Publishing tools to empower makers

A vibrant ecosystem of products is the lifeblood of any successful marketplace. So we focused on facilitating the role of the creators—Independent Software Vendors (ISVs)—with a toolset that helps them get their products into the marketplace with as little effort as possible.

The toolset integrates aspects of IBM’s Provider Workbench with the Red Hat certification process and system, to get the most value out of both properties. Through technical and heuristic audits of the existing IBM and Red Hat publishing experiences, as well as competitive reviews of prominent cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud, argo identified critical integration points and usability enhancements that strike a balance between experience and technical feasibility.

The finished product is a world-class publishing experience: a combination of self-serve and concierge touchpoints that effectively guide ISVs through creating an account, publishing their first product, establishing support and billing parameters, and managing and monitoring their offerings.