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AWS ‘bullish’ on continued opportunities for A/NZ partners

AWS’ head of partner success for Asia Pacific and Japan Corrie Briscoe explains where local partners have been focusing their efforts towards.
Corrie Briscoe (AWS)

Corrie Briscoe (AWS)

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) has reached its 10-year anniversary, yet the cloud giant has said it feels “pretty bullish” on the opportunities that lie ahead for its channel players in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ).

This is according to AWS’ head of partner success for Asia Pacific and Japan Corrie Briscoe, who said to ARN that the company is continuing to focus on both acquiring new partners and satisfying existing ones.

“If I look at the latest data that I'm reading, there's anywhere between 85 and 95 per cent of enterprise workloads that are yet to migrate to the cloud,” she claimed.

“If you look at the opportunity that exists in front of us and our partners, it's large, and we're not to a point yet where we're feeling a need not to continually add to that network.”

While Briscoe did not specify a number, she said the APN has seen “tremendous” growth in cloud adoption and cloud services used by customers during the last 24 months.

“We feel pretty bullish around the fact that that's going to continue for a long period of time as our customers transform in the way that they use those technologies and consume those technologies is going to continue to adapt as well,” she said.

Where the opportunity lies for partners, Briscoe continued, is across a range of focus areas, including migration services, moderinsation, data and analytics as well as the customer experience.

However, these opportunities don’t exist in a vacuum, as they have the potential for overlap.

“So, how do I not only think about taking my existing infrastructure and placing it on the cloud, but how do I think about the modernisation of the applications and workloads that will then sit on that infrastructure?” she said.

“Then data becomes another key investment area of a number of our partners and where we've been focusing investments as well. You see those two focus areas coming together."

It’s not just a trend that’s being seen at the local level, but up at the global level too, she said.

“If you look at a number of our more traditional GSI (global systems integrators) relationships, many of those are building their own software and IP and offering that as value-added services, whether they be industry-based or heavily vertically oriented or line of business are definitely trends we see within those organisations,” Briscoe said.

There are also opportunities that lie through partner to partner integration, she continued, pointing to AWS’ Marketplace, which opened up to A/NZ independent software vendors (ISV) in April 2020

“People are recognising that the value that I