AWS re:Invent: AWS, Partners Working Together to Transform, Innovate, Create New Opportunities
This year marks the 10th anniversary of AWS Partner Network and AWS Marketplace.
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At last year’s re:Invent, AWS unveiled its Partner Paths program with five paths, including hardware, software, training, distributor and services.
“We got feedback from our partners saying that it was complex to deal with us,” AWS’ Ruba Borno said. They didn’t know how to navigate the partner programs, which ones applied to them. So we established these partner paths tied to their business models. Since then, we’ve had over 100,000 enrollments in Partner Paths. So that’s a key milestone on something that we announced last year. We’ve seen a tremendous uptick in that, and we would love to see more and more partners enroll in the Partner Paths.”
At re:Invent, AWS unveiled Industry Quest: Financial Services. It’s a first-person video game aimed at teaching cloud skills relevant to banking and financing.
This follows AWS launching Cloud Quest, an interactive role-playing game, Skill Builder and Skill Builder Subscription.
“Industry Question: Financial Services is for someone that is within that industry to have experience building solutions that are very relevant and common within that industry,” said AWS’ Jenni Troutman. “The person goes in and they actually are building out and growing their financial service business by creating these solutions, and they improve by improving key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business. So we’re really excited now to make that broadly available as part of our Skill Builder offering.”
AWS partners can leverage the cloud skills training to provide better solutions and better outcomes for their customers, she said.
Partners and their customers just don’t have enough cloud-skilled people, Troutman said.
“Last year, we did a study and 76% of IT decision makers said they have a skills gap and that’s up from 31% in 2016,” she said. “So it’s growing, and now IDC is even reporting that by 2025, nine out of 10 businesses aren’t going to have the skills they need. And it’s massive because they say it’s not only that they’re not going to have the skills they need for their transformation, but they’re saying it to the tune of $6.5 trillion of impacted business, product launches that are delayed, lost business, that sort of thing. So the gap is big and getting bigger.”
Partners and customers need people who have the foundational skills and can speak the language more for marketing purposes, Trout said.
“If they stay focused only on the technologies they know, when they don’t learn the new stuff, then they’re probably not optimizing for the environment,” she said.
Learning cloud skills isn’t a one-and-done thing, Troutman said. It requires continual updating.
“That’s why we introduced AWS Skill Builder,” she said. “Historically, we’ve provided classroom training for 10 years, and we’ve had certifications that go along with it and it’s been more intensive, multi-day with an expert, you learn it and then hopefully go apply it really quickly. There are a lot of people that value that and who get a lot from that. But what our customers were telling us was we need that, but we also need to have people that can continuously learn. They need them to be able to go back if they forgot something in the class and try again, practice and refresh. They need them to be able to keep up with the updates. And they need them to be able to learn new technology so that they can continue to grow their careers.”
AWS Skill Builder is available any time so a person can go in on their own time whenever they want, and if a new service comes out, they can learn what that service is, Troutman said.
AWS re:Invent is always a good opportunity to hear from partners, said AWS’ Chris Casey.
“What most of the partners are asking us about is … how do we be really deliberate and focus next year with regard to the resources that we’re both mutually investing in to help them grow their business and achieve customer outcomes, being very deliberate about the mission-critical customer workloads and the pain points that those customers have, and that they’re really looking to solve for now as part of their enterprise transformation, and really getting aligned very early with our partners on how we can really help unlock that value for customers in 2023,” he said. “That’s the general theme that I’m getting from partners about how maybe we can be a bit more opinionated and provide a bit more guidance around that in a really positive way just to help them focus their resources, especially in the times that we’re in now. They need to be frugal with how they’re investing their resources. They want to be very deliberate and targeted with regard to that.”
Also during AWS re:Invent, Fortinet announced the availability of FortiGate Cloud-Native Firewall (FortiGate CNF) on AWS. It’s an enterprise-grade, managed next-generation firewall (NGFW) service specifically designed for AWS environments.
FortiGate CNF incorporates FortiGuard artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security services for real-time detection of and protection against malicious external and internal threats. It’s underpinned by FortiOS for a consistent network security experience across AWS and on-premises environments.
By shifting the management of network security infrastructure to Fortinet via FortiGate CNF, customers can focus more on their core competencies and deploying effective security policies to protect their business-critical applications and data.
Dave Ward is AWS’s general manager of application networking.
“We know organizations are looking to further simplify and modernize security on the cloud, which is why we’re working with Fortinet to deliver adaptive cloud security solutions,” he said. “With FortiGate CNF, customers can build confidently, boost agility, and take advantage of everything AWS has to offer. As a fully managed cloud-native service, FortiGate CNF provides the enterprise-level firewall services and network security that helps reduce risk and improve compliance, and optimizes customers’ security investments. We’re looking forward to continuing our work with Fortinet to help our mutual customers accelerate their cloud security goals.”
