Get Found, Get Chosen, Get Paid on the Ultimate Partner-led B2B Commerce Platform

The new battleground for growth: Distribution

Three powerful trends are converging to reshape how companies get discovered: the rise of AI, the dominance of digital marketplaces, and increasing customer acquisition costs.

For every business owner, CIO, and IT leader, this new reality presents a formidable challenge. With a sea of solutions flooding the market and competing for buyer attention, distribution has replaced product features as the decisive competitive battleground. Consider this: 81% of B2B buyers already have a preferred vendor before they ever talk to sales. The influence is happening upstream, in the partner ecosystem. But managing the complex web of partner networks, hyperscaler programs, and indirect billing stacks is often a fragmented and manual struggle. And as large language models (LLMs) rewrite the rules of product discovery, there is new urgency for businesses to ensure their solution is discoverable and recommended when buyers search.

This is the challenge AppDirect is solving decisively with the acquisition of PartnerStack, a leading partner relationship management (PRM) platform with one of the largest B2B partner networks in the world. This move builds on our recent acquisition of Tackle.io, the preeminent cloud go-to-market platform that supports over $20B in cloud hyperscaler marketplace transactions, to create a single, unified ecosystem engine for modern B2B commerce.

The acquisition combines PartnerStack’s powerful PRM platform and its network of over 138,000 B2B affiliates, influencers, co-sell and channel partners with AppDirect’s subscription commerce and marketplace infrastructure. It gives B2B companies one place to drive distribution through the channels that matter most to buyers today: trusted partners, marketplaces, and AI search.

TL;DR

To win in today's B2B landscape, you have to master distribution. With the acquisitions of PartnerStack and Tackle.io, AppDirect has created a single, unified platform to help you do just that.

Own every route to market: Unify your partner ecosystem, hyperscaler marketplaces (like AWS and Azure), and direct sales into one powerful engine.

Win the growth game with AI: Drive growth by leveraging the world's largest B2B partner network to get discovered, chosen, and paid in a world where marketplaces, partners, and AI shape every buying decision.

The go-to-market playbook for the AI era

“With this acquisition, we're at the center of the underlying infrastructure powering enterprise technology purchase decisions today. Navigating commerce and partner management requires a unified platform. By bringing these capabilities together, AppDirect is giving companies the foundation they need to scale through partners and win in an increasingly indirect, marketplace-driven world.” —Nicolas Desmarais, CEO and Chairman of AppDirect

In this hyper-competitive landscape, traditional go-to-market playbooks have quickly become outdated. Overwhelmed by choice, buyers are tuning out the noise and turning to channels they trust. This behavior has created a new center of gravity for B2B commerce, built on three pillars:

1. AI is the new concierge

AI is fundamentally transforming how customers discover and assess software. As buyers turn to AI search on platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity (all available on a single platform through AppDirect’s devs.ai), the third-party content created by trusted partners is emerging as the most influential factor in getting found.

2. The channel is the key to success

The real story behind growth is the channel ecosystem.

• Research from Omdia projects that channel partners will drive 60% of all marketplace spend over the next four years, making them your most critical asset for growth.

• Forrester data confirms a similar power shift, with 70% of B2B purchases now flowing through indirect routes.

• Gartner predicts that by 2028, 75% of B2B organizations will close their highest-revenue deals through digital channels.

3. Marketplaces are the backbone

Managing all these channels is complex and requires tools to streamline operations and offer seamless experiences for partners and customers. Cloud marketplaces like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud have become a non-negotiable channel for B2B software sales. As committed cloud budgets grow and procurement teams centralize spending, marketplaces are where an increasing share of enterprise transactions close.

Changing the game: AppDirect + PartnerStack + Tackle.io

With the convergence of marketplaces, AI-driven discovery and partner-led commerce, companies need a single engine to master every route to market.

With Tackle.io enabling hyperscaler marketplace-led growth and PartnerStack providing the tools to recruit, onboard, manage, and scale partner ecosystems globally, AppDirect is now positioned to provide partner management, marketplace capabilities, and commerce functionality within one platform, making it the definitive platform for B2B subscription commerce.

AppDirect’s combined ecosystem now connects over 2,000 technology providers and more than 150,000 partners, powered by our leading commerce platform, solidifying its position as the leading B2B subscription commerce platform for finding, buying, managing and selling technology services.

Here’s a closer look at how it all comes together.

