Ruba Borno (Amazon Web Services)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is to reduce the costs associated with its marketplace service and bring in new partner specialisations in the coming year.
Speaking at the cloud giant’s annual re:Invent event in Las Vegas, AWS VP of worldwide channels and alliances Ruba Borno said fee reductions for Marketplace were on the way from January 2024.
The new structure lowers listing fees for public software-as-a-service (SaaS) and data subscription services to 3 per cent. Additionally, private offers have also seen a shake-up with a sliding scale depending on deal size – from 3 per cent for private offers under $1 million, then 2 per cent for deals between $1 million and $10 million, followed by 1.5 per cent for anything greater than $10 million.
Renewals will also incur a fee of 1.5 per cent in order to promote customer retention, Borno added.
“We’re not slowing down; we’re committed to you,” she said.
She was joined on stage by AWS CEO Adam Selipsky, who revealed his own set of announcements earlier in the week and doubled down on the cloud giant's commitment to its partners.
"The partner ecosystem has been an absolutely fundamental plank of AWS strategy literally since day one," he said. "That is completely unchanged.
"We're investing more resources now, not fewer, in terms of people, in terms of extra dollars that we spend to go to market to support that type of thing. So the the investment is only is only increasing."
Two new partner specialisations were also announced by Borno – AWS Resilience and AWS Cyber Insurance. The former is for partners that have technical expertise in helping customers improve the availability and resilience of critical workloads in the cloud, along with the associated proven customer success. This is available in three categories: Resilience Design, Resilience Operations, and Resilience Recovery. Further, those that earn all three can earn the Core Resilience designation.
Meanwhile, the latter is earned by those who help users find affordable insurance policies, with these partners able to provide cyber insurance pricing estimates and can help them purchase plans.
Next was the general availability of AWS Built-In for Independent Software Vendors (ISV). This, Borno said, produces an AWS-approved infrastructure as code asset, which users can then use to automatically install, configure and integrate ISV partner solutions with foundational AWS services.
The launch of AWS Marketplace SaaS Quicklaunch was also announced, which the company claimed will reduce the time to configure and launch third-party SaaS products.
“Customers can quickly configure, deploy and launch AWS on AWS group cloud formation templates that are defined and validated by both the ISV software vendor and AWS with the latest AWS security standards,” Borno said.
Also revealed was an application programming interface (API) for Marketplace for sellers to provide AWS Marketplace access within their own application, making sure customers don’t have to leave domains to make purchases.
Additionally, various updates were shown for AWS Partner Central.
Sasha Karen travelled to re:Invent 2023 as a guest of AWS.
