AWS re:Invent Day 3: Tons of Partner News Amid ‘Pent-Up,’ ‘Mature’ Vibe
The third day of AWS’ flagship event in Las Vegas features more announcements for the channel.
![AWS' Swami Sivasubramanian AWS' Swami Sivasubramanian](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/blt12f389fd60e4cad5/65240edff1078151740e6a66/AWS-Swami-11-30-22.jpg?width=700&auto=webp&quality=80&disable=upscale)
AWS delivers a number of competency programs to certify partners in its various technologies. The latest to join the crowd? The AWS Conversational AI Competency. This will launch in the first quarter. It will ensure partners do chatbot, virtual assistant and interactive voice response correctly. The curriculum will include the following:
• Selecting use cases
• Defining Natural Language Understanding intents and training phrases
• Designing conversational flows
• Integrating back-end services
• Testing, monitoring and measuring
Partners that have already taken part in the initial launch of the initial AWS Conversational AI Competency include Accenture, Cation Consulting, Cognigy, Deloitte, NeuraFlash, NLX, Quantiphi, ServisBOT, TensorIoT, VoiceFoundry and XAPP AI.
AWS continues to bulk up resources around data. Data, after all, deliver insights that support better business decisions and customer service. That was the focus of Swami Sivasubramanian’s keynote on Wednesday. Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and machine learning at AWS, spent a couple hours reviewing AWS’ data services, and debuting new ones.
Here are just a couple new offerings from AWS around data.
First, there’s the Glue Delivery specialization for partners with a consulting arm. AWS Glue is the cloud provider’s data integration service.
The new capability will help customers find validated AWS partners doing data integration, pipeline and catalog use cases via AWS Glue.
AWS Glue is serverless. It allows users to discover, prepare and combine data for analytics, machine learning, and application development. It can connect more than 30 data sources and supports integration pipelines in open source SparkSQL, PySpark and Scala. AWS also says Glue can process petabytes of data in real-time.
Some of the partners already holding the AWS Glue specialization include Ascending, Brillio, Mission Cloud Services and Quantiphi.
For all of AWS’ new data announcements, go here. Sivasubramanian also discussed AWS’ new zero-ETL approach, which AWS CEO Adam Selipsky unveiled on Nov. 29.
Next up, another set of specializations.
The first centers around Amazon SageMaker software, various platforms that focus on machine learning. The new Amazon SageMaker Service Ready specialization validates products built by AWS partners for specific AWS services. Launch partners for this effort include Domo, Fiddler, OctoML, Snowflake and Teradata.
The second new specialization concerns AWS Graviton, the company’s processor for cloud workloads in Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2. With the new AWS Graviton Delivery specialization, partners validate their professional services related to AWS Graviton.
“More and more customers want to capitalize on the AWS Graviton instances’ best-in-class performance capabilities, cost savings, and sustainability benefits,” said Alan Braun, director of service acceleration at AWS. “With validated professional services offerings from AWS Graviton Delivery Partners, customers can confidently leverage the expertise and experience of these partners to accelerate their adoption of Graviton.”
Some of the AWS Graviton Delivery Partners so far include AllCloud, Caylent, SoftServe and Wangsu.
Speaking of EC2, AWS took the wraps off the Amazon EC2 Spot Ready specialization. EC2 Spot is a compute-purchase option that lets customers use spare EC2 capacity to save money. Spot acts as a best-practices regimen. As such, the EC2 Spot Ready specialization ensures ISV partners offer the right products and capabilities to support Amazon EC2 Spot.
Launch partners include ActionIQ, CircleCI, Databricks, Incredibuild and Rafay Systems.
With the launch of Amazon Security Lake on Nov. 29, Vectra AI has announced its platform that works with that new offering. The Vectra Cloud Detection and Response works with Security Lake after a short installation process.
“With the increasing scale and intensity of cyberattacks, customers need … ecosystem solutions to simplify security processes focused on real threats and extended coverage across global networks,” said Sachin Saranathan, director for cloud and technology alliances at Vectra.
