AWS re:Invent: MSP Partners Make Big Money On Top of AWS Sales
The AWS Partner Solution Factory works with partners to 'SaaSify' their solutions
During re:Invent, AWS unveiled its new Security Data Lake. The security solution brings together telemetry from over 50 different security providers and partners, including ISVs.
“What you’re seeing is that we have services now that are launched with partners in mind from the beginning,” said AWS’ Ruba Borno. “And I think that is incredibly encouraging, not only for our partners, but more importantly for our customers who know that they have multiple partners to deliver value for them. So seeing AWS bring that together and bring our partner community together to solve these challenges for our customers has received incredible feedback.”
In addition, thousands of ISVs are now available on AWS Marketplace to help deliver more solutions to customers, she said.
“So again, our partners are seeing that optimism that we have and recognizing that AWS recognizes the value that partners bring to our customers together,” Borno said.
AWS is set to help partners succeed in the current economic climate, Borno said.
“We’re leveraging programs that we have, such as our Migration Acceleration program, where we are working with our partners to actually pay for a portion of the cost of customers migrating to the cloud,” she said. “This has been extremely valuable to our partners and to our customers, especially in this environment. That’s one area.
The other area is with AWS Marketplace. With AWS Marketplace, customers can draw down on their agreement with us, even if they’re procuring third-party solutions or services. So in a world where our customers are thinking through how do they get more value, they’re able to procure third-party solutions from partners like IBM, Infor, Confluent and Snowflake, all from the AWS Marketplace, and draw down on their EDP commitments to AWS. So we believe that adds value to our partners and also adds value to customers.”
AWS is focused on co-selling with its partners and the various vehicles that it’s using for that, Borno said.
“I touched on AWS Marketplace, but we have seen a lot of great progress in our ability for our field to connect with our partners, to support customers and expand co-selling,” she said. “We have a program called ISV Accelerate for ISV partners where we compensate our field for selling non-AWS solutions, but they’re built on AWS. So they’re not AWS services, rather built on AWS. Companies like Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent … we have really great progress on joint cross-selling with them, and that’s something that we will continue to invest in with our partners.”
Borno also announced the preview of AWS Marketplace Data Visualization Dashboards. It’s aimed at helping partners to more easily visualize and grow their businesses. She also announced the general ability of AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights. It’s aimed at simplifying software risk assessments and increasing buyer confidence.
Also at re:Invent, AWS and Atos announced a global strategic transformation agreement that enables Atos customers with large-scale infrastructure outsourcing contracts to accelerate workload migrations to the cloud and achieve digital transformation.
The multiyear agreement extends the strategic relationship between Atos and AWS, with Atos selecting AWS as its preferred enterprise cloud provider and AWS naming Atos as a strategic partner for IT outsourcing and data center transformation. This agreement provides business and technology advisory, digital engineering, and managed services to Atos’ customers to accelerate their journeys to the cloud.
AWS will also work with Atos to develop and deliver new industry solutions for IT outsourcing and data center transformation to customers globally, as well as to upskill Atos’ workforce and drive efficiencies in its data center, cloud and security operations, including selective migration of legacy data centers and IT hardware assets.
In addition, Atos employees will be trained on AWS, scaling up their skills and knowledge to continue supporting customers on their digital transformation journeys. Over the next three years, Atos plans to train its employees to achieve more than 20,000 AWS certifications in order to expedite customers’ cloud adoption and help them leverage the advantages of the cloud.
Nourdine Bihmane is co-CEO in charge of Atos‘ tech foundations business line.
“We are proud to strengthen our partnership with AWS in a first-of-its-kind collaboration, which is transformational in both its approach and its impact on our customers and the IT outsourcing industry,” he said. “In addition, this partnership represents another significant step in Atos’ transformation. As a trusted partner, we are offering our customers the opportunity to accelerate their migration to AWS’ powerful, proven, cost-effective and scalable cloud infrastructure, while supporting them in their digital transformation journey.”
