Digital Ocean, a provider of cloud services, today launched an application marketplace as part of an effort to introduce its channel partners to developers of emerging applications.
Providers of application development tools and platforms that have agreed to make their offerings available via the Digital Ocean Marketplace include GitLab, InfluxData, Grafana, Plesk, cPanel, OpenFaaS, Hasura GraphQL, and Fathom Analytics. Ultimately, Digital Oceans is looking to partner with somewhere between 60 to 100 application vendor partners, says Shiv Ramji, senior vice president of product for Digital Ocean.
Those vendors, in turn, will be exposed to not only millions of developers but also solution providers that sign up to become part of the Digital Ocean ecosystem, says Ramji. Channel partners typically see margins in the range of 10 to 15 percent on reselling cloud services along with other incentives from Digital Ocean on top of whatever revenue they generate for helping customers to build and deploy a cloud solution, notes Ramji.
Those margins are considerably higher than what most partners are likely to see from hyperscale providers of cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), adds Ramji. In contrast to those hyperscale rivals, Digital Ocean is also committed to making available high-touch support services, says Ramji.
“When you work with the hyperscale providers you may never get to interact with anyone, says Ramji.
Ramji says one of the biggest challenges Digital Ocean faces today comes down to simple education. Not enough partners are aware there is a viable alternative for building applications in the cloud that is specifically focused on the needs of small development teams, says Ramji.
Digital Ocean may never be the size of an AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. But from a channel partner perspective bigger is not always necessarily better, especially when the level of hands-on support required is a lot higher than the leading cloud service providers have thus far been willing to absorb in their business models.
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