AppDirect provides the core commerce foundation

As the central platform, AppDirect enables technology advisors and providers to manage their entire quote-to-cash lifecycle. It offers access to a distribution network of over 14,000 technology advisors and gives companies the power to launch their own marketplaces, streamlining both direct and indirect selling. For partners, it provides a single point of truth to manage earnings across all channels.

PartnerStack is the engine for partner-led growth

“PartnerStack is the largest B2B content-partner network in the world, having driven well over $3 billion in revenue for our customers.” — Bryn Jones, CEO, PartnerStack

Providers will benefit from PartnerStack’s extensive network of over 138,000 partners, enabling them to discover new routes to market, new ways of managing partner relationships, build co-sell programs, and the tools to get discovered through LLMs.

Providers who operate marketplaces can now offer new solutions to customers by adding PartnerStack’s 600+ provider catalog. This also enables them to monetize product listings in new ways by becoming referral partners themselves.

• PartnerStack handles the heavy lifting—finding partners, onboarding them, issuing them trackable links, and paying them based on the pipeline they create—so teams don’t have to manage those tasks manually.

• Providers will have access to PartnerStack’s dashboards to visualize which partners are generating traffic, sign-ups, and revenue, and the citation tool highlights which creators publish content that shows up in AI-powered searches for their category.

• PartnerStack’s AI-first visibility, built to turn third-party partner content into a dynamic growth engine with a measurable pipeline, will become an integral part of the AppDirect platform.

This AI functionality is a vital element in the new distribution dynamic. As PartnerStack CEO Bryn Jones explains, “85–90% of AI search results are influenced by third-party partner content. PartnerStack is the largest B2B content-partner network in the world, having driven well over $3 billion in revenue for our customers. Companies are now leveraging our network to create the third-party content that AI search relies upon, which is rapidly becoming one of the most important channels for their businesses.”

AppDirect partners, including technology advisors, referrers, and resellers, will gain access to over 600 new providers, offering a wider mix of referral-ready solutions. It will also reduce complexity for customers by centralizing purchases through a single relationship. Partners will continue to earn commissions, with AppDirect serving as the single, central platform to manage all opportunities and earnings.

Learn more about PartnerStack and access resources, including case studies.

Tackle unlocks the hyperscaler ecosystem

With the acquisition of Tackle, AppDirect now supports over $20 billion in cloud hyperscaler marketplace transactions.". Tackle empowers software vendors to effortlessly list, sell, and manage products across critical marketplaces like AWS, Microsoft, and Google Cloud—integrating every route to market into one unified platform.

Those cloud marketplaces have become a non-negotiable channel for B2B software sales, but navigating their complexities, from listing to co-selling, can be a major hurdle. This is where Tackle comes in.

Bringing Tackle into the AppDirect platform makes it easy for software vendors to treat hyperscaler marketplaces as a core part of their strategy. This allows them to:

• List, sell, and manage products across the major hyperscaler marketplaces from a unified platform

• Simplify co-selling by connecting their CRM directly with cloud provider portals, creating a single, shared pipeline for them and their strategic cloud partners

• Unify their GTM strategy, ensuring their cloud marketplace efforts are fully integrated with direct sales and other indirect channels, not siloed

This approach ensures that no matter where a customer wants to buy, technology providers have a simple, efficient, and connected way to meet them there.

Learn more about Tackle and sign up—Access FAQs, read and watch customer testimonials, and sign up to start selling recurring services.

The ultimate mission: Meeting customers where they are

Ultimately, this integration is about more than streamlining sales motions. It's about reorienting the entire B2B commerce model around the buyer. For decades, the process of discovering, purchasing, and managing business technology has been defined by friction, forcing customers to navigate a maze of separate vendors, resellers, and billing systems.

The creation of a single, unified ecosystem signals a move toward a more transparent and connected future. When partners can operate from a universal platform and buyers can find, purchase, and manage solutions in one place, the complexity that has long defined B2B transactions begins to disappear. This isn't just about creating a more efficient go-to-market for sellers. It's about creating a fundamentally better experience for buyers.

As AI continues to automate discovery and ecosystems become the primary source of trust, the platforms that succeed will be those that remove friction, not add to it. The unification of AppDirect, PartnerStack, and Tackle is a definitive step in that direction, laying the groundwork for a future where technology is not only easier to sell, but simpler to buy.

Resources to explore

• Read the PartnerStack acquisition press release
• Read the Tackle acquisition press release

• Watch how Freshworks achieved a 300% increase in qualified signups
• See how monday.com grew partner-driven sales by 200% YoY
• Read how Coupa enabled its global partner ecosystem and ensured customer success through Business Spend Management (BSM).