Also during AWS re:Invent, Fortinet announced the availability of FortiGate Cloud-Native Firewall (FortiGate CNF) on AWS. It’s an enterprise-grade, managed next-generation firewall (NGFW) service specifically designed for AWS environments.
FortiGate CNF incorporates FortiGuard artificial intelligence (AI)-powered security services for real-time detection of and protection against malicious external and internal threats. It’s underpinned by FortiOS for a consistent network security experience across AWS and on-premises environments.
By shifting the management of network security infrastructure to Fortinet via FortiGate CNF, customers can focus more on their core competencies and deploying effective security policies to protect their business-critical applications and data.
Dave Ward is AWS’s general manager of application networking.
“We know organizations are looking to further simplify and modernize security on the cloud, which is why we’re working with Fortinet to deliver adaptive cloud security solutions,” he said. “With FortiGate CNF, customers can build confidently, boost agility, and take advantage of everything AWS has to offer. As a fully managed cloud-native service, FortiGate CNF provides the enterprise-level firewall services and network security that helps reduce risk and improve compliance, and optimizes customers’ security investments. We’re looking forward to continuing our work with Fortinet to help our mutual customers accelerate their cloud security goals.”
AWS RE:INVENT — Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent on Monday shared the message that partnership is the “highest obsession” for the cloud giant.
AWS re:Invent is taking place this week in Las Vegas, and has drawn more than 50,000 global partners and customers.
Ruba Borno is AWS’ vice president of worldwide channels and alliances.
AWS’ Ruba Borno
“We’re really excited about how we’re working with partners to transform customers together, to innovate together, to create more opportunities for our partners together,” she said. “And also I’m really excited about the impact that we’re having on our communities with our partners.”
This year marks the 10th anniversary of AWS Partner Network and AWS Marketplace, Borno said.
“One of the things that we’re really excited about is it sounds like so much has already happened in terms of cloud transformation, but it’s still day one, only 5%-15% of IT workloads that could migrate to the cloud have migrated to the cloud,” she said. “So we believe there’s still a tremendous potential there for us to work with our partners to deliver more value through the cloud. And we’re really excited about the future.”
AWS ‘Heavily Vested’ in Partner Ecosystem
AWS is heavily vested in its partner ecosystem, and it’s one of the foundations that the cloud giant sees as key for it to enable customer growth over the next decade and beyond. That’s according to Chris Casey, AWS’ director and general manager of industry software and data alliances.
Casey directly manages the ISV and data provider team, but AWS also works with MSPs, SIs and consulting partners.
AWS’ Chris Casey
“As we start to get more and more customer demand for more and more industry-specific use cases and workloads, it’s critical for us to be able to solve that end-customer outcome with a really deep and wide partner ecosystem that can offer as many of the imaginable use cases that a customer might ask us to fulfill on the cloud,” he said. “And so from our side, we certainly are diving into industry-specific themes and workloads in each industry. Those differ, but fundamentally across those industries, AWS has success in being able to unlock that end-customer value. It’s really foundationally built on top of not only our native services, but also the partner solutions that we have available.”
Innovation at AWS re:Invent
Jenni Troutman is head of products and services for AWS training and certification.
AWS’ Jenni Troutman
“There’s a lot of innovation with all of the announcements we’ve had over the last couple of days,” she said. “There’s a lot of innovation and frankly things that we can do to do good for the world. I work with training and certification where we’re really focused on building cloud skills across the globe. And our theme here is really the time is now. We’re seeing that the need for cloud skills is only growing. And so our focus here is really about, hey, we have lots of resources and opportunities for people to build and validate their cloud skills, and get started today.”
AWS is always looking to continuously reinvent how it goes to market, and looks to evolve what it’s doing with customers, and most importantly with partners, Casey said.
“What I’d really love our industry partners and our data providers to take away is that we really value their feedback and we’re listening to it, and we’re iterating as fast as possible with them,” he said. “For partners who have attended re:Invent or even watched some of the keynotes, I hope it’s really resonating with them that AWS is continuously investing in improving how we’re supporting those partners, simplifying their experience and ultimately simplifying the end-customer experience as fast as we possibly can. And we’re nowhere near done with that. We’re pushing the boundaries with some of these partners in brand-new areas. But that’s super exciting because we’re unlocking brand-new use cases for customers in almost every imaginable industry.”
See our slideshow for more from AWS re:Invent.
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