Inside The AWS Sales Machine

When it comes to targeting new accounts, Amazon Web Services (AWS) almost has a singular focus on going after the second or third biggest customer in a vertical industry on the assumption that those companies are the most likely to embrace something transformational when it comes to IT in order to usurp the leader in that industry segment.

Speaking this week at a Marketplace LIVE event sponsored by Telx, a provider of hosting services, Anthony Anzevino, director of America sales for AWS, says the cloud giant focuses its own inside sales efforts on some 3,500 named accounts, which is then supplemented by some 5,000 systems integrators.

Most of those customers, says Anzevino, are looking to find a more agile way to deliver IT services using a cloud service provider that is committed to innovate across a wide depth of product offerings. After all those factors are considered it’s only then that the conversation turns to cost and pricing models, said Anzevino.

The single biggest deterrent to making that sale, said Anzevino, is the internal IT organization. Unless there is some plan in place regarding how the skills of the internal IT staff will be reapplied to add value to the business Anzevino said most internal IT organizations will go to significant lengths to prevent application workloads from moving out to the cloud.

Counterbalancing that influence, says Anzevino, is usually a chief financial officer that wants to outsource everything that is not core to the business. More often than not the CFO does not see IT as being strategic to the business and the real costs of delivering IT to any line of business inside that organization are generally poorly defined.

For the most part AWS became the largest cloud provider by targeting independent software vendors (ISVs) that didn’t want to invest in IT infrastructure to deliver a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. To fuel continued growth AWS is now targeting traditional enterprise IT organizations, many of whom are eager to at least move application development activities into the cloud. The battle comes when it’s time to move those applications into production environments. More often than not because of security, performance, compliance and total cost of ownership issues the internal IT organization will make a strong case for deploying production applications inside a private cloud or in a managed hosting environment. In fact, as big as AWS is some would argue that it only represents a fraction of an IT outsourcing market that is valued north of $60 billion.

Anzevino concedes that AWS loses application workloads every day and that its channel partners generate a fair amount of revenue by helping customers move workloads in an out of AWS. But with over one million customers it’s clear that AWS, at least for the time being, is seeing a lot more workloads moving in than out.