A cloud marketplace for resellers is an online store through which telecom operators, distributors and IT firms resell other companies' software to their own business customers. A business customer chooses software, such as an office suite or an antivirus product, from the reseller's store. The marketplace then sets up the customer's accounts with the software maker, and adds the charge to the reseller's own bill. It is a part of subscription billing.
Why would a business buy software through its telecom operator? A small business already has a relationship with its operator, and already gets one monthly bill for its phones and internet lines. Buying email, office software and security from the same operator means one bill, one support number and one company to call when something goes wrong. For the operator, reselling software earns more from customers it already has. For software makers, resellers reach many small businesses that they could not sell to directly. Selling through other companies in this way is called channel sales.
The product does three jobs in one place. The first is the marketplace: the catalogue of software, with prices set by the reseller. The second is provisioning, which means creating the customer's account with the software maker and switching on the right number of user licences, automatically. The third is billing: working out each customer's monthly charge, dividing the money between the reseller and the software maker, and sending the charge to the reseller's own billing system.
Consider a dental clinic chain in Nagpur with 18 staff. Its office manager opens the business portal of its telecom operator. She buys 18 licences of an email-and-office suite at ₹125 per user a month, and 18 licences of an antivirus product at ₹60 each. Within minutes, the marketplace creates the clinic's accounts with both software makers, and each staff member gets a login. The charge of ₹3,330 a month, before GST, is added to the clinic's monthly phone bill. The operator's telecom billing system collects it. The marketplace then pays each software maker its part, after the operator keeps its margin. When the clinic hires two more staff, the manager adds two licences, and the next bill rises by ₹370.
The same kind of store sells other add-ons too. For example, the add-ons that extend an issue tracker, called issue tracker plugins, are sold through a marketplace. Software bought in any of these ways is still SaaS, rented and used over the internet. Only the seller in between is different.