fieldnotes

Does Marketplace Portfolio Size Matter ?

2026-02-19

What’s this one all about then ?

We’ve recently been doing some more analytics type work over AWS Marketplace as a community of sellers and products. We’re certainly not new to the game in terms of appreciating the size and scale of some sellers and their product portfolios - there are a number of public examples of sellers with $1B+ cumulative revenue via Marketplace and a smaller but growing number of $1B ARR through Marketplace which tells you something about size and scale.

But our understanding has been recalibrated recently with some “outlier” discoveries - where there are sellers with hundreds of listings.

Our (somewhat incorrect) assumptions

We’d assumed prior to this, and based on a few years of experience in working with different sized/shaped AWS partners with Marketplace presence that the bell curve was something like this:

Thats a classic long tail distribution, or close enough. We’d never seen actual evidence of the 100+ product sellers, it was a hunch.

The Data

In our work recently we have been working with a body of about 2500-3000 AWS sellers with a Marketplace presence. Thanks to the wonders of observability, we came across a few things that stood out in terms of portfolio sizing.

This is by no means a scientific survey, its anecdotal and based on seeing outliers in the data we have been working with.

The Real Big Guns

If you look at their website … it seems “a bit unusual” as they are not really a technology vendor but a market research firm, their LinkedIn tells a similar story (with “51-100” employees, the Marketplace listing to staff member ratio is around 4-5 listings per person ??). A fair number of their products are “free” data products - which makes more sense. Regardless they have have hit the Marketplace publish button a whole heap of times to get to this point.

The Not-Quite-So-Big Guns

The Really-Quite-Small Guns

We had to draw the line somewhere, the ones below are still significant but they are clearly not in the same weight division as the ones in the earlier sections.

Observations

A few things stand out from this list (again, noting its not a scientific sample, its just a big enough sample to have some confidence in).

  1. Systems Integrators / Consulting Partners tend to have the larger catalogs of Marketplace listings, compared to ISVs.
  2. Technology companies that are in the business of shipping images based around open source software are also quite prevalent.
  3. Bigger portfolios are mostly bundles of product and service (not claiming “multi-product solutions”, but rather a solution which has both technology product and human effort involved in delivery)
  4. There are specialist data set publishers (via Data Exchange) that have larger portfolios of different data sets.

Its completely possible that there are other examples of sellers with even larger portfolios of listings; or its possible (but unlikely) we’ve just stumbled across the biggest, and our original view about the long tail distribution remains valid.

Potential Bias

These numbers are interesting enough, but consider:

Practical implications of managing Marketplace portfolios at this size/scale

Now being somewhat “in the game” of helping AWS partners put Marketplace entries together and then back them with co-sell motions there’s a few things that make us wonder about listing portfolios of this size:

The wrap up

As we said a few times, this is definitely not science but it is observation on a sizeable data set. Of course, AWS themselves know all the numbers (but as usual they don’t give many away).

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