Jeff Kratz, Ruba Borno on Generative AI, More News for AWS Partners
With AWS’ Public Sector Summit in full swing and an interview with Ruba Borno on hand, here’s a big update.
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With the AWS Summit for public sector partners underway in Washington, D.C., we thought it appropriate to start there. Jeffrey Kratz, VP, worldwide public sector channels and alliances, hosted day two of the event June 8.
Here’s a look at the highlights from that event.
The first announcement concerns the AWS Partner Transformation Program, a workshop with technical assessments and enablement approaches where partners emerge with a 100-day growth plan. AWS has offered the PTP since 2017 and says more than 700 partners have so far completed it.
This year, AWS has added so-called Targeted Transformation Modules to the initiative. The modules cover specific topics that “align with our partners’ unique needs,” Kratz said.
Examples of those topics include Cloud Enablement Engine and CFO Cloud Conversations.
The first, Mike Cannady, director of worldwide public sector partner programs at AWS, told Channel Futures, helps partners build a Cloud Center of Excellence within about 90 days. The second helps partners “with forecasting and talking points for the C-suite,” Cannady said. That’s because a number of partners are finding that top-level business leaders sometimes still don’t understand the value of cloud computing.
Given the investment and innovation at stake, Kratz chimed in, there’s “no room for error.”
AWS is big into accelerator programs, getting startups off the ground more quickly than they could on their own. As such, the world’s largest public cloud computing provider just launched the AWS GovTech Accelerator.
“Justice and public safety customers have told us they need technology solutions to help increase community engagement, deter crime and reduce recidivism.” Kratz wrote. “This new accelerator will bring the power of innovation to help AWS customers address these challenges and better serve their communities.”
Here’s what he told Channel Futures about the GovTech Accelerator:
“We really believe there is an amazing innovation wheel there. … This will help partners build programs customers are asking for.”
Applications will close on Monday, July 10. Selected participants will go through what Kratz called an “intense, multiweek program” that will include pricing, marketing, sales, technology reviews, engagements with venture capital firms and more.
So. We’ve not yet discussed the tech sector’s topic du jour, generative AI.
Never fear, AWS is on it.
“Every single partner’s asking about it,” Kratz told Channel Futures. “I had to fly out a day early [to D.C.] from Seattle just to meet with partners about it.”
While AI and machine learning are nothing new to AWS, generative AI has suddenly morphed into 2023’s dominating trend.
“Our goal is to move AI out of research and democratize it with customers,” Kratz told Channel Futures. Those efforts will help end users “build their own models,” he said. As a result, much of this week’s public sector summit will revolve around tech training on different AWS AI tools, including the recently unveiled Bedrock. The sessions also are showing partners “how to accelerate their engagement in the channel,” Kratz said.
In terms of skills, partners need to have a couple capabilities ready in-house. The first, on the technical side, calls for data scientists and other experts who understand, and can build or customize, models. Then, on the practical side, partners need people who can bring data into the cloud, and who know how to price and bill, Kratz said.
Public sector organizations rank as among the most demanding when it comes to security. They’re growing targets for fraud and hacks.
With that in mind, AWS ISV partner Snowflake this week launched the Government & Education Data Cloud. While it’s not a direct AWS announcement, Kratz talked it up because of the impact on public sector partners. Managed service providers, system integrators and other channel experts team with Snowflake via AWS, so they will want to know about the new platform.
In sum, the new platform “eliminates technical and institutional data silos,” Kratz said. It comes with secure data sharing, holistic viewing and the ability to “prevent fraud sooner.”
Finally, another new offering comes in the form of the AWS Partner CRM Connector. It’s part of the APN Customer Engagements Program. The CRM connector serves as an integration path for eligible partners who use Salesforce as their CRM.
Upon integration, partners can share opportunities with AWS directly from Salesforce. Kratz said this will save AWS partners time “so they can focus on selling with AWS.”
Next, AWS provided some updated statistics on marketplace participation and growth.
