AI innovation takes center stage at Microsoft Ignite
Artificial intelligence is transforming how software companies build, scale, and deliver solutions. At Microsoft Ignite, we announced new tools and programs to help developers accelerate innovation responsibly, from AI-powered workflows and unified tools in Microsoft Foundry to Cohere’s language models on Azure. Plus, the global launch of Microsoft Marketplace brings the industry’s largest catalog of AI apps and agents, enabling partners to reach new customers and unlock growth. Explore the latest announcements and learn how to ship faster, scale confidently, and turn AI innovation into business impact. Read the full articleIgnite 2025: Drive the next era of software innovation with AI
Artificial intelligence is unlocking new possibilities and redefining what’s achievable. Software companies, startups, ISVs and AI Natives are leading the charge, using AI to speed up delivery, scale effectively, and unlock new business potential. Microsoft empowers software companies to unlock growth through AI-driven innovation, empowers their developers to ship faster and scale through programs, incentive and Microsoft Marketplace. There is clear momentum in AI innovation, led by forward-thinking software companies. For instance, Microsoft Marketplace now offers 4,000+ AI Apps and Agents—more than any other marketplace—as well as additional cloud solutions designed to help customers accelerate their innovation. Software company acceleration at Microsoft Ignite. This week at Ignite, Microsoft is empowering software companies across three key areas: 1. Unlock growth with AI Software companies can access a broad choice of models, tailor them to their use case, and create AI apps and agents that deliver outcomes while using responsible AI to protect data and reduce risk. New announcements: Unified tools catalog in Microsoft Foundry (Public preview) New Microsoft Foundry updates in preview will enable developers to enrich agents with real-time business context, multimodal capabilities and custom business logic through a unified Tools catalog of Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers built with security and governance in mind. The catalog includes Unified tool discovery, deep business integration, new tools for prebuilt AI services, and custom tool extensibility. Managed instance on Azure App Service (Public preview) Enables organizations to move web applications to the cloud with just a few configuration changes, saving the time and effort of rewriting code. Whether .NET web apps are running on-premises or in virtual machines, developers will be able to modernize them into a fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment and future-proof their infrastructure. The result is faster app modernization with lower overhead and access to cloud-native scalability, built-in security and Azure’s AI capabilities. Cohere joins Microsoft Foundry’s first-party model lineup (Public preview) Cohere’s leading language models (Command A, Embed 4 and Rerank) are now available directly from Azure, giving customers fast, secure, and compliant access without third-party dependencies. Delivered with Azure-native governance, observability, networking, and billing, Cohere on Azure enables organizations to build high-performance retrieval, classification, and generation workflows at enterprise scale. Introducing Anthropic's Claude models in Microsoft Foundry (Public preview) Microsoft and Anthropic are expanding their existing partnership to provide broader access to Claude for businesses. Customers of Microsoft Foundry will be able to access Anthropic’s frontier Claude models including Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Opus 4.1, and Claude Haiku 4.5. This partnership will make Claude the only frontier model available on all three of the world’s most prominent cloud services. Azure customers will gain expanded choice in models and access to Claude-specific capabilities. 2. Accelerate development Ship faster with AI-assisted workflows, build across clouds and open-source stacks, and use databases that speed data access and analysis to quickly move from prototype to production. New announcements: Systems innovation (Private preview) Remote storage throughput of up to 20 GBps, up to 1 million remote storage IOPS and network bandwidth of up to 400 Gbps, enabling significant performance improvements for the latest Azure VM series. Azure Boost is a server subsystem designed by Microsoft consisting of purpose-built software and hardware that offloads server virtualization processes traditionally performed by the hypervisor and host OS. Various storage and network intensive workloads will benefit the most from these new performance specifications. Microsoft Defender for Cloud + GitHub Advanced Security (Preview) With Microsoft Defender for Cloud and GitHub Advanced Security, you can protect cloud-native applications across the full app lifecycle from code to cloud. This natively integrated solution helps connect software developers and security teams while staying in the tools they use every day; to prioritize the most critical risks exposed in production and fix these risks faster with AI-powered remediation. Azure HorizonDB PostgreSQL (Private preview) A new PostgreSQL cloud database service delivering high speed and elastic scalability for building or modernizing mission-critical applications. Integrated with Microsoft Foundry, Microsoft Fabric, Visual Studio Code and more, Azure HorizonDB streamlines development. Modern authentication with Microsoft Entra ID and security features like Microsoft Defender and private endpoints support enterprise-grade protection. 