The Marketplace Playbook: Start with the Customer, Scale What Works

TL;DR

A marketplace can help technology providers expand distribution and simplify buying when it’s built around a clear customer need. Leaders from Vodafone Business, T-Mobile, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Workday recently shared practical lessons on choosing a focused catalog, weighing build versus buy, connecting with hyperscaler channels, and exploring AI to improve discovery while keeping customer trust and human support in view.

Define the job your marketplace needs to do

Building a marketplace is a series of choices: which customer problem to address first, what to bring to market, and what to scale once it works. In a Thrive 2026 main-stage panel session moderated by AppDirect CTO Emanuel Bertolin, leaders from Vodafone Business, T-Mobile, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Workday shared the decisions behind their marketplace strategies—and the lessons other providers can put to work.

Though their marketplace journeys are at different stages, the discussion focused on a shared question: how should a marketplace help customers buy—and support the provider’s business?

Together, their experiences offer a practical starting point: define the customer need and business goal your marketplace should serve before choosing a platform or catalog, then build around the capabilities that remove friction and scale what works.

How four providers are putting marketplaces to work

The panelists’ examples show what that customer-first approach looks like in practice: speeding up launches, supporting partners, and giving customers and sellers more choice.

Vodafone Business has integrated its marketplace into its technology and fulfillment systems. Tobi Icks said the German operation can use the wider group’s existing catalog and billing setup when launching products—helping shorten the process from four or five months to about four weeks.

Workday sees its marketplace as infrastructure for its partner program. Jake Zborowski described using it to support e-commerce and self-service, taking some manual work away from sales and marketing while making partner solutions easier for customers to discover and evaluate.

At T-Mobile, Brent Johnston said the marketplace is intended to help the company bring third-party solutions to market faster and give sellers and customers more choice.

Ron Kafka of HPE described a different starting point: after trying to build marketplaces internally, the company recognized it needed a stronger financial model and a way to connect third-party offers with customer spending commitments.

These examples suggest a useful first exercise for any organization thinking about its marketplace strategy:

• Map the customer journey. Where do customers discover, evaluate, buy, and manage the products you offer?

• Name the friction. Is it slow launches, disconnected fulfillment, limited choice, manual sales work, or a buying process that doesn’t fit customer commitments?

• Set a marketplace job. Decide which parts of that journey the marketplace should improve first.

• Choose a measure of progress. Track a result connected to that job, such as launch time, customer access to relevant solutions, or the amount of manual work removed.

A clear role makes later choices easier. It helps determine what belongs in the catalog, which integrations matter, and where human sales support should remain part of the experience.

Curate for customer demand, not catalog size

A large catalog can look impressive, but more listings don’t automatically make it easier for customers to find a solution. The panelists described focused portfolios built around the needs their organizations can serve well.

Vodafone began with a curated portfolio that included products such as Microsoft and Google. Icks said the company has kept that approach, adding products when there’s a clear market demand and strategic fit. Vodafone is also looking at adjacent professional and managed services as it expands beyond its traditional telco role.

Workday takes a similarly targeted approach. Zborowski said it looks for independent software vendors that fill strategic gaps for particular industries or verticals, alongside first-party solutions. The aim is to help customers see the products and services that complete a solution, rather than browse an undifferentiated long tail.

T-Mobile is taking a hybrid approach, combining its own products with third-party offerings. Johnston said access to a broader ecosystem can give customers and sellers more choice, including options the company may not have previously been able to offer in a particular vertical.

For providers shaping a marketplace portfolio, the panel’s examples point to a few practical tests for each prospective offer:

1. Is there demonstrated customer demand? Look for a specific need, segment, or buying scenario the product addresses.

2. Does it fit your strategy? Consider whether it complements your core offer or fills a meaningful gap.

3. Can your sales and delivery teams support it? A listing is only useful if customers can evaluate, buy, and use the solution successfully.

4. Does it give customers a meaningful choice? Add alternatives where they help customers find the right fit, not simply to increase the listing count.

Curating a catalog doesn’t mean keeping it permanently small. It means having a reason for each addition and expanding in response to what customers and sellers need.