AWS Marketplace now boasts more than 330,000 active customers, Kratz said this week. The marketplace operates in 29 regions and features more than 3,000 ISVs and 1,300 registered consulting partners.
“We are going to continue to invest in the AWS Marketplace and double down on the benefits for partners this year,” Kratz said.
For more insight on AWS’ plans for partners, go to the next slide. Channel Futures spoke with channel chief Ruba Borno in May and we share her updates here.
Since taking on the role of channel head at AWS, Ruba Borno has met with more than 1,000 partners “and counting,” she told Channel Futures. The results of those meetings have led to changes she was eager to share.
One of the most significant ties to the company’s Partner Profitability Framework. Recall that, at last December’s re:Invent, AWS shared the outcomes of a third-party study. That report showed that partners selling AWS services can make up to $6.40 for every dollar of AWS they sell.
“Our goal is to make it easier for our partners to leverage programs and tools that deliver profitable growth for our partners tied to their unique business models,” Borno said. “So, what are we doing about that?”
The answer? Go to the next slide.
Here’s AWS’ plan for making it easier for partners to do business with the company.
“Over the next year, we’re looking across our programs and merging similar programs and related requirements, all with the goal of making it easier for our partners to utilize the benefits that help them move up or across that profitability framework,” Borno said.
That will mean the consolidation of some programs such as the MSP and Service Ready programs into one specialized, umbrella initiative. Partners can expect “consistent benefits, consistent requirements and a consistent and simpler … experience,” Borno said. “So we are making some changes on the program side, but it’s tied to helping our partners achieve greater growth, greater profitability and have a better experience with AWS.”
AWS partner teams are working on those upgrades over the coming year.
AWS also has updated its partner portal to version 2.0. Enhancements include new site navigation and a new menu structure “that aligns with that motion of Build, Market, Sell, along the partner journey,” Borno said.
There’s also better personalization. Users now can segment by role — technical or marketing, for example.
“That allows that user role to navigate through the AWS Partner Path and path stages based on their persona,” Borno said.
Next, Borno talks about AWS’ recently introduced Cloud Operations Comptency.
Recall that, in April, AWS added the Cloud Operations Competency to its portfolio of partner certifications. The program addresses give areas: cloud financial management, cloud governance, monitoring and observability, compliance and auditing, and operations management.
“These represent a set of essential technical capabilities that help customers set up, build, migrate and operate securely and efficiently with an integrated approach to cloud operations,” Borno said. “These are all things that we heard from customers that they needed and we heard from partners that they were delivering to customers. And so it was imperative to develop a competency around this to support our partners to deliver to customers. We’re really excited about that.”
It seemed to Channel Futures that this type of competency was a bit overdue. So we asked Borno about that.
“As with any competency, we don’t just launch them,” she said. “These are competencies that we develop over the course of many months, in some cases longer, with our partners. We ensure that [partners] are validated, we ensure that we have proven track records before launching these so that they can scale appropriately to our broader AWS partner network. So just because it recently launched doesn’t mean that we hadn’t been working on it for quite some time with our partners in service of our customers.”
On a similar note, AWS also debuted the Media and Entertainment competency at the recent National Association of Broadcasters event.
“It highlights the specialized AWS partners that have the track record of customer excellence, vetted use cases and validated cloud solutions to address the significant disruption in the media and entertainment industry’s operational and monetization models,” Borno said. “That means helping move toward direct-to-consumer models, helping to create personalized, compelling content to keep audiences engaged while keeping cost optimization and efficiency top of mind.”
“The No. 1 thing that I’m getting asked about by customers, by partners, by press, is about generative AI,” Borno said. “This is top of mind for everyone right now because it is changing the game for the industry.”
AWS has invested in AI and ML for 20 years, Borno noted.
“It’s been a huge focus for the company and we’re now seeing really the next wave of widespread adoption of ML with the opportunity for every customer experience and every application to be reinvented. I don’t think that we can overstate that.”
With that in mind, Borno reviewed AWS’ recently introduced services that support the company’s generative AI applications. And, she added, “partners are integral to all of these.”
