Founders, Your Product Isn’t Enough
Why Ecosystems Win in B2B
🧠 TL;DR: In today’s cloud-first world, B2B software success no longer depends solely on product quality - it hinges on ecosystem strategy.
Hyper-scaler platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are not just infrastructure providers; they are growth engines. Yet many founders sabotage their own scalability by clinging to ego-driven independence instead of building strategic partnerships.
Canonero’s "War of the Ecosystems" reveals that in modern B2B, the real competition is between networks, not products. Founders who master ecosystem orchestration - marketplace presence, technical integration, SI alliances, and multi-cloud strategy - unlock compounding distribution, credibility, and customer value.
The future doesn’t belong to the best software. It belongs to the best-connected.
In the hyper-competitive landscape of B2B software, the difference between exponential growth and stagnant struggle often lies not in the superiority of the product, but in the strategic orchestration of partnerships that amplify distribution, accelerate market penetration, and fundamentally reshape the path to success.
As Dr. Alejandro Canonero argues in his seminal work "War of the Ecosystems," we are witnessing an unprecedented transformation where cloud hyper-scalers have become the central battlegrounds for ecosystem dominance.
Yet, this transformative power of ecosystems remains paradoxically underutilised, largely due to a pervasive founder psychology that equates partnership with weakness and views solo success as the ultimate validation of entrepreneurial prowess.
Source : Atlassian
The Cloud Hyperscaler Revolution: Redefining the Ecosystem Battlefield
The emergence of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud as dominant platforms has fundamentally altered the ecosystem landscape for B2B software companies.
Dr. Canonero's three decades of experience building technology platform ecosystems at companies including Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Teradata, and Hewlett Packard provides unique insights into how these platforms have transformed from mere infrastructure providers into ecosystem orchestrators that can make or break software companies.
Cloud marketplaces have grown 86% year-over-year, with hyper-scalers making them center pillars of their partner strategies.
This astronomical growth represents more than market expansion - it signals a fundamental shift in how B2B software is discovered, evaluated, and purchased.
When Google Cloud's Corporate VP Kevin Ichhpurani states that "you cannot be customer-centric if you are not also partner-centric," he's articulating a strategic reality that many founders still fail to grasp.
The ecosystem battlefield that Canonero describes is characterised by intense competition not just between individual software companies, but between entire ecosystem networks.
Microsoft Azure holds 24% market share, AWS maintains 31%, and Google Cloud captures 11%, but these numbers only tell part of the story.
The real competition lies in each platform's ability to create gravitational pull that attracts and retains both software providers and customers within their ecosystem orbit.
The Psychological Barrier: When Ego Becomes the Enemy of Growth
The founder's dilemma is deeply rooted in the heroic narrative of entrepreneurship that pervades Silicon Valley culture and beyond.
The mythology of the lone genius - the Steve Jobs archetype who single-handedly revolutionises industries - creates a psychological framework where seeking partnerships feels like admitting inadequacy.
This mindset manifests in several destructive ways: founders become territorial about their vision, viewing potential partners as threats to their control rather than multipliers of their impact; they overestimate their ability to build every necessary capability in-house; and they undervalue the strategic advantages that come from leveraging established relationships and market presence of others.
Dr. Canonero's framework reveals how this ego-driven approach becomes particularly catastrophic in the cloud era.
The barriers to entry that once protected traditional software distribution models have been obliterated by cloud platforms.
Today, a startup can achieve global distribution in months rather than years—but only if they understand how to navigate the ecosystem dynamics that Canonero's "War of the Ecosystems" illuminates.
The irony is profound. While founders pride themselves on being data-driven and rational, they often make fundamentally irrational decisions when it comes to partnerships, choosing the harder path of building everything from scratch rather than the smarter path of strategic collaboration.
This ego-driven approach doesn't just slow growth - it often prevents companies from reaching their full potential entirely, as they exhaust resources trying to recreate infrastructure and relationships that already exist within their potential partner ecosystem.
The Hyper-scaler Ecosystem Multiplier Effect: Beyond Traditional Distribution
Modern B2B software success hinges on understanding that partnerships with cloud hyper-scalers create value far beyond simple channel distribution.
The ecosystem effect operates on multiple dimensions simultaneously, creating compound advantages that no single company can achieve alone.
When partnerships are executed strategically within the AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud ecosystems, they don't just expand reach they fundamentally transform how value is created, delivered, and captured.