Rod Wallace, general manager for Amazon Security Lake, agreed.
“Amazon Security Lake centralizes an organization’s security data from cloud and on-premises sources into a customer-owned … data lake,” Wallace said. “Vectra Security Findings in Amazon Security Lake will help customers optimize security log data retention and enable customers to make their logs accessible to address a variety of security use cases such as threat detection, investigation, and incident response.”
Accenture and AWS have introduced a joint platform called Velocity. It’s intended to remove the complexity of building and operating large applications and cloud estates. Velocity, the companies said, will deliver 50% faster value.
The Velocity announcement comes as enterprises face more scrutiny around cloud costs, even as they come under pressure to migrate to cloud for competitive reasons.
Accenture and AWS will deliver Velocity via subscription. Users will get shared expertise from thousands of cloud projects led by Accenture and AWS. That insight will come from a range of capabilities, including technology building blocks, accelerators and various other assets.
TD Synnex has added two more AWS competencies to its toolbox.
The distributor now holds the government and education competencies. It’s already a partner in the AWS managed service provider, public sector partner, and U.S. government service delivery programs.
TD Synnex’s news comes after the company cemented a new strategic collaboration agreement with AWS earlier this year. That deal delivers financial and other resources, from both parties, to help SMBs and public sector organizations expand their digital offerings.
On a similar note, vendor SoftwareOne says it has achieved Premier Tier services partner status with AWS. SoftwareOne had to prove its capabilities in helping customers design, build, migrate and manage their workloads on AWS.
A lot’s happening on the AWS Marketplace, which turned 10 this year. Let’s dive in with a couple of examples from re:Invent.
Red Hat has expanded its managed services on the AWS Marketplace.
The OpenShift Data Science service has limited release right now but will be have full general availability soon. It’s a fully managed, AI-powered cloud service for data scientists and developers. Features include ML operations and NVIDIA capabilities.
Red Hat also has made OpenShift Streams for Apache Kafka publicly available in AWS Marketplace. This platform lets developers create, discover and connect to real-time data streams regardless of where those exist.
In addition, Solvo, which delivers cloud infrastructure security, has joined the AWS Marketplace. The company’s real-time detection and analysis will now be broadly available so users may detect cloud infrastructure identity access management misconfigurations and deliver automatic remediation.
New Relic now supports AWS Compute Optimizer, Lambda Extensions and App Runner.
These capabilities help engineers troubleshoot workflows, and optimize and analyze containerized applications more easily, New Relic said. At the same time, tooling and engineering costs go down, the company said.
“By combining New Relic’s … observability platform with AWS, New Relic helps customers further de-risk and accelerate their cloud migration, modernization and workload optimization initiatives on the cloud,” said Riya Shanmugam, New Relic’s global vice president of global alliances and channels. “We’re committed to pushing the leading edge of innovation with AWS, simplifying observability in cloud environments and supporting even bigger efficiency gains.”
Joint New Relic and AWS customers can take advantage of the capabilities through one observability platform.
Building on their initiative announced in August, IBM and AWS have made additions to their work together.
To that end, partners now may take advantage of IBM Envizi ESG Suite, IBM Planning Analytics with Watson (in beta), IBM Content Services and IBM App Connect Enterprise running aaS on AWS Marketplace.
Collectively, the offerings feature more data, planning and analytics for use across various industries, the companies said. Importantly, end users still can purchase from their IBM partner of choice, while drawing down on their AWS enterprise committed spend.
The four new IBM SaaS offerings for AWS are available today in the United States; IBM plans to expand availability to more regions next year.
Recall what Justin Copie, CEO of managed service provider Innovative Solutions, said about 2022 marking the AWS Partner Network’s biggest year of impact and change. Here’s what else he told Channel Futures as we round out this slideshow from Day 3 of AWS re:Invent:
Progress, he said, “is due to the execution of Adam and Ruba’s vision at AWS. Innovative [Solutions] has experienced triple digit growth, is able to now help hundreds of new customers and is driving more value than was ever possible before. Ruba’s focus on listening to partners and helping change the dialogue internally at AWS has left a significant mark. Most notably, for the first time in the five years we’ve been an AWS partner, we see our voice being heard in ways that help us lead impactful change for our customers. We are excited for many of the new announcements to come, and our increased level of collaboration in the future. It’s a win-win-win between customers, AWS and its partners.”