“A product has to serve a certain demand. So there must be market demand for us.”
— Tobi Icks, Vodafone Business

Make the build-versus-buy decision with clear eyes

“In the past, bringing an offer to market could take as long as a year. Working with AppDirect was a way to move faster while still curating offers for sellers and customers.“

— Brent Johnston, T-Mobile

The build-versus-buy decision often comes down to how quickly a company can turn an idea into something customers and sellers can use. T-Mobile had limited IT resources to spare for building from scratch, and Johnston described the trade-off plainly. There’s zero velocity in that and it can cause a lot of friction. “In the past, bringing an offer to market could take as long as a year. Working with AppDirect was a way to move faster while still curating offers for sellers and customers.“ He added that close collaboration between the IT teams helped them identify and resolve challenges quickly, contributing to that faster pace.

HPE approached the same question from the other direction. After incubating two marketplaces internally, the company identified gaps in its approach—including the economics of third-party sales and a way to connect offers to customer spending commitments. “We needed a better financial model,” Ron Kafka said. HPE’s broad-based spend commitment program was designed to help customers access preferred pricing, while the marketplace effort also required alignment across the teams involved.

For Workday, the value of a marketplace investment also includes opening channel opportunities and making the buying experience easier to navigate. Zborowski put the case for practical improvements this way: “Sometimes the simplest things, like simplifying your storefront and making it easier for customers to review information, can have the biggest impact.”

How to assess a marketplace build

Before committing to an internal build, assess:

• Time to value: How soon do customers need the capability, and what will it take to launch and maintain it?

• Available resources: Which product, IT, finance, sales, and operations teams will need to contribute—and will also able to maintain it once it's launched?

• Required commerce capabilities: What must work across catalog, ordering, fulfillment, billing, and partner processes and be compliance-ready?

• The business model: How will the marketplace support partner economics, customer pricing, and existing sales motions?

• Room to evolve: Can the approach accommodate new products, channels, and customer requirements without starting over?

The right solution depends on the organization’s needs and resources. The important step is to compare the full effort of building and maintaining a marketplace with the value of using a platform and focusing internal teams on the parts of the experience that differentiate the business.

“Sometimes the simplest things, like simplifying your storefront and making it easier for customers to review information, can have the biggest impact.”

— Jake Zborowski, Workday

Connect the marketplace to how customers buy

A marketplace can be a destination, but it can also support the sales relationships and systems customers already use, bringing digital commerce together with assisted sales, partner engagement, and internal tools.

Vodafone relies heavily on assisted sales. Account managers need to understand each customer’s plans and challenges, and sales teams need the enablement to explain the products. The company is also exploring how partners might help test demand without pulling sales teams away from customer relationships.

T-Mobile sees its field sales force and sales engineers as part of the buying experience. The marketplace could connect with portals, CRM, and other internal systems, while helping sellers surface relevant offers for customers based on their industry and how they buy. Johnston captured the balance the company is aiming for: “We wanted to be able to have that velocity, but also to be able to curate things for our sellers and our customers in an intentional way, but at scale.”

At Workday, the marketplace supports a more partner-oriented go-to-market approach as the company expands into new geographies. Zborowski described it as the backbone of Workday’s partner program, providing e-commerce infrastructure and self-service capabilities. This can reduce manual work for sales and marketing while making partner solutions easier for customers to discover and evaluate. He added that enabling the channel through the marketplace had opened new markets and accelerated the revenue process.

For providers, the practical takeaway is to plan for both the customer-facing storefront and the routes that bring customers to it:

• Enable sellers and partners to explain the offers and identify when they fit.

• Connect the marketplace to the sales workflows and systems your teams already use.

• Decide which purchases should be self-service and which benefit from a sales conversation.

• Give customers a consistent path from discovery through purchase and fulfillment.

• Treat partner enablement and demand generation as part of the marketplace strategy.

The aim is to make buying easier without removing the human guidance customers rely on for complex decisions.

Use hyperscaler marketplaces as part of your distribution strategy

The panelists generally described hyperscaler marketplaces as complementary to their own, with each channel serving a role in reaching customers.

HPE sells through hyperscaler marketplaces, and Kafka said his team uses that experience to understand what customers encounter there. The goal is to learn from those buying experiences and apply what works to HPE’s own marketplace, while keeping the offer connected to customers’ day-to-day buying motions.

