Presented by Terry Wise, VP of Global Alliances and Channels at AWS
The room was full of energy during the AWS Global Partner Summit keynote session in Las Vegas yesterday. Terry Wise, the VP of Global Alliances and Channels at AWS, presented the top initiatives, business trends, and program advancements that will create new opportunities for partners in 2019 and beyond.
Partner Program Momentum
It was an impressive scene as Wise presented the growth and evolution across the partner ecosystem over the last year. According to Wise, partner opportunities have more than tripled in size compared this time last year.
“2018 was an amazing year for the partner community in building shareholder and customer value,” Wise explained, “The AWS partner community received strong private and public market funding along with notable mergers and acquisitions.” One of the acquisitions highlighted by Wise was that of CloudHealth Technologies and how VMware’s purchase was made “at a strong valuation.”
Click here to learn more about the CloudHealth acquisition.
Keys To Partner Success
Hundreds of thousands of unique cloud solutions from the entire partner community are solely focused on driving customer success. With that, partner momentum is widely driven by the end-users’ needs for knowledge and expertise as they migrate to the cloud. While unique partner services are key to driving end-user success in the cloud, Wise also identified an experienced staff who are trained and certified as a key differentiator.
“Partners are core to our company DNA. We are committed to helping them accelerate their business by differentiating their cloud portfolio, improving service delivery efficiency, and boosting profitability. This years partner summit keynote reinforced how well aligned we are with AWS and helping partners become next-generation Managed Service Providers (MSPs). This year alone we had over 100 partner professionals become CloudHealth certified.”–Bob Kilbride, Senior Director of Partner Channels, CloudHealth by VMware
The partners who gain focused experience will have immense growth potential and differentiate themselves from the competition by providing prescriptive value for customers. As partners consider investment areas for future training and competencies, Wise listed some of the top technologies for partners, including: containers, serverless computing, database, analytics (over 10,000 partners are using AWS analytics services to date), machine learning, artificial intelligence, and over time, robotics.
APN Program Advancements
According to Wise, the majority of Fortune 500 companies utilize APN Partner solutions & services in some capacity. With this in mind, it should come as no surprise that APN Partners are driving enormous growth and new business opportunities in key areas including migration services, managed services, end-user computing, Aurora, SAP, VMware, and Windows.
One of the key announcements made during the keynote session on Tuesday was a set of updates to the overall APN Program that will recognize and support the growth, investment, and innovation of our evolving APN Partner community, and better align APN Partners to more structured program benefits. The APN Program updates include:
- Renaming the Standard Tier to Select Tier
- Structured benefits for APN Partners at each tier
- Updating APN requirements to measure each APN Partner’s knowledge, experience, and customer success
AWS has spent the past year considering the partner feedback from re:Invent 2017 along with other advancements that will make partners successful. Below are the additional program advancements mentioned during the Global Partner Summit keynote session yesterday:
- There are now 40 AWS competencies, including the new AWS Container Competency
- For IoT, there’s a new AWS Device Qualification Program and new Partner Device Catalog
- Partners building towards a specific competency now have new AWS Navigate Tracks for DevOps, IoT, and HPC. AWS Navigate provides a prescriptive path towards specialization for APN Partners. Our Navigate tracks offer APN Partners the guidance they need to become AWS experts and deploy innovative solutions on behalf of AWS Customers. AWS expects to Navigate for MSPs in Q1 2019.
More on re:Invent 2018
Stay tuned for more re:Invent 2018 updates, including a special recap on the next keynote session presented by AWS CEO Andy Jassy which will kick off today at 8 am PST sharp.