Recall what Justin Copie, CEO of managed service provider Innovative Solutions, said about 2022 marking the AWS Partner Network’s biggest year of impact and change. Here’s what else he told Channel Futures as we round out this slideshow from Day 3 of AWS re:Invent:
Progress, he said, “is due to the execution of Adam and Ruba’s vision at AWS. Innovative [Solutions] has experienced triple digit growth, is able to now help hundreds of new customers and is driving more value than was ever possible before. Ruba’s focus on listening to partners and helping change the dialogue internally at AWS has left a significant mark. Most notably, for the first time in the five years we’ve been an AWS partner, we see our voice being heard in ways that help us lead impactful change for our customers. We are excited for many of the new announcements to come, and our increased level of collaboration in the future. It’s a win-win-win between customers, AWS and its partners.”
AWS RE:INVENT — Amazon Web Services partners have a pile of news to process from AWS re:Invent Day 3 in Las Vegas.
Some of the AWS announcements featured more applicability to consultants, managed service providers and system integrators than others. To that point, the AWS re:Invent Day 3 morning keynote focused on data and the various upgrades AWS is making to products including SageMaker. We have more information on the second slide.
More pertinently, we also dive here into some of the announcements delivered as part of Ruba Borno’s keynote speech this afternoon. Borno, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at AWS, took to the stage on Wednesday to highlight the cloud provider’s partner efforts — updates that she expects the channel will embrace.
AWS’ Ruba Borno
“I think our partners are full of optimism,” Borno told Channel Futures’ Edward Gately. “They’re seeing the potential for us to continue to work together.”
Justin Copie, CEO of managed service provider Innovative Solutions, praised Borno for that very reason.
Innovative Solutions’ Justin Copie
“The work that Ruba Borno and her team have done has been transformative not only to AWS, but to the entire AWS Partner Network,” Copie told Channel Futures. “Leaders often talk about their ‘big ideas’ and ‘vision for the future,’ but at times can lack execution. There has truly been no bigger year of impactful change and meaningful execution to the partner network than in 2022.”
In that vein, the slideshow above presents new capabilities that should interest consultants, MSPs and integrators. (The final slide features more thoughts from Copie, as well.) Watch for AWS re:Invent coverage from Gately, as well, for even more partner-centric AWS news.
AWS re:Invent Day 3: ‘Pent-Up Energy’
In terms of the overall atmosphere at AWS re:Invent, partners seem upbeat.
Local Measure’s Jonathan Barouch
“The vibe at this year’s event feels like pent-up energy from so many people having missed re:Invent for a number of years,” Jonathan Barouch, CEO and founder of Australia’s Local Measure, a software provider, told Channel Futures. “I’m seeing way more AWS partners at the event as compared to last year.”
(Incidentally, Local Measure just signed a three-year strategic collaboration agreement with AWS.)
Lahav Savir, founder and CTO at MSP AllCloud, agreed.
AllCloud’s Lahav Savir
“It’s bigger than last time,” he told Channel Futures on Wednesday. “There’s a lot of excitement. … The vibe is very mature.”
That maturity comes as cloud reaches widespread adoption.
“There’s no need to convince people ‘why cloud,’” Savir said. “It’s the how … and why cloud can do it better.”
That said, AWS itself is maturing, too, Savir said, especially when it comes to data. On that front, AWS is simplifying operations “and making data much more usable. … Everything is around data,” Savir said. Again, see our second slide for more on data.
We have more, as well, on new releases from AWS re:Invent Day 3, plus announcements from companies including, but not limited to, Accenture, IBM, Red Hat, TD Synnex and Vectra.
(Pictured above: Swami Sivasubramanian, AWS’ VP, database, analytics and machine learning, on stage at re:Invent, Nov. 30)
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