Google Cloud Marketplace (GCP Marketplace) provides opportunities to companies - Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), data providers, channel partners, and resellers to reach more customers, accelerate deal cycles, and grow revenue by selling solutions and services on Google Cloud Marketplace. This blog provides the details of how to sell solutions, offer professional services, accelerate deal cycles, and extend value on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Note – There are some specific criteria to meet, so verify that you meet the listing requirements below in Appendix -1.
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Offer software on Google Cloud Marketplace 

The following is a high-level overview of the process of selling your software on Cloud Marketplace:

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1. Your organization must join Partner Advantage.  

After your organization has joined Partner Advantage, you get access to Partner Hub, where you sign the Marketplace Vendor Agreement. To view and accept the Marketplace Vendor Agreement in Partner Hub, you must be a Partner Admin.

2. Verify that you meet the requirements to list your product on Cloud Marketplace.

3. Sign up as a Cloud Marketplace vendor.

4. Accept the Cloud Marketplace agreement.

5. Select your pricing model.

6. Prepare to list your product.

7. Integrate your software with Cloud Marketplace.

8. Prepare your go-to-market (GTM) strategy.

Choose what you want to offer

You can sell one or more of the following product types on Cloud Marketplace:

1. Kubernetes apps for GKE and GKE Enterprise: Containerized apps that users can run on their Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) clusters, or on their own infrastructure using GKE Enterprise.

2. Virtual machine (VM) products: Custom VM instances that run on Compute Engine.

3. Software as a service (SaaS), billed by Google: SaaS products that run on Google Cloud, and are billed by Google.

4. Container image products: Open source containers, listed on Container Registry.

5. Dataset products: Dataset pages for Google Cloud customers.

Sign up as a Cloud Marketplace vendor

To sign up as a Cloud Marketplace vendor, complete the following steps:

1. In Partner Hub, start the process of becoming authorized as a Build partner.

2. In View tasks, under Partner tasks, click Initiate onboarding your product to Marketplace.

3. Complete the steps that follow, which might include submitting supporting documentation, such as architecture diagrams or business inputs, to verify that your organization and product meet the listing requirements.

Accept the Cloud Marketplace agreement

You must view and accept the Cloud Marketplace agreement in Partner Hub.

After you've accepted the agreement, you can see the version of the agreement that you accepted at Marketplace Vendor Agreement. To see the most recent version of the agreement, visit the public Marketplace Vendor Agreement.

To click to accept the agreement, you must be a Partner Administrator for your organization in Partner Hub.

Select a pricing model

If you're selling commercial software, you must choose a pricing model. Review the pricing options for different types of software:

• Pricing for Kubernetes apps

• Pricing for VM products

• Pricing for SaaS products

Prepare to list your product

After your vendor agreement is finalized, you receive instructions to complete the following steps:

1. Create a Google Cloud project, which you use to host all the components of your products. Depending on what you're offering, follow the guidelines in these sections:

• Set up your environment for Kubernetes apps

• Set up your environment for VM images

• Set up your environment for SaaS products

• Set up your environment for container image products

• Set up your environment for dataset products

2. Complete a Project Info form, provided by the Cloud Marketplace team. This enables access to Producer Portal, where you create and manage your product listing.

3. Sign up to receive payments from Cloud Marketplace.

4. Configure access control for members of your team who use Producer Portal.

5. Add your pricing model in Producer Portal. Pricing models take up to four business days to review. You can continue integrating your product while the pricing model is reviewed.

Integrate your software with Cloud Marketplace

To offer your product on Cloud Marketplace, your development team must integrate it with Google Cloud's infrastructure and billing systems, so that users can deploy your product with minimal effort.

To start integrating your software with Cloud Marketplace, read the following sections for an overview and checklist of tasks:

• Offering Kubernetes apps

• Offering VM products

• Offering SaaS products

• Offering container image products

• Offering dataset products

Prepare your go-to-market (GTM) strategy

If you're considering offering products on Google Cloud Marketplace, learn about how we help you to market them in the Drive demands for your products guide.

If you're already a Google Cloud partner, visit Partner Hub for details of our offered GTM benefits.

Conclusion

Selling on Google Cloud Marketplace is a strategic decision, it requires bit strategy and planning. Completing entire process and all the steps could take between four to eight weeks and requires significant manual work from the Google team as well.

There are companies in the space of marketplace listing and management platforms such as wetransact.io, labra.io and others. CloudNuro team would be happy to assist, contact us at https://www.cloudnuro.ai/ or send email at info@cloudnuro.com

Just like a successful GCP Marketplace strategy optimizes visibility, pricing, and cost management, Cloudnuro empowers enterprises with deep insights, cost optimization, and governance across SaaS and cloud environments. Eliminate waste, improve efficiency, and scale smarter. Book a free demo today!

Appendix -1

Requirements for Google Cloud Marketplace

If you want to offer products on Google Cloud Marketplace, you must meet the following listing requirements. You must also maintain operational best practices for the types of products that you're offering.

1. Requirements for your organization (Company)

• Your organization must join and maintain good standing in Partner Advantage.

Note: If you aren't yet a Google partner, learn more and sign up at the Join Google Cloud Partner Advantage page.

After your organization has joined Partner Advantage, you get access to Partner Hub.

• Your organization must be incorporated in one of the supported regions.

• Your organization must have a Cloud Marketplace vendor account and payment profile in good standing.

2. Requirements for your product :
   
   Your product must be production-ready (not alpha or beta) to be publicly listed and sold through Cloud Marketplace.

• Your product must be enterprise-ready, including a professional online presence, a defined sales motion, customer support, and adherence to strong security best practices.

• Your product must not include known vulnerabilities, viruses, spyware, Trojan horses, or other malicious code of any kind.

• You must verify to Google Cloud through an approval process during onboarding that you host your software product primarily on Google Cloud. The following patterns are common approved use cases:

Pattern 1
Your entire product, and all of its supporting components, run entirely on Google Cloud. The following architecture diagram provides an example of this pattern.

Pattern 2
Your product's compute or data plane runs on Google Cloud, but smaller control planes or support infrastructure, such as logging or AI inference, run on-premises or on another cloud. In this case, your Google Cloud-hosted compute or data plane must be the resource whose consumption increases the fastest when your users increase their consumption. The following architecture diagram provides an example of this pattern.

Pattern 3
Your storage, backup, replication, or data recovery (DR) product must replicate all data to Google Cloud, while the product's control plane can run on-premises or on other clouds. The following architecture diagram provides an example of this pattern.

Pattern 4
Your product is migration tooling that has Google Cloud as its only destination for migration, but can run on-premises or on another cloud as a migration source. The following architecture diagram provides an example of this pattern.

Pattern 5
Your product's compute or data plane runs on Google Cloud. Your product's monitoring or security agents can run on-premises or on another cloud, but they must send data to a Google Cloud-hosted environment for storage and analysis. The following architecture diagram provides an example of this pattern.

Pattern 6
Your product is a dataset hosted on and delivered through Google Cloud. The following architecture diagram provides an example of this pattern.  

• You must ensure that your products on Cloud Marketplace have the same capabilities and features as any versions of those products that you offer outside of Cloud Marketplace.

• You must ensure that your data products don't contain any "personally identifiable sensitive information" as defined in the Protecting Americans' Data from Foreign Adversaries Act of 2024.