AWS and Slalom announced a multiyear extension to the companies’ global strategic collaboration agreement (SCA). The two companies will work together to develop vertical solutions and accelerators on AWS for customers in the energy, financial services, health care, life sciences, public sector, and media and entertainment industries.
They’ll deliver specialized end-to-end cloud migration and modernization services to help accelerate customers’ cloud journeys. In addition to supporting accelerated growth in Slalom markets in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, Japan and New Zealand, AWS and Slalom in 2023 will jointly create go-to-market (GTM) strategies and make co-investments in support of Slalom’s continued expansion into Ireland, Switzerland and the Netherlands, followed by additional countries in Latin America, Asia Pacific and Europe over the next three years.
As part of the agreement, AWS and Slalom are expanding on their 2019 collaboration to deliver AWS/Slalom launch centers that help enterprises accelerate their business transformations and modernize information technology services.
AWS is working with Slalom to develop solutions to help customers solve specific industry challenges. For example, Slalom offers the Slalom Meter Data Analytics solution on AWS, which uses Amazon SageMaker to help utility and renewable energy customers improve billing and energy efficiency, and forecast power outages.
Jeff Pearson is managing director of Slalom‘s AWS business.
“This multiyear strategic collaboration agreement strengthens our relationship with AWS and reinforces our shared focus on providing the best service we can for our customers,” he said. “We’re excited to build upon our 10-year partnership to develop vertical solutions and accelerators that provide end-to-end migration and modernization services to accelerate customer’s cloud journeys. Additionally, this agreement supports Slalom’s growth, as we expand into new countries, across the world, including in Asia and Europe.”
Also at re:Invent, CrowdStrike announced expanded service integrations with AWS to provide breach protection across AWS environments, simplified infrastructure management and security consolidation.
AWS announced the release of AWS Account Factory Customization (AFC), which enables customers to customize their AWS account natively during provisioning in AWS AFC. For this integration, CrowdStrike Falcon Horizon cloud security posture management operates together with AWS AFC to automatically provide data to help triage findings and recommend remediations to close the gaps and keep cloud data secure while ensuring cloud infrastructure meets industry and governmental security requirements and compliance standards.
Additionally, customers can automate the detection of cloud-specific misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, eliminating security threats across cloud environments. CrowdStrike’s adversary-focused approach provides real-time threat intelligence on over 180 adversary groups, over 50 indicator of attack (IOA) detections and guided remediation that increases investigation speed by up to 88%, enabling teams to respond faster to stop breaches.
Brett Shaw is CrowdStrike‘s senior product marketing manager.
“With CrowdStrike and AWS, customers benefit from better protection, better performance and immediate time-to-value,” he said. “With over a dozen service-level integrations available, joint AWS and CrowdStrike customers are provided with a consistent security posture between their on-premises workloads and those running in the AWS cloud for defense-in-depth security.”
AWS unveiled it new Supply Chain offering. The new application helps businesses increase supply chain visibility to make faster, more informed decisions aimed at mitigating risks, lowering costs and improving customer experiences.
AWS Supply Chain automatically combines and analyzes data across multiple supply chain systems so businesses can observe their operations in real-time, find trends more quickly, and generate more accurate demand forecasts that ensure adequate inventory to meet customer expectations.
Andy Tay is global lead of Accenture‘s AWS Business Group.
“AWS Supply Chain is arriving at a time when supply chain disruptions will continue for the foreseeable future,” he said. “Enterprises need experts who can combine disparate processes, systems and technologies. We’re honored that Accenture is the only professional services company to partner with AWS on their new AWS Supply Chain. Specifically, we will leverage AWS Supply Chain across our supply chain offerings, including our SynOps platform, to bring pre-built solutions that allow companies to move at speed, delivering automation into complex processes to realize value faster.”
Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies‘ head of worldwide channel sales, said his company came to re:Invent to unify its channel with AWS’ channel.