3. Scale with confidence Turn innovation into revenue with Microsoft Marketplace by expanding your reach through the partner ecosystem, unlocking go-to-market benefits, and differentiating with offers that stand out. New announcements: Global release of Microsoft Marketplace (General availability) Microsoft Marketplace — your trusted source for cloud solutions, AI apps, and agents — is now globally available following its launch in the United States in September. All traffic from legacy storefronts (Azure Marketplace and AppSource) is now redirected to Marketplace.Microsoft.com. Featuring the industry’s largest catalog of AI apps and agents, Marketplace extends the Microsoft Cloud, helping customers accelerate their AI-first transformation with tens of thousands of vetted solutions from our partner ecosystem. These solutions integrate easily with Microsoft products, delivering faster time-to-value. Microsoft Agent 365 (Preview) Extend the existing infrastructure that you use for managing people to agents. Agent 365 equips your agents with the same apps and protections, tailored to agent needs, saving IT time and effort on integrating agents into business processes. It includes leading Microsoft security, productivity and collaboration solutions: Defender, Entra and Purview to protect and govern agents; Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration apps and Semantic Index to accelerate their productivity; and Microsoft 365 admin center to manage agents. We're already seeing great examples from Devin, Genspark, Glean, Kasisto, Manus AI, n8n, ServiceNow, Workday, and more. Unified programs for software companies – App Accelerate (Public preview) Our Partner Program is focused on delivering more value for software companies, and we’ve identified an opportunity to simplify the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (MAICPP) offers available to software companies today. We're announcing a new offering for software development companies, available in 2026—combining incentives, benefits, and co-sell resources across existing offerings such as ISV Success, and Marketplace Rewards—into one streamlined pathway for partners. App Accelerate brings together ISV Success, Marketplace Rewards, and more into a single-entry point, creating a unified and simplified experience to help partners accelerate their growth through Microsoft Marketplace. Early access to co-sell benefits (Pilot) As part of our new unified offer, we’re creating an additional route for software companies to access co-sell benefits. This pathway is designed for partners who may not have reached the $100K milestone in Marketplace Billed Sales (MBS) or Azure Consumed Revenue (ACR) but demonstrate readiness in other critical areas. This early access option is nomination-based, with eligibility determined by criteria such as Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC), customer traction, and pipeline strength. Resale enabled offers (General availability) Analysts estimate nearly 60% of cloud marketplace business will be channel-led by 2030. With a partner ecosystem of 500K+ —Microsoft Marketplace is fully embracing the channel-led Marketplace opportunity with the general availability of resale enabled offers. Resale enabled offers enable software companies to empower channel partners to manage their Marketplace listings through a repeatable model designed for scale. This helps software companies break through to new markets without adding overhead while channel partners maintain their customer relationships while getting the added value of Marketplace. Sales of eligible solutions also count toward customers’ Azure consumption commitments, opening the door to larger, more strategic deals funded by pre-committed cloud budgets—creating stickier relationships and fueling growth. Featured Ignite sessions Whether you're attending Ignite in person or joining online, these sessions are designed to help software companies build smarter, scale faster, and unlock new growth opportunities. Tuesday, November 18 – 1:00pm PT Agents, apps, and acceleration: Helping software companies grow Explore the opportunity for AI apps and agents. Learn how to build experiences that matter and get best practices from other leading software companies. Wednesday, November 19 – 10:15am PT Benefits for accelerating software company success Discover resources available across the build, publish, and grow journey in MAICPP. Hear how peers are using AI investments and go-to-market benefits to grow. Wednesday, November 19 – 5:00pm PT Executing on the channel-led Marketplace opportunity for partners Discover practical strategies across diverse dealmaking scenarios to grow business and deepen Microsoft partnerships. Keep the momentum going—explore more Ignite sessions and activities created with software companies in mind. Let’s create the future together You are redefining what’s possible with AI. Microsoft is here to help you create the future. Get started Get resources to help grow your software development company Use ISV Success to build faster with AI tools, services, and expert support Publish your solution and reach millions of customers on the Microsoft Marketplace Access App Advisor and get step-by-step guidance to build, publish, and sell your app or agentMeet customer business needs with flexible billing schedules in the marketplace
