Try before you buy at Amazon's intelligence community market

Amazon.com Inc.'s new U.S. intelligence community (IC) marketplace may make it easier for small software vendors to compete for classified business. According to Amazon Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr, "Our goal is to give the Intelligence Community as broad a selection of software as possible, so we are working to help our AWS Marketplace sellers through the onboarding process so that the Intelligence Community can benefit from use of their software." To be eligible for the IC marketplace, software must already be available on Amazon's public marketplace, according to Amazon. And, according to Nextgov, "The IC Marketplace is essentially a classified version of AWS' public marketplace that allows customers to peruse -- and try before they buy or deploy -- nearly 3,000 software offerings created by 925 independent software vendors." Little information is publicly available about what's available on the IC marketplace, although it's a sure bet that companies are trying out their analytics and big data platforms.