“The good news is we have a lot of people in common,” he said. “They’re interested in cloud security. They’re interested in the marketplace and growing together.”
There’s a “lot of room” in cloud security, Rauch said.
“The meetings I had with AWS around cloud security have been extremely productive and complementary,” he said. “It’s not only cybersecurity. It’s people talking about resilience and security. You can have one, but if you don’t have the other you still have a problem. So it’s really a good conversation. But what I’m really am enthusiastic about is just the partners. They have bright eyes for maybe the first time in two years. They see the growth path. Everybody wants to meet with AWS. They want to meet with us in the same room. And they want to be able to understand how their value proposition works with AWS and works with Check Point. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
Frank Rauch, Check Point Software Technologies‘ head of worldwide channel sales, said his company came to re:Invent to unify its channel with AWS’ channel.
“The good news is we have a lot of people in common,” he said. “They’re interested in cloud security. They’re interested in the marketplace and growing together.”
There’s a “lot of room” in cloud security, Rauch said.
“The meetings I had with AWS around cloud security have been extremely productive and complementary,” he said. “It’s not only cybersecurity. It’s people talking about resilience and security. You can have one, but if you don’t have the other you still have a problem. So it’s really a good conversation. But what I’m really am enthusiastic about is just the partners. They have bright eyes for maybe the first time in two years. They see the growth path. Everybody wants to meet with AWS. They want to meet with us in the same room. And they want to be able to understand how their value proposition works with AWS and works with Check Point. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
AWS RE:INVENT — Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled a new Partner Solution Factory and other partner-related offerings on Wednesday during this week’s re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. And its channel leader said MSP partners are making big money through every AWS sale.
AWS re:Invent has drawn than 50,000 partners and customers globally. Ruba Borno, AWS’ vice president of worldwide channels and alliances, detailed the latest partner offerings during her keynote.
AWS’ future will be realized through the power of partnerships, Borno (pictured on stage above) said.
“You, our partners, are critical to our customers’ transformation,” she said. “And we believe it will result in a better customer experience.”
The AWS Partner Solution Factory aims to work with partners to “SaaSify” their solutions, Borno said.
“We connect them with experts and we do well-architected reviews with them,” she said. “And one really great example is a partner like Deloitte, where we launched the Smart Factory in Wichita with them. And it’s an actual factory that is a graduate of SaaS Factory, where there are so many solutions for customers to go in and see how they can automate a manufacturing environment. With AWS Partner Solution Factory, we will be working with partners to validate their solutions in verticals or horizontal use cases and then putting them on the AWS Solutions Library for customers and for other partners to consume to deliver those business outcomes to customers.”
Customers want to work with their preferred partner, but they also want pre-built, validated solutions that have been tested and have customer references that they can trust have been utilized before, Borno said.
“That’s what compelled us to work on the AWS Partner Solution Factory working backward from a customer need where they often prefer those pre-built, validated solutions,” she said.
MSP Partners Prospering with AWS
AWS recently commissioned a third-party study regarding managed services. It shows for every dollar of AWS has sold, partners who have managed services, capabilities and practices across multiple AWS services make $6.40 on top of that, Borno said.
“So that should be very exciting for our managed service partners,” she said.
In addition, partners realized 61% of that value in the first year.
It’s very important for AWS’ MSP partners to continue build out training and certifications, and skill sets, Borno said.
“For us, that’s something that we are seeing,” she said. “Now is not the time to slow down on that. We absolutely encourage all of our partners to continue to double down on investing in the technical capabilities of their people. We know the measured value behind that. So partners that invest in training and certification for their people receive a 229% ROI and also 27% higher gross margins. So from that perspective, we think it’s really attractive for them to do, but also now is the time to do that to deliver value to customers.”
Scroll through our slideshow above for more from AWS re:Invent.
Want to contact the author directly about this story? Have ideas for a follow-up article? Email Edward Gately or connect with him on LinkedIn. |
About the Author(s)
You May Also Like