BRENDAN BINEDELL , ALLIANCE MANAGER , LIFERAY
Q & A
EDITOR ’ S
BRENDAN BINEDELL , ALLIANCE MANAGER , LIFERAY
The marketplace is a key part of Liferay ’ s overall vision to deliver the best cloud platform for tailored solutions . According to Bryan Cheung , CEO of Liferay , the goal is to meet highly specialised B2B , B2C , and B2E use cases for businesses who need tailored digital solutions but do not want to build from scratch , saving resources to focus on generating value for their customers , partners , and suppliers .
Liferay partners are highly experienced in using the Liferay platform in a vast range of use cases . Marketplace empowers customers to leverage high-quality solutions that are already tested and utilised in the market .
Partners undoubtedly need to be well equipped with the online marketplace solutions to be able to unlock and maximise the power of the business model and provide optimum value to the customer . They need to have complete knowhow and understanding of the solutions and how to bring value to the main offering through marketplace solutions .
The marketplace encourages the partner to be creative and to become specialised in select fields they are working on to have a unique selling proposition .
Marketplaces offer partners the opportunity to scale in new markets ,
geographies , and customer segmentation . The often more standardised product offering can reduce their sales cycle and remove overheads from their sales motion . Marketplaces also complement core products or solutions . Either the company itself , or the wider community , can create complimentary add-ons , new services , additional functionalities , and advanced integrations to name a few which all strengthen the core solution .
As such , the marketplace serves as a way to ensure many additional requirements and use cases can be catered for without having to invest in large capital investments .
Moreover , there are many marketplaces on many technology platforms , which certainly helps diversify the route to market and reach all corners of the addressable market .
The downfall is that organisations need to be structured in such a way that they can absorb an increase in sales coming from the marketplace . This holds true both from an administrative perspective as well as a product development perspective .
Companies need to ensure that it is easy for customers to buy the products in the marketplace , that the company can easily and quickly provision and administer the sales , that the product infrastructure is scalable , and all necessary metrics and KPI ’ s can be generated . Failing this it can quickly become a burden .
Companies do need to consider that marketing activities will be different and can be a challenge as they need to ensure that their products and solutions content is constantly updated , fresh , and eye-catching . Promotion within marketplaces often is neglected resulting in the true value not being achieved . •
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