Author: Howard M. Cohen
On a recent segment of Idenxt’s Microsoft Partner Secrets podcast with Per Werngren, Dexter Hardy, President and CTO of Ntegral, discussed the company’s success in building custom VMs and Azure managed applications for the Azure Marketplace, which has enabled rapid cloud migration for clients.
Ntegral, founded in 2002, pivoted to become an ISV in 2020, achieving significant growth with customers in over 100 countries and generating $100 million in Azure consumed revenue every six months. Hardy emphasized the importance of scale, marketplace optimization, and leveraging AI to enhance productivity. He also introduced Spark by Ntegral, a platform designed to help ISVs succeed in the marketplace, which received a positive reception at Ignite.
From the Interview
Ntegral’s journey is a masterclass in how a “traditional” Microsoft partner can pivot into a high-growth ISV by going all-in on the Azure Marketplace, scale, and AI.
In 2002, Ntegral started life as a systems integrator doing classic Microsoft work—servers humming in the data center, DVDs from Redmond, and a services P&L built on billable hours. Two decades later, they’ve turned that experience into productized IP: custom VMs, containers, and Azure Managed Applications that make cloud migration feel as familiar as racking a new box on-prem but deliver in minutes instead of months.
That packaging shift matters. Instead of expecting every customer’s team to become cloud experts, Ntegral bakes hard-won DevOps and migration patterns into ready-to-deploy solutions in the Azure Marketplace. The value proposition is simple and powerful: deploy like you always have, but always land directly in Azure, with governance and best practices pre-wired. For overworked engineers who own the “we’re moving to Azure” mandate, that’s not a small improvement; it’s the difference between constant firefighting and genuine peace of mind.
The Pivot Point of Inflection
The real inflection point came in 2020, when Ntegral pivoted from systems integrator to ISV and treated “marketplace” not as a side experiment but as the core business model.
By 2021 they shipped their first marketplace offer. Within a year they had customers in 44 countries, and the year after that, in more than 100 countries. That global reach wasn’t fueled by a massive field sales org. It was driven by marketplace distribution and a focus on what Microsoft cares deeply about, Azure consumed revenue.
Today, their solutions are driving roughly 100 million in Azure consumed revenue every six months, turning them from “just another regional partner” into a strategic ISV that Microsoft actively promotes.
Getting on Microsoft’s “Radar”
If you’re wondering how to get on Microsoft’s radar, that’s the blueprint. First, think in terms of scale, not just excellence. It’s not enough to be the best in your local market. Microsoft is looking for partners whose offers can be discovered, deployed, and expanded globally through the commercial marketplace.
Second, design your solutions to be Azure-first in a way that makes Azure look great: easier migrations, faster deployments, more workloads landing on the platform with less friction. When customers use your product and that leads them to use more Azure, you become “better together” with Microsoft in a very important and measurable way.
Ntegral also leans hard into AI, not as a marketing tagline, but as a force multiplier for their own team. They’ve embedded AI extensively in their internal processes and have built custom copilots to capture and reuse organizational knowledge, compressing the time it takes to package, patch, and optimize marketplace offers.
That reinforces a key theme emerging from Microsoft’s own “frontier firm” narrative: the winners are not those who replace humans with AI, but those who use AI to make every person on the team dramatically more productive.
The Discipline is in the Details
Their marketplace discipline shows up in the operational details too. Ntegral “lives” in Partner Center, monitoring analytics, fine-tuning listings, and aligning campaigns with Microsoft solution plays instead of treating the portal as a one-time registration form. They refresh their profile so it reflects what they actually do today, avoid the rookie mistake of checking every capability box and track marketplace KPIs with the same rigor most partners reserve for pipeline or utilization. Marketplace, for them, isn’t a storefront, it is the business.
Spark by Ntegral is the natural next step in that evolution: an ISV-for-ISVs platform built by a partner that eats its own cooking.
Unveiled at Ignite, Spark combines self-service tooling with advisory services to help ISVs and partners treat marketplace as a serious new line of business rather than a brochure site. It starts with fundamentals including business model, TAM, target segments, team, and then moves into offer design, listing optimization, and go-to-market execution. In other words, it codifies the playbook Ntegral used to go from selling hours to driving recurring revenue and from local systems integrator to global ISV with customers in over 100 countries. An impressive accomplishment.
Luck is Not a Strategy
There’s a quiet but important lesson here. Ntegral didn’t get lucky, they decided to pivot, committed to marketplace as the primary route to market, wired AI into their operating model, and iterated relentlessly inside Partner Center.
If you’re a Microsoft partner wondering whether it’s “too late” to build an ISV business on Azure, Ntegral’s story is a strong data point in the opposite direction. The tools are there. The marketplace is now central to Microsoft’s partner story, and AI has changed the economics of building and operating software.
The question is less “Can we?” and more “Are we willing to treat this as a real business, at real scale?”
To learn more, contact us here.
