the Microsoft ecosystem that have a budget to be spent on the marketplace,” says Aussenac, “and we track that through MACC agreements.

“The objective in everything we do is: how can we help you to make money out of the Microsoft Marketplace? How can we help you grow? This is why the commercial partnership with SoftwareOne is so natural because that is what we both want. We do it in different ways, but we share the objective of making ISVs as successful as they can be. This is why our collaboration is such a win-win for them.”