"If Suger were to disappear tomorrow, an extremely crucial building block in our daily operations for our co-sell motion with any hyperscaler would be gone. It would create a huge operational overhead — more expensive than just hiring someone for it."
Overview
Ona is a platform for running background agents and AI software engineers that work 24/7 inside the customer's own infrastructure. They sell into Fortune 500 banks, insurers, and pharma. To meet their customers where they already were, Ona built a hyperscaler-first go-to-market motion with AWS Marketplace as the primary commercial channel.
But running marketplace-led at enterprise scale meant the operational layer had to be seamless. Sellers and CX needed to self-serve from inside Salesforce. Co-sell with AWS had to happen automatically, every time.
By partnering with Suger, Ona automated the entire co-sell and private offer workflow end-to-end. Today, more than 75% of Ona's total contract value flows through AWS Marketplace, opportunity share rates sit above 93%, and the partnerships team hasn't manually created a private offer in over a year.
Opportunity
Rethinking the partner playbook
Most software companies build their partner ecosystem the same way: start with SIs to refer or resell, layer in technology partners, then eventually pick a hyperscaler.
Daniel Zäh, Alliances Lead at Ona, deliberately built it the other way around — leading with the hyperscaler relationship, because that's where Ona's enterprise buyers were already committed.
"The traditional path locks you in. Either into SIs that don't work with your preferred hyperscaler, or into a hyperscaler that isn't ideal for your ICP. We started with the hyperscaler because those partnerships are enablement partnerships — they enable your team, your pipeline, your brand. And they give your enterprise buyers a procurement path they actually want to use."
That last point mattered. Ona's customers were large enterprises already sitting on multi-year AWS commits, and had a real incentive to buy through marketplace.
The strategic bet was clear. Executing it was harder. Every part of the motion had to scale: private offers, co-sell with AWS, and renewals — where marketplace mechanics get genuinely complicated.
Before the team automated it, the cost showed up as manual operations work.
"We had one dedicated person who always had to go through Salesforce, make sure every opportunity was being shared, that everything was being tracked. I've done a lot of manual private offers in the past, made extensions to private offers, tried to upload opportunity files in bulk to APN — let's face it, it doesn't work."
Solution
One tool, every workflow
When Daniel joined Ona, he set a clear vision for what good should look like. Every AE and rep touching a marketplace deal should self-serve from inside Salesforce, without ever opening a new tab. Co-sell with AWS should happen automatically, not as a separate workflow owned by one person. And the partnerships team should be free to focus on relationships, not on processing offers.
Here's how Suger brought that vision to life.
- Salesforce-native experience. AEs use Suger to create private offers and CX processes renewals without leaving the CRM.
- Fully automated co-sell with AWS. The entire co-sell flow — sharing opportunities, syncing updates, closing the loop back into Salesforce — runs automatically. Share rates moved from 68% to 95%, effectively at the ceiling once Ona's qualification criteria are applied.
- A self-serve sales org. Daniel hasn't touched a private offer himself in more than a year. With Suger, everyone self-serves — sales reps creating offers, CX handling renewals — and the partnerships team only steps in when something errors.
- Listing expansion. With the operational burden removed, Ona went from two marketplace listings to five — driven by Suger making each new listing cheap to launch and operate.
For Daniel, the success came down to how Suger's product is built to understand where his teams already work.
"The more tools you put in front of a person, the harder it gets to make sure they actually use them. Suger's UI is strong, but UI doesn't win the deal. What matters is people living in one tool with everything integrated. That's why Suger was the right partner."
Outcome
Scale without the overhead
In under 12 months, Ona moved from manually shared opportunities and hand-built private offers to a fully automated, end-to-end co-sell motion driving the majority of company revenue.
- 75%+ of total contract value transacted through AWS Marketplace.
- 95% co-sell share rate, up from 68%.
- 95%+ time saved on co-sell operations.
- 100% workflow automation in under 12 months.
The more telling outcome is what's no longer happening. No one is manually exporting opportunities to share with AWS. No one is rebuilding private offers from scratch when terms change. No one is the bottleneck.
A big part of why the partnership works, Daniel says, is the level of support — and the way Suger shows up.
"We don't think of partners as external companies we collaborate with. They become an extended part of our team. And we feel this is the same with Suger. Your team lives in our Slack Connect, the exchange is good, you're responsive. Your customer success plays a critical role."
About Ona
Ona is a platform for running background agents — AI software engineers that work 24/7 inside the customer's own infrastructure. Each AI engineer runs in a secure, ephemeral cloud environment deployed in the customer's AWS or GCP VPC, executing complete engineering workflows from ticket to pull request. Ona works asynchronously in the background, tackling organizational-scale work like large-scale migrations, CVE remediation, and tech debt across hundreds of repositories while engineers focus on higher-value work. Ona serves enterprise customers in regulated industries including financial services, insurance, and pharma.
Learn more at ona.com.