Discover how Microsoft Marketplace can support your FinOps strategy and cost optimization goals
Learn how Microsoft Marketplace can help organizations streamline cloud procurement, optimize spend visibility, and simplify software purchasing through a FinOps-driven approach. This upcoming Microsoft Marketplace customer office hours session explores how partners and customers can leverage Marketplace capabilities to align cloud investments with business outcomes, improve operational efficiency, and maximize the value of Azure consumption commitments. Read the full event details and see why this session is valuable for organizations focused on cloud financial management, procurement modernization, and Marketplace growth strategies. 👉 Register Here: Microsoft Marketplace as a FinOps platform - Microsoft Marketplace customer office hours
Publishing readiness for AI apps and agents in Microsoft Marketplace
Discover how to prepare AI apps and agents for publishing in Microsoft Marketplace. This Marketplace Community article explains why readiness starts before Partner Center, focusing on the operational, technical, and organizational foundations required to ensure solutions can be evaluated, purchased, and operated reliably. As AI systems manage identity, data, runtime behavior, and subscription lifecycles, gaps in readiness can create friction during certification and customer adoption. Clearly defined identity boundaries, consistent data handling practices, and predictable responses to subscription events help ensure solutions behave as expected across environments and tenants. Learn how to establish publishing readiness that supports smooth certification, reliable operations, and confident customer adoption at Marketplace scale. Read more: Publishing readiness for AI apps and agents on Microsoft MarketplaceDesign CI/CD pipelines for AI apps and agents in Microsoft Marketplace
Discover how to design CI/CD pipelines for AI apps and agents selling through Microsoft Marketplace. This Marketplace Community article explains why controlling how changes reach production is essential for maintaining predictable behavior, reliability, and customer trust. As AI systems evolve through updates to code, models, prompts, and agent logic, behavior can change in ways that impact cost, performance, and outcomes. Structured pipelines that isolate change, validate behavior, and enable safe promotion and rollback help ensure updates are introduced deliberately—without unexpected impact across environments or tenants. Learn how to design CI/CD strategies that support safe iteration, controlled releases, and consistent behavior as AI solutions scale in Marketplace environments. Read more: Design CI/CD for AI apps and agents selling through Microsoft MarketplaceDesign reliable environment strategies for AI apps and agents in Microsoft Marketplace
Discover how to design a reliable environment strategy for AI apps and agents selling through Microsoft Marketplace. This Marketplace Community article explains why structured Dev, Stage, and Production environments are essential for safe updates, predictable behavior, and long‑term customer trust. As AI systems evolve through prompt updates, model changes, and shifting data contexts, behavior can vary across environments. Clear environment separation, controlled promotion paths, and consistent configuration boundaries help prevent regressions, support validation, and ensure changes can be introduced safely without impacting production workloads. Learn how to design environment strategies that enable confident iteration, support Marketplace readiness, and help customers operate solutions predictably at scale. Read more: Designing a reliable environment strategy for Microsoft Marketplace AI apps and agentsEnforce AI entitlements using Marketplace commerce signals
Discover how to enforce entitlements in AI apps and agents using Microsoft Marketplace commerce signals. This Marketplace Community article explains why purchase and subscription data must be integrated at runtime to ensure customers only access what they’ve paid for. As AI apps and agents dynamically invoke tools, expose capabilities, and operate without constant user input, static enforcement approaches fall short. Translating Marketplace signals into deterministic runtime behavior—across SaaS, containers, virtual machines, and managed applications—ensures access is controlled, auditable, and aligned with subscription state. Learn how to design entitlement enforcement that remains consistent through plan changes, scaling workloads, and real‑time agent decisions. Read more: Integrate Marketplace commerce signals to enforce entitlements in AI appsDiscover how AI-powered agents on Microsoft Fabric are accelerating retail merchandising decisions
Retail organizations are under increasing pressure to move faster and make smarter, data-driven decisions at scale. In this latest Marketplace Partner Spotlight, Microsoft highlights how AI agents built on Microsoft Fabric are helping merchandising teams transform complex operational data into actionable insights—without leaving the security of their existing data environment. By leveraging Microsoft Fabric and OneLake as a unified data foundation, partners like Lucid Data Hub are enabling retailers to automate time-intensive reporting processes and shift toward continuous, insight-driven workflows. These business-ready AI agents can analyze large volumes of sales and operational data, surface meaningful trends, and deliver clear recommendations—empowering buyers and store leaders to act faster and with greater confidence. The impact is tangible: merchandising teams can reduce hours of manual analysis into minutes, uncover item-level performance insights, and identify opportunities across store clusters to optimize outcomes. If you’re exploring how AI agents, Microsoft Fabric, and the Microsoft Marketplace ecosystem can drive intelligent automation in retail, this article offers practical insights and real-world examples to help you get started. 👉 Read the full article AI agents on Microsoft Fabric for faster retail merchandising decisionsBuild observability for scalable AI apps and agents selling through Microsoft Marketplace
Discover how to design observability for AI apps and agents selling through Microsoft Marketplace. This Marketplace Community article explains why visibility into execution behavior is essential for operating AI systems confidently at scale—not just keeping them running. As AI apps and agents reason, branch, retry, and exit dynamically at runtime, traditional infrastructure metrics fall short. Behavioral signals such as execution flow, token usage, latency, and failure patterns help explain what systems are doing, why outcomes occur, and how limits and safeguards shape behavior across tenants and environments. Learn how observability turns runtime telemetry into clarity that supports customer trust, usage‑based billing, and scalable operations. Read more: Design observability for AI apps and agents selling through Microsoft MarketplacePartner perspective: How Breakthru uses App Advisor and AI-listing optimization to drive growth
Optimizing a Marketplace listing isn’t just a marketing exercise—it directly impacts discoverability, demand, and revenue. But knowing what to change (and when) can be challenging for software development companies. In this partner‑written blog post, Marketplace software development company Breakthru shares firsthand experience using AI‑powered listing recommendations in App Advisor to move from guesswork to confident, data‑driven optimization—without risking listing performance. Dan Langille also reflects on how App Advisor became a core part of their business, what’s working in practice, and how AI is changing how teams iterate on their Marketplace presence. 👉 Read the partner story here: Improve Marketplace outcomes with AI‑powered listing recommendations in App Advisor Discussion prompts for the community: Would AI‑driven recommendations change how often you iterate on your listing? Have you used App Advisor for selling and growing app and AI agent sales? Curious to hear how other Marketplace partners are approaching listing optimization today!Feedback on Partner Benefit Renewal Experience
I wanted to share a bit of feedback on the partner benefit packages based on our experience. In the past we used the Action Pack and it worked very well for us. Renewal was simple and everything that was already configured just continued into the next period without any extra work. After it was discontinued we moved to the Partner Success Core Benefits package. Our experience has been less smooth, especially with how the Azure credits are handled. The credit must be assigned to a specific user, and if that user already has Azure credit it cannot be applied until the current one expires. When the credit expires, the subscriptions funded by it automatically switch to Pay As You Go. After that we need to contact support to convert the subscriptions back to Azure Sponsorship before the new credit can be applied, which involves several support teams and can take a few days. We also then need to ask support to cover the temporary Pay As You Go usage. As you can imagine, this turns what should be a simple renewal into a fairly time consuming process. Ideally, renewing the benefit package would just extend the existing setup, similar to how it worked with Action Pack, so everything continues without needing support involvement.
