When evaluating the marketplaces of the big three public IaaS cloud providers – Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft – AWS stands out in terms of the maturity of its platform for partners to offer products and services on top of its cloud. But Microsoft, too, has a formidable partner program that could rival Amazon’s in the future, analysts predict.

Each of these three providers has a network of partners that have products and services that run on top of their IaaS clouds. Examining these marketplaces can be important for cloud customers; once a cloud provider is chosen, users may want to explore other third-party apps and services that are tightly integrated with that cloud service. In many cases, apps on top of these providers’ clouds are a customer’s first use of Amazon, Microsoft or Google’s cloud.

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