Consider the concept of "ecosystem velocity" - the speed at which value flows through interconnected partner networks orchestrated by cloud platforms.
Companies that master this concept don't just sell through hyper-scaler marketplaces; they create solutions where cloud platforms, software providers, system integrators, and customers become co-creators of value.
This transforms the traditional buyer-seller relationship into a four-way value creation engine where everyone benefits from enhanced outcomes.
SaaS is the biggest contributor to cloud spend at 30% of the $600 billion market, attracting SaaS companies who need to be where their customers are.
This statistic reveals why hyperscaler partnerships have become existential rather than optional.
The most successful B2B software companies have realized that their product is not just their software - it's their software plus the ecosystem of cloud infrastructure, integrations, implementations, customisations, and ongoing support that hyper-scaler partners provide.
Strategic Partnership Archetypes in the Cloud Era
Understanding the different types of strategic partnerships within hyper-scaler ecosystems provides insight into how distribution can be fundamentally reshaped.
Cloud marketplace partnerships represent the most visible form of ecosystem participation, where software solutions gain instant access to enterprise buyers who are already committed to specific cloud platforms.
New cloud marketplaces already dwarf the first B2B SaaS app stores, with vastly more applications than the 3,000+ apps on Salesforce AppExchange.
Technology integration partnerships with hyper-scalers create technical ecosystems where software solutions become more valuable together than apart.
When a B2B software company achieves deep integration with AWS services, Azure Active Directory, or Google Cloud AI, they're not just providing compatibility - they're creating lock-in effects and increasing their strategic value to customers who are invested in those platforms.
Implementation and consulting partnerships represent another critical archetype, where established system integrators and consulting firms become force multipliers for software adoption within specific cloud ecosystems.
Major consulting firms like Kyndryl and Rackspace Technology continue to expand their strategic alliances with AWS, while companies like Lemongrass extend partnerships with Microsoft to target SAP migrations to Azure.
These partnerships are particularly powerful because they combine market credibility with deep customer relationships and cloud-specific expertise.
According to Canonero's framework, the most sophisticated ecosystem players understand that hyper-scaler partnerships aren't just about distribution - they're about creating "ecosystem lock-in" where customers become increasingly dependent on integrated solutions that span multiple partners within a single cloud platform.
The Acceleration Paradigm: Cloud-Speed Market Entry
In B2B software markets, speed to market often determines winner-take-all outcomes, and cloud partnerships provide acceleration mechanisms that are impossible to replicate through organic growth alone.
The time required to build direct sales teams, establish market credibility, and develop customer relationships can be measured in years. Strategic partnerships with hyperscalers can compress this timeline to months or even weeks.
Multi-cloud strategies are changing the structure of the cloud industry, with Azure and GCP growth rates twice the size of AWS despite AWS's $25 billion+ run rate.
This dynamic creates opportunities for software companies that can successfully navigate multiple ecosystem relationships simultaneously, achieving what Canonero terms "ecosystem arbitrage."
The acceleration effect is particularly pronounced in enterprise software, where buying decisions involve multiple stakeholders and extensive evaluation processes.
Cloud partners who already have established relationships with key decision-makers can dramatically reduce sales cycles.
More importantly, they can provide credibility and risk mitigation that new software companies cannot achieve on their own.
This acceleration isn't just about speed - it's about compound growth effects. When hyper-scaler partnerships enable faster market entry, they create earlier cash flow, which enables more investment in product development, which creates better solutions, which attracts better partners, creating a virtuous cycle of accelerated growth that compounds over time.
Ecosystem Intelligence: The Hidden Competitive Advantage of Cloud Partnerships
One of the most overlooked advantages of strategic partnerships with cloud hyperscalers is access to ecosystem intelligence - market insights, customer feedback, and competitive information that flows through their vast partner networks.
This intelligence provides several strategic advantages that Canonero emphasises as critical to ecosystem warfare success.
Cloud partners often have broader market visibility than individual software companies, seeing patterns across multiple customers and industries.
They understand customer pain points from an implementation perspective, providing product development insights that pure software companies might miss.
Additionally, they have competitive intelligence from working with multiple vendors, understanding market positioning and customer preferences in ways that individual companies cannot.
Hyper-scalers support startups because they bring fresh perspectives, agility and specialist expertise, providing opportunities to tap into emerging markets, address technological gaps and acquire new talent.
