What’s the best way to differentiate a SaaS offer from a Teams offer in Microsoft Marketplace?
Hey community! Our app is transactable, and we currently have two offers live in Marketplace: Saas and MS Teams offers. However, some of our customers find it confusing and aren’t sure which one they should choose. We also always prefer them chosing Saas so we can track everything via Partner center. What’s the recommended way to structure or differentiate the two offers so the choice is clear for customers? For example, should we use different naming, descriptions, or positioning for each offer? Would really appreciate any best practices or examples from others who have faced it!The AI Trust Gap: We're Auditing Outputs, But Nobody's Watching the Input
Hi all, Manjish here, founder of Pryvasee.AI. I want to open a conversation rather than make a pitch, because I think this is a problem bigger than any one company can solve, and I'd like to hear how others in this community are approaching it. Over the past year, watching enterprises adopt LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek, etc one pattern kept showing up. Almost every governance conversation started after the prompt was sent. Teams were building dashboards to review AI outputs, running periodic audits, writing acceptable use policies. All useful, but all reactive. Nobody I spoke to had a clear answer to a much simpler question: what actually happens to the sensitive data in that prompt in the moments before it leaves your organisation's control? That gap is why we built Pryvasee.AI differently. Instead of sitting after the model and reviewing what came back, we sit before it. Pryvasee Guard screens prompts, documents, and images for PII, PHI, and PCI and other such sensitive data before anything reaches a model. Pryvasee Thread lets you run the same request across OpenAI, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek from one interface, so you're never trusting a single model's answer by default. And the Trust Engine scores every response that comes back for groundedness and hallucination risk, so there's a number behind "does this look right" instead of a gut feeling. We built it natively on Azure (AKS, Azure SQL, Azure SQL Ledger for a tamper evident audit trail) because we think the next wave of AI governance problems won't just be about data leakage. They will be about proving, after the fact, exactly what happened, for a regulator, an auditor, or your own board. Most organisations can't do that today for a single AI interaction, let alone thousands a day across four different model providers. We're early. MVP/Beta since July 2026, live on the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace since late August, and currently working through a handful of enterprise pilots rather than claiming a long customer list. I would rather be upfront about that than oversell it. What I'm genuinely curious about: for those of you building or advising on enterprise AI adoption, is anyone handling the "before the model" problem today, whether with tooling, policy, or something else? And do you think this becomes a bigger issue as more employees start using multiple AI tools side by side, or does it resolve itself as the big model providers add more guardrails natively? Would love to hear how others are thinking about this.
Can Marketplace Become the Trusted Delivery Ecosystem for Specialized Microsoft Services?
Over the past several years, Azure Marketplace has become an increasingly important mechanism for connecting customers, partners, publishers, and Microsoft. As Marketplace adoption grows, I have been reflecting on one aspect of ecosystem collaboration. Many customer initiatives involve multiple organizations, each with different responsibilities, commercial models, onboarding requirements, and procurement processes. This raises an interesting question for the community: Can Azure Marketplace play a larger role in reducing operational friction between Marketplace participants who are already transacting through the platform? Potential outcomes could include: Faster customer project execution. Simpler cross-organizational collaboration. Greater adoption of Marketplace-transactable solutions. Reduced administrative overhead. Increased Marketplace transaction activity. From a Marketplace ecosystem perspective, reducing friction between participants may create value for customers, partners, publishers, and Microsoft alike. I would be interested in learning: Whether others have encountered similar challenges. Whether existing Marketplace capabilities already address this area. Which future improvements would have the greatest impact. Looking forward to hearing the community's perspective.
Microsoft Templates for Azure Application upload
Hi All, Are there ready to use templates for the documentation that Microsoft is requesting to upload for this offer type - such as Solution and Deployment Architecture, Customer Installation Guide, Customer Onboarding and Configuration Guide, Data Integration Guide. If yes, could someone share the links or the templates. Thank you!
