Procurement has moved to the marketplace. Most programs cannot credit the deal.

Your partner program was designed around a purchase order you controlled. A growing share of the money now moves through someone else’s checkout.

Omdia forecasts enterprise software sales through hyperscaler marketplaces rising from $30bn in 2024 to $163bn by 2030, a compound rate of 29.1%. The driver is committed spend. Close to $470bn sits in cloud commitments across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, and buyers have stopped treating marketplace purchases as a way to burn down leftover budget. They now negotiate those commitments deliberately to cover a wider set of third-party products.

The important part for partner leaders is what Omdia says next. Partners are not being displaced by this. They are adapting to it, supported by partner private offers and distributor models across all three hyperscalers. Jay McBain expects half of all marketplace transactions to include a partner-created private offer by 2027.

So the partner is still in the deal. The program is the part that falls over. Deal registration, margin tiers and rebate schedules were all built for a transaction that ran through your paper. When the paper runs through a hyperscaler instead and the partner attaches a private offer, most programs cannot see the deal, cannot attribute it, and cannot pay on it. The partner did the work and the record says direct.