This ecosystem intelligence creates a feedback loop that enhances product development, market positioning, and strategic decision-making.
Companies that effectively tap into this intelligence often find that their cloud partners become strategic advisors, providing insights that drive product innovation and market strategy.
The Network Effect: Exponential Value Creation in Cloud Ecosystems
The true power of hyper-scaler partnership ecosystems lies in their network effects—the phenomenon where the value of the network increases exponentially as more high-quality partners join.
The adoption of multi-cloud strategies allows organisations to diversify reliance away from one provider, reduce costs, and increase reliability, but paradoxically, this also strengthens individual ecosystem networks as companies seek deeper integration within each platform they use.
Cloud network effects create several strategic advantages: customers become more valuable as they can access more integrated solutions within their preferred cloud platform; partners become more valuable as they can offer more comprehensive cloud-native solutions; and the software platform becomes more valuable as it becomes a central hub within broader cloud ecosystem.
Network effects also create powerful competitive moats.
Once a strong partner ecosystem is established within a specific cloud platform, competitors face not just the challenge of building better software, but the much more difficult challenge of recreating an entire ecosystem of relationships, integrations, and collaborative value creation within that same cloud environment.
Case Study Insights: Cloud Ecosystem Success Stories
Slack's transformation illustrates the power of strategic partnerships in reshaping distribution within cloud ecosystems.
Rather than trying to build every workplace functionality internally, Slack created an ecosystem where thousands of third-party applications integrate with their platform, while simultaneously achieving deep integration with cloud providers like AWS and Google Cloud.
This multi-layered ecosystem strategy transformed Slack from a point solution into a platform that customers couldn't easily replace.
The key insight from Slack's approach is that cloud partnerships didn't just provide distribution - they fundamentally changed the value proposition.
Customers weren't just buying messaging software; they were buying access to an ecosystem of workplace productivity tools that leveraged cloud infrastructure for scale, security, and reliability.
Similarly, HubSpot's ecosystem strategy demonstrates how partnerships can accelerate market education and adoption within cloud environments.
By creating a comprehensive partner program that includes solution providers, developers, and service providers, while maintaining strong relationships with cloud infrastructure providers, HubSpot transformed the complex process of implementing marketing automation into a supported, cloud-native ecosystem experience.
Dr. Canonero's Strategic Framework: Winning the Ecosystem War
Canonero's "War of the Ecosystems" provides a strategic framework for understanding how B2B software companies can navigate the complex battlefield of cloud-native partnerships. His central thesis - that we are witnessing a fundamental shift from product competition to ecosystem competition - has profound implications for how founders should approach partnerships.
According to Canonero's framework, successful ecosystem warriors understand three critical principles.
First, ecosystem participation is not optional; it's existential.
Companies that attempt to remain independent of major cloud ecosystems will find themselves increasingly marginalised as customers consolidate their technology stacks within specific cloud platforms.
Second, ecosystem success requires understanding the strategic objectives of hyper-scaler partners, not just your own objectives.
Cloud providers are building platforms designed to create customer lock-in and maximise platform value, and successful software partners align their strategies with these objectives.
Third, ecosystem warfare requires different metrics and mindsets than traditional software competition.
Success is measured not just by individual product performance, but by ecosystem influence, partner network strength, and platform integration depth.
The Strategic Imperative: Reframing Partnership as Strength in the Cloud Era
The fundamental insight for B2B software founders is that strategic partnerships with cloud hyper-scalers are not a compromise or admission of weakness - they are a strategic imperative for achieving maximum impact and sustainable competitive advantage in the cloud era.
The companies that will dominate the next decade of B2B software are those that master the art of cloud ecosystem orchestration, creating value through collaborative networks rather than purely internal capabilities.
This requires a fundamental shift in founder mindset: from viewing partnerships as necessary evils to seeing them as strategic multipliers; from focusing on maintaining control to optimising for impact within cloud ecosystems; and from building everything in-house to curating the best possible ecosystem of collaborative value creation anchored by hyper-scaler platforms.
McKinsey projects B2B marketplaces will generate $17 trillion by the end of the decade, and cloud marketplaces will be central to this transformation.
The ecosystem advantage is not just about finding partners—it's about creating a strategic framework where partnerships with cloud hyper-scalers become the primary engine of growth, innovation, and market leadership.