Co-authored by Trevor_Yeats Today, we’re announcing that Microsoft now offers flexible billing schedules through private offers to better align with customer needs. Flexible billing schedules are available globally to all marketplace-supported currencies. Watch these demo videos to learn more about flexible billing schedules. The value for your customers and for you With flexible billing schedules, customers can buy with confidence knowing that private offers can be customized for virtually any contract value and billing timeline to align with their requirements. Partners can tailor customer private offers and multiparty private offers to meet those requirements. This streamlines sales and accelerates deal velocity. With over 100 partners in our private preview, we’re excited to make this capability publicly available. Many of these partners have achieved remarkable success, closing deals worth millions of dollars. “Flexible billing in Microsoft marketplace has significantly improved how our sales teams engage with customers. It allows them to meet each organization's and customer's procurement needs, whether it's aligning with fiscal year budgets or accelerating project timelines from evaluations to implementations. Additionally, it helps with managing cloud commitment benefits. This flexibility has made it easier for our customers to purchase and deploy solutions faster, without waiting for specific budgets to become available. We can now set up flexible billing schedules to accommodate their needs.” Brett Ferancy, Global Alliance Leader, Abnormal AI Example use cases See below for some real-world examples of how partners and customers are leveraging flexible billing. Variable pricing with specific dates. In this example, the customer pays a setup fee at the start of billing, followed by variable pricing throughout the contract to match consumption patterns and budget cycles. 3-year deal $80M total Notes Immediate charge when billing starts $2M Setup fee – 1 st month 01 Jan 2025 $5M Year 1 installment #2 15 Jul 2025 $3M Year 1 installment #3 01 Jan 2026 $10M Year 2 installment #1 15 Jul 2026 $10M Year 2 installment #2 01 Jan 2027 $20M Year 3 installment #1 15 Jul 2027 $30M Year 3 installment #2 Variable quarterly billing. In this example, the customer pays a setup fee at the start of billing, followed by variable pricing each quarter. 1-year deal $10M total Notes Immediate when billing starts $2M Q1 01 Jun 2025 $3M Q2 01 Sep 2025 $2M Q3 01 Dec 2025 $3M Q4 Delayed start for billing. In this example, the customer gets the first two months free, followed by varied payments throughout the contract to match budget cycles 2-year deal $25M total Notes Immediate when billing starts $0M Free – 2 months 01 Mar 2024 $10M Year 1 fee 15 Jan 2025 $5M Year 2 installment 1 01 Jul 2025 $10M Year 2 installment 2 How it works To start using flexible billing for private offers: The software partner creates a private offer in the marketplace. Currently flexible billing supports SaaS flat rate offers, VM software reservations, and professional services. Partner must choose “Customize SaaS plans and Professional Services” or “Customize VM software reservations” when creating a new private offer. On the configure pricing page, under “billing frequency,” the partner will select “flexible schedule when the contract duration is 1-year or greater.” The software partner creates the billing schedule with up to 70 installments up to $100,000,000 USD, or any of the currencies supported by marketplace, over the length of the deal. There is also an option to book an immediate charge when billing starts or delay the first charge to a date in the future. Private offers can have up to ten included product plans. Each plan has its own billing frequency and may include a unique flexible schedule. A flexible schedule does not apply to all plans included in the private offer and must be set up independently. The software partner can also create a schedule in their customer’s local billing currency using the market pricing template. The customer accepts and purchases the private offer with the flexible billing schedule. For a multiparty private offer, the process is the same except: The software partner sends the private offer to the channel partner. The channel partner adds their price adjustment percentage aligned to the flexible billing schedule and passes it to the customer. Eligibility Any company who is part of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program can sell on the marketplace through private offers with flexible billing. Details are provided in our documentation, but at a high-level: Be a member of the Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program (it’s free to join) Sign the marketplace publisher agreement Publish your offer Sell private offers with flexible billing In addition, we have many support resources for partners depending on where they are on their marketplace journey. For example, software development companies can join ISV Success for tools and resources that help them publish their solution and maximize its reach on the marketplace. Get started with flexible billing on marketplace We invite you to start leveraging these new improvements to flexible billing today. Learn more by visiting aka.ms/flexbill-docs.Co-sell Coaching: Episode 1, Carve Partners - AMA