Johnston said T-Mobile works closely with hyperscalers and sees opportunities to offer some solutions through its own marketplace while aligning with hyperscaler channels where appropriate. Zborowski said Workday also partners with and sells through AWS and Google marketplaces, and expressed interest in approaches that could make it easier to publish through one distribution point and reach multiple marketplaces.

A channel strategy should be based on customer reach and fit:

• Identify where your customers already buy and transact.

• Decide which offers belong in your own marketplace and which should also reach customers through hyperscaler channels.

• Look for ways to reduce duplicated publishing and operational effort.

• Keep the buying experience and partner motion connected across channels.

The panel’s message was not that every provider needs to choose the same mix. It was that distribution decisions should follow customer buying behavior and the role each channel can play.

Apply AI where it improves discovery and confidence

AI is beginning to shape both how customers discover solutions and how sellers recommend them. At Workday, AI-first products currently have a separate category so they’re “easy to find,” while an attestation process helps identify AI capabilities built into other offerings. In time, the categories may eventually merge as AI becomes more common.

Vodafone is exploring conversational discovery: a customer could describe a challenge and get help finding suitable products. The same capability could support account teams during renewals and proactive customer conversations, surfacing relevant offers without taking the focus away from customer relationships.

“The north star of AI is the need to reduce seller friction. The second thing is to improve buyer confidence.”

— Ron Kafka, HPE 

At HPE, Kafka framed AI goals around two outcomes: reducing seller friction and improving buyer confidence. The longer-term vision is not just a feature on the marketplace, but more of an intelligence layer on the marketplace that’s aligned with customers’ business, their infrastructure, and their purchase histories—so they can feel confident in the results and not feel like they have to jump off and go somewhere else.

A practical path for providers is to start with the customer or seller problem AI should address:

• Make it easier to describe a need and discover relevant products.

• Help sellers identify offers that fit a customer’s situation.

• Give customers clear information about why a result or recommendation is relevant.

• Decide how AI-enabled products will be identified and categorized in the catalog.

• Keep people involved where customer context, trust, and judgment matter.

One thing is clear: these capabilities are areas of development and exploration, not finished outcomes. Any provider can use that same discipline: define the experience they want to improve, test it with a focused use case, and expand based on what customers find useful.

Scale what works, then make the next improvement

The lessons coming out of this discussion came from organizations at different points in their marketplace journeys. Together, they offer a practical sequence for providers:

1. Define the marketplace’s role. Be specific about the buying or operational problem your marketplace should solve.

2. Start with a focused portfolio. Choose products that meet real demand and fit your strategy.

3. Choose the right operating model. Evaluate the full cost and effort of building, buying, integrating, and maintaining the experience.

4. Connect commerce to your go-to-market. Equip sellers and partners, and connect digital buying with the customer relationships and systems around it.

5. Reach customers through the channels they use. Treat your marketplace and hyperscaler channels as parts of a distribution strategy.

6. Improve discovery deliberately. Explore AI where it can make it easier to find relevant solutions or support sales, while maintaining customer confidence.

7. Learn from each release. Make it easier to trial an offer, respond to what you learn, and improve the storefront and buying experience.

Icks noted that Vodafone can now trial products much faster than before. Even when a trial doesn’t succeed, there’s value in what the team learns: “Even if it fails, you’ve learned.” That captures the logic behind scaling what works—make it easier to test an offer, learn from the result, and respond.

What these marketplace journeys reveal

Taken together, these examples show how different marketplace choices can serve distinct business needs while keeping customer value at the center.

• Vodafone’s experience shows how integrating a marketplace with fulfillment and billing can speed up launches.

• T-Mobile’s approach highlights the value of velocity, broader choice, and coordination across teams.

• HPE’s journey underscores the importance of a sustainable business model—and knowing when a platform is a better fit than continuing to build internally.

• Workday’s strategy shows how marketplace infrastructure can support partner-led growth and customer self-service.

There isn’t one marketplace design that fits every provider. The common thread is the discipline to begin with the customer’s buying journey, make deliberate choices about the experience and catalog, and grow the parts that prove useful. That’s how a marketplace can expand distribution and simplify purchasing while keeping the trust, expertise, and human support enterprise buyers expect.

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Resources

• View the full Thrive26 Marketplace Playbook session video

• Access all the key Thrive26 assets, including main stage keynotes and spotlights, breakout session insights and resources (session decks, marketing toolkits, articles, and more).