GST/VAT in Microsoft-managed countries
Hi, I am in a Microsoft -managed jurisdiction and have a transactable offer in AppSource. I have only recently onboarded some customers and I don’t fully understand how GST is being managed. We are in Scenario 5 as described in https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/marketplace-offers/tax-details-marketplace which means Microsoft collects from the customer at the list price + GST. Ignoring store fees for this purpose, Microsoft pays the (10%) GST to the tax authority then pays out the balance. Unfortunately, the way GST works here, we have to show the amount we receive from Microsoft as gross revenue and then deduct a further 10% to pay to the tax authorities. In other words, we get no credit for the tax Microsoft has paid. As I understand it, the publisher should invoice Microsoft for the sale price + GST then Microsoft invoices the customer at the price plus GST and claims an input tax credit for the GST it pays to the publisher. There may be some specific tax ruling that overrides this. Would be very grateful if any ISV in a similar jurisdiction has encountered this issue.A cautionary tale if you have customers who use Coupa
We learned the very very very hard way that next-day Marketplace invoicing does NOT play nicely with Coupa. Here's what happened: Back in April, we closed a Marketplace transaction via private offer with one of our enterprise customers. Not a new customer, either - this was for a license extension with a current customer with which we'd transacted through Marketplace twice before. 30 days go by, and Partner Center still shows the invoice as 'uncollected.' 60 days go by, and Partner Center still shows the invoice as 'uncollected.' I open a ticket with Marketplace support. And kudos to them, they pick up my ticket within an hour. "Customer hasn't paid the invoice," they tell us. So now we are forced to take on the role of collections agency for a Microsoft invoice our customer hasn't paid and for which we don't know why they haven't paid. (Partner Center's Revenue reports are rather light on useful details.) Our buyer inside the customer also has no idea why the invoice wasn't paid: She sits far away from the folks who pay the Microsoft bills. Her colleague in IT who pushed the buttons to purchase the private offer likewise has no idea why the invoice wasn't paid: He too sits far away from accounts payable. We're baffled because never before have we had any delay in getting our payouts for this customer's Marketplace purchases. Our first thought is okay, maybe they now have custom net 60 payment terms with Microsoft. (A different issue we experienced on a different delayed payout back in January!) After ten days of intensive investigations involving nearly a dozen different people, we finally discover the source of the issue: The customer pays its Microsoft bills through Coupa, BUT: they did NOT know about nor integrate into Coupa workflow the (relatively new) next-day invoicing mechanism for Marketplace transactions. For their accounts payable team, if an invoice doesn't land in Coupa, it doesn't exist. The invoice for this Marketplace purchase was generated, but it got sent . . . nowhere, I guess? So in picking up my support ticket, Marketplace Support could only say "Customer hasn't paid the invoice." They probably had no way to know the correct response was "Customer hasn't received the invoice." Moral of the story: Ask your customers if they use Coupa. And if yes, prepare them for the possibility they might not receive the invoice for your software.How to navigate multi-currency private offers and optimize global deals in Microsoft Marketplace
Selling through Microsoft Marketplace increasingly means operating across regions, currencies, and complex billing scenarios and understanding how multi-currency private offers work is critical to successful deal execution. Multi-currency private offers enable partners to scale globally, but require a clear understanding of how FX rates, timing, and pricing conversions impact both customer costs and partner payouts throughout the transaction lifecycle. Gain practical insights into how pricing is set and converted, how timing influences outcomes, and how to structure deals more predictably across geographies. Learn how to confidently manage cross-border transactions, reduce risk from currency fluctuations, and strengthen your Microsoft Marketplace strategy for global growth. 👉 Read the full article Multi-currency private offers in Microsoft Marketplace: What partners need to know or watch the recent office hours session Multi‑currency private offers in Microsoft MarketplaceDiscover 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 hoursDiscover new Microsoft Marketplace innovations announced at Microsoft Build
At Microsoft Build, Microsoft shared new opportunities for software development companies and partners to build, scale, and monetize AI apps and agents through Microsoft Marketplace. Explore how Microsoft Marketplace is helping software companies accelerate go-to-market strategies, expand customer reach, simplify procurement, and unlock new revenue opportunities across the Microsoft ecosystem. Learn how organizations can take advantage of Azure and Marketplace capabilities to support AI innovation and deliver enterprise-ready solutions faster. Whether you’re building intelligent applications, growing your commercial marketplace presence, or exploring new ways to monetize AI-powered solutions, this is a valuable resource for understanding the latest Microsoft Marketplace announcements and opportunities coming out of Build. 👉 Read more: Build, scale, and monetize apps and agents with Microsoft MarketplaceDiscover 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 decisions
