Julia Chen (Amazon Web Services)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) plans to trim down more than 100 “disjointed” partner benefits to a more manageable number this year.
Currently, the cloud giant has over 100 different benefits for partners, covering programs, funding and incentives, according to Julia Chen, VP of corporate development at AWS.
The sheer number of this however can be daunting for some partners and Chen claims AWS is looking to rectify this, particularly during the tenth anniversary of the AWS Partner Network – a milestone that was highlighted during AWS re:Invent 2022.
“We have so many [benefits] that they sometimes can appear disjointed to partners and partners who come in and look at all the different things that we have; it's hard for them to navigate all that,” she said to ARN during the conference.
“Over ten years, all of these creations have been the right things, they've helped co-invest, incent and helped develop the partners in different ways, but now we actually have to knit that all together into a framework that's more cohesive.”
While Chen was tight lipped as to what the slimmed down version of the benefits would look like, she did hint that their new form would be announced around April.
“I'm trying to organise our programs in such a way that a partner knows where they are on the map, where they're trying to get to and what's the right path of programs, tools, incentives and enablement they need to get them there,” she added.
She also said she was optimistic about Australian partners and claimed that they “seem more flexible than partners in certain other countries that have had a long history of ... classic system integrator [and] data centre-type partnerships”.
“The market is self-contained in a certain way. I like that, because it means that they can experiment and cancel out some of these external noise factors and you can really focus on [whether] 'does this actually work? Can you deliver business outcomes solutions? Can partners actually work together like this?'” she said.
“I'm quite delighted when I see what kind of innovation is coming out of Australia and the openness actually of the partners to change the way that they do business.”
During the partner keynote at re:Invent, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky claimed "partners have always been a central plank of our strategy".
He also claimed that its more successful partners are those that go all-in with their AWS service offerings.
"A lot of the most successful partners that we've seen host a business unit view and build organisational capabilities around working with AWS and going to the field together," Selipsky said.
AWS also revealed a number of upcoming solutions for partners during the keynote, including a preview of AWS Partner Solution factory, the general availability of AWS Marketplace insights, a public preview of AWS Marketplace visualisation dashboards and previews for AWS Data Exchange for AWS Lake Formation and Data Exchange for Amazon S3.
Sasha Karen travelled to AWS re:Invent as a guest of AWS.