In an increasingly connected and specialised business environment orchestrated by cloud platforms, the ability to thrive within multiple cloud ecosystems may be the most important competitive advantage a B2B software company can develop.
The choice facing founders is clear: continue the ego-driven approach of trying to win everything alone, or embrace the strategic power of cloud ecosystems to achieve exponential growth and sustainable competitive advantage.
The evidence overwhelmingly supports the latter approach, but the psychological barriers remain the primary obstacle to realizing this potential.
As Dr. Canonero's work demonstrates, the future belongs to those who understand that in B2B software, the cloud ecosystem is not just a growth strategy - it is the growth strategy.
The sooner founders embrace this reality, the sooner they can unlock the transformative power of strategic partnerships to elevate, accelerate, and reshape their path to success in the cloud era.
Source : Clazar
References
Canonero, Alejandro. "War of the Ecosystems: Strategies for Growing Your AI, Cloud, and SaaS Businesses." Amazon Publishing, 2024
Dr. Alejandro Canonero Professional Background: "30+ years of successful hands-on experience in building Cloud, SaaS & AI Ecosystems," alejandrocanonero.com, 2024
"Cloud marketplaces of AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud grow 86% YoY," Partner Insight, February 2023
"Microsoft Azure Market Share & Buyer Landscape Report," HG Insights, February 2025
"Cloud partners bolster relations with AWS, GCP and Microsoft," TechTarget, 2022
"AI Drives Investment: Cloud Market Share 2024 for Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud," ChannelE2E, August 2024
"Cloud Wars: The Rivalry Between Amazon, Microsoft, and Google," CB Insights, January 2022
Salesforce AppExchange Case Study: "Building Platform Ecosystems," Harvard Business Review, 2019
HubSpot Ecosystem Development: "Partner Program ROI in SaaS," Forrester Research, 2021
B2B Software Ecosystem Trends: "The State of Partner Channel Programs," PartnerFleet, 2023
Founder Psychology in Partnership Decisions: "Entrepreneurial Ego and Strategic Decision Making," Stanford Business Review, 2020
Network Effects in Software Platforms: "Platform Revolution," MIT Press, 2016
Enterprise Software Buying Behavior: "The Changing B2B Sales Landscape," Salesforce Research, 2023
✍️ Why I Wrote This
I’m endlessly fascinated by startups and the emotional rollercoaster that begins the moment a founder has that epiphany - the “aha!” moment 💡 where a problem grips them so tightly they feel compelled to solve it.
As a recovering Founder and Co-Founder myself - and someone who now supports startup founders and leadership teams across the globe 🌍 - I’ve seen something intriguing: the way a person approaches decision-making, risk, and intuition often varies dramatically depending on their age, experience, or both.
A strategic imperative is enabling your ecosystem and ignore the hyper-scalers at your peril. Not easy but huge value for both parties if you can crack it smartly. More on this soon.
I have known Dr Alejandro Canonero for over 20+ years as we did our Executive MBA together at Ashridge, 🇬🇧 . A close friend and amazing operator, he founded the AWS Marketplace in EMEA and recently ran partnerships for Google Cloud globally. Alejandro came on The G&T Sessions earlier this year. Here is the link to the article about this amazing episode, hot 🥵 on the heals of his release of his best-selling book “War of the Ecosystems” which was his Doctorate [PhD] level research on this topic. A global expert and here is the link 👇
Alejandro Canonero, Founder, Builder, Leader Navigating the Wild West of AI, SaaS & Cloud Ecosystems
In this episode of the G&T Sessions podcast, Andrew Turner welcomes back Alejandro Canonero, who shares insights from his recent PhD research on the success and failure of AI, SaaS, and cloud companies.
This article is just the start. I’m building a full Founder’s Guide to Ecosystem Strategy. Want early access?
👉 Which cloud ecosystem are you betting on - and why? Please share in the comments 👇
🎧 Let’s Stay Connected
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🎙 Listen + subscribe → https://www.linktr.ee/thegtsessions
(For deeper dives into the psychology of founders.)
You can also follow me on X → https://www.x.com/andrewjturner
And now it’s July 2025 already 🤬 , I wanted to let you all know I am working on a new proposition that I will be launching before September - no holidays for the wicked 😜.
I’m building something that takes all of this and more….and turns it into a framework founders can use in real time. Want to be part of the next cohort starting soon?
Ciao for now 👋
– Andrew