PLEASE NOTE: If you are planning to attend this event, please either use the 'Add to calendar' option below the "Attend" button, or create your own calendar reminder. Clicking attend will not automatically add this event to your calendar, and you will not receive any email notifications reminding you about the event. Join us for Co-sell Coaching, where your peer Microsoft partners will walk you through their best practices on how to co-sell effectively through the marketplace. Our first community event in this series will feature Carve Partners. Join to learn: Unlock Faster Growth: Why you should prioritize co-selling Get Started the Right Way: How to create a co-sell strategy and get started Maximize Your Impact: How to prioritize deals and build your co-sell pipeline Engage Microsoft Sellers: What to expect and how to get their attention Keep Winning: What to do after a co-sell win to build ongoing momentum Each Co-sell Coaching event features a live Q&A with Microsoft partners and Microsoft subject-matter experts.Pipeline Prioritization with Marketplace Propensity Scoring
A note of gratitude to the Marketplace Rewards team + a recommendation for my partner peers: Marketplace Propensity Scoring has proven to be an exceedingly powerful tool for prioritizing pipeline and accelerating sales cycles. Offered as a Marketplace Rewards benefit, propensity scoring provides you with a score that ranks your pipeline prospects by their likelihood (0 to 100) to transact through Marketplace. We combine this with our co-sell conversations a) to help our buyer identify who on their own IT team has the necessary permissions to buy through Marketplace and b) to gain insight into the customer's MACC status (ie, are they behind pace and therefore keen to decrement via Marketplace purchases). We've shaved a full month off our historical sales cycle since implementing this into our process three quarters ago. Side note on another way valuable way to use this benefit: We also lead with Marketplace in opportunities with a propensity score of 0. Three times we've been successful in being a customer's first-ever Marketplace transaction. It took a lot more effort, but we do it because it demonstrates for our Microsoft friends our commitment to the co-sell motion . . . and they LOVE it when we help them establish a precedent on which they can build the customer's Marketplace muscle. #MarketplaceChampions
Looking for advice on collaborating with complementary Microsoft partners
a { text-decoration: none; color: #464feb; } tr th, tr td { border: 1px solid #e6e6e6; } tr th { background-color: #f5f5f5; } Hi everyone 👋 My name is Martin Rojze. I’m focused on the Microsoft data platform, with a specialization in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. My work is centered on helping organizations design, implement, and scale modern analytics and reporting solutions on Azure, with a strong emphasis on real world business outcomes rather than just dashboards. As demand for end to end solutions continues to grow, I’m looking to deepen collaboration with complementary Microsoft partners, for example partners who focus on Dynamics 365 or Business Central Data engineering, data science, or AI App development including Power Apps, custom apps, or ISVs Security, governance, or change management I’d really appreciate advice from partners who have successfully built co sell or referral relationships, specifically What has worked and what has not when partnering with other Microsoft partners How you structure collaboration so it’s mutually beneficial and scalable Tips on aligning around go to market, co selling, or delivery without stepping on each other’s toes If you’re a partner interested in collaborating around Fabric and Power BI led analytics engagements, or if you’re willing to share lessons learned, I’d love to connect and learn from your experience. Thanks in advance and looking forward to the discussion. MartinAccelerate massive growth by co-selling through Microsoft Marketplace with App Advisor guidance
Co-selling with Microsoft is one of the most powerful growth levers available to software companies to sell to enterprises. But on its own, co-sell is not a strategy. The real acceleration happens when you combine them. When you publish a transactable offer in Microsoft Marketplace and make it Azure IP co-sell eligible, you unlock joint selling with Microsoft’s global field organization— and that changes the trajectory of your business. Here’s how to turn Marketplace plus co-sell into a growth engine. Why Marketplace & co-sell drive larger, faster deals Data consistently shows that co-sell deals outperform non-co-sell deals: Co-sell deals are ~ 30% larger, Co-sell deals close up to 2x faster, Microsoft sellers are incentivized to prioritize Azure IP co-sell eligible solutions. When your offer is transactable in Marketplace and co-sell eligible, three important things happen: Microsoft sellers can confidently introduce your solution to their enterprise accounts, Customers can apply purchases toward their Azure consumption commitments, Your offer becomes visible inside Microsoft’s internal sales systems. This reduces friction in procurement, increases executive visibility, and accelerates deal velocity. You’re no longer selling alone. You’re selling with leverage. The following is high-level guidance of the steps to start co-selling Want to skip right to the curated guidance? Go to App Advisor Step 1: Publish a transactable offer in Marketplace Co-sell begins with Marketplace readiness. To unlock Azure IP co-sell benefits, you must publish a transactable offer through one of these marketplace offer types: Software as a service (SaaS), Azure Application, Azure Container, Azure VM. If you sell apps or agents built on Microsoft 365 or Copilot, link your solution to a transactable SaaS offer to qualify. To see how Abnormal Security made the most of co-selling, see the blog and corresponding Co-Sell Coaching call. Step 2: Create a co-sell ready solution in Partner Center When publishing your offer, you can create a co-sell solution to activate visibility with Microsoft sellers. Inside the Referrals workspace in Partner Center: Create a co-sell solution, Classify your solution using Microsoft taxonomy, Upload required marketing collateral: Solution one-pager, pitch deck, reference architecture diagram (required for SaaS), Enter the link to your product's website to help Microsoft sales teams and channel resellers learn more about your solution, Add geographic sales contacts. This listing tells Microsoft sellers: Who to contact, What your solution does, Which Azure services it uses, Why they should bring you into a deal. Clear positioning drives seller confidence. Seller confidence drives joint opportunity. Step 3: Achieve Azure IP co-sell eligible status To become Azure IP co-sell eligible, you must meet performance or technical validation requirements. You can qualify by: Reaching $100K USD in trailing 12-month Marketplace billed sales or Azure Consumed Revenue (this is the fastest path to meeting that requirement) or Passing Microsoft technical validation confirming your solution is primarily built on Azure This status matters because: Customers can count the purchase toward Azure consumption commitments, Microsoft sellers are financially incentivized to include your solution, Your offer is labeled Azure benefit eligible. Customers being able to decrement their Azure consumption commitments can help draw engagement and interest to your app or agent. Step 4: Use referrals to build momentum High-performing software companies don’t just wait for Microsoft to bring opportunities. They submit referrals to help sell co-sell their app. Submitting referrals: Increases your visibility to Microsoft sellers, Signals strategic partnership depth, Opens doors to new seller collaboration, Provides insight into customer Azure commitments. Small actions compound. Referral discipline builds pipeline resilience. For more information about referrals, visit Generate, manage, and nurture leads step in App Advisor. Step 5: Use Marketplace Rewards to amplify co-sell Marketplace Rewards benefits strengthen your co-sell motion: Customer propensity scoring to prioritize Marketplace-ready buyers, Azure sponsorship credits to help close competitive deals, Microsoft seller webinars and solution spotlights. This is how you differentiate inside the ecosystem — not just with customers, but with Microsoft sellers. The growth shift: from independent seller to ecosystem player Software companies that treat Marketplace merely as a checkout page miss some amazing opportunities. Those that combine: Transactable offers, Azure IP co-sell eligibility, Strong co-sell collateral, Referral discipline, and Marketplace Rewards. Move from transactional selling to ecosystem selling. The result: Larger average deal sizes Shorter sales cycles Stronger executive alignment Increased visibility inside Microsoft accounts You’re no longer trying to break into enterprise deals. You’re already in the room. Ready to put your co-sell strategy into motion? Visit App Advisor to learn more about how to accelerate your growth with co-sell.
What changed for co-sell after QRP retirement — what ISVs should update now
Microsoft retired QRP last week and consolidated referrals into Partner Center. What most ISVs haven't caught yet is that the new AI-based matching reads your solution descriptions and industry tags differently than QRP did. If your listing hasn't been updated since early 2025, you may be getting matched to lower-quality leads or missed entirely. Three things worth reviewing now: your solution area tags, your customer segment fields, and your co-sell 1-pager format. Happy to share more detail on what I've seen reviewing several listings. Drop your questions below.
Accelerating AI Innovation with Microsoft Marketplace: Key Takeaways from AI Tour London
At the recent AI Tour in London, I had the opportunity to connect with partners and customers to discuss how organizations are accelerating artificial intelligence adoption through the marketplace ecosystem. One theme came through clearly: Microsoft Marketplace is becoming a key platform for discovering, purchasing, and scaling AI solutions - and ultimatley enterprise wide deploying through partner-led private offers. In my latest article, I share key takeaways from the event, including how developers and channel partners are using Microsoft Marketplace to bring AI innovations to market faster, simplify procurement for customers, and drive new growth opportunities across the partner ecosystem. Read the full article to learn how Microsoft Marketplace is helping organizations move from AI experimentation to real business impact—and what these insights mean for partners building and selling AI-powered solutions. https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/marketplace-blog/how-microsoft-marketplace-is-accelerating…