She started by pointing to Amazon Code Whisperer, which is generally available to all individual developers for free. It supports more than 10 programming languages.
“It’s really a huge leap in developer productivity,” Borno said. “We’ve done some studies to show that participants who use Code Whisperer complete tasks 57% faster than those who don’t. … And they complete tasks successfully 27% more frequently than those who don’t use Code Whisperer.”
The next generative AI component comes in the form of Bedrock, AWS’ managed service for pretrained foundational models that remains in preview mode. From there, Borno talked up AWS’ generative AI infrastructure, which has to be “specialized,” she said, to keep costs as efficient as possible.
AWS also offers some EC2 instances with extra-large bandwidth and 20% higher performance than other buckets. These are meant for large, network-intensive models.
Overall, Borno said, “From the code to the foundational models, to the managed services, to the infrastructure, all of this is to help [make sure] our customers and our partners are integrated … from the beginning.”
Speaking of MSPs and their peers, we round out this slideshow with Borno’s thoughts, particularly as generative AI applies to this sector of the channel.
When it comes to generative AI, AWS want to make sure that MSPs and system integrators are “very familiar” with it, Borno said.
“I think the first thing is to determine where you want to specialize. Generative AI, on its own as a domain, is very broad. So do [you] want to specialize in supporting certain verticals or certain horizontals … in the customer use cases? The next thing that we ask [partners] to do is really to start thinking through and becoming familiar with the tools that are available to them and to the customers that they’re working on.”
Overall, though, whether generative AI is involved or not, “our partners are critical to supporting our customers,” Borno said. “[W]hether it’s supporting our customers on cost optimization [or], more importantly, supporting them on business transformation … we’re really excited about the future of the AWS partner network and we’ll continue to innovate with our partners in service of our customers.”
When it comes to generative AI, AWS want to make sure that MSPs and system integrators are “very familiar” with it, Borno said.
“I think the first thing is to determine where you want to specialize. Generative AI, on its own as a domain, is very broad. So do [you] want to specialize in supporting certain verticals or certain horizontals … in the customer use cases? The next thing that we ask [partners] to do is really to start thinking through and becoming familiar with the tools that are available to them and to the customers that they’re working on.”
Overall, though, whether generative AI is involved or not, “our partners are critical to supporting our customers,” Borno said. “[W]hether it’s supporting our customers on cost optimization [or], more importantly, supporting them on business transformation … we’re really excited about the future of the AWS partner network and we’ll continue to innovate with our partners in service of our customers.”
Things are hopping right now for Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners.
For starters, the company this week is holding its annual Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C. Channel Futures spoke earlier this week with Jeff Kratz, vice president of worldwide public sector channels, for the latest news coming out of the event. We highlight some of the most partner-impacting announcements and Kratz’s thoughts on those developments. Before we dive in, let’s just say Kratz is hyped about the state of the public sector partner market.
AWS’ Jeff Kratz
“We’re seeing continual demand for our partners to bring their innovation, technical expertise and support services leveraging the AWS platform to solve some of the hardest challenges out there, and to do it quickly,” he told Channel Futures. There is, he added, “a high energy level that is inspiring.”
What he means by that is, post-COVID-19, the expectations around “going global in minutes, doing more with less,” have not waned. In fact, they’ve only sped up, Kratz said, and AWS partners are responding, thanks in large part to the company’s efforts.
“We’re helping them continue to optimize the platforms and cost structure so they can be profitable, recognizing that in regulated industries, no one size fits all,” Kratz said. “And that’s just part of the partner journey.”
Kratz addresses more AWS partner developments in the slideshow above.
AWS’ Ruba Borno
And then we bring in Ruba Borno, vice president of worldwide channels and alliances at AWS. Channel Futures sat down with Borno in May to learn more about what she and her team have in store for AWS partners. Hint: Lest you think we’d overlook the industry’s hottest topic – generative AI – with either Kratz or Borno, think again.
We cover a lot more, of course, as well. In fact, rather than talking more about what you’ll read on AWS partners, AI and more, we recommend clicking the image above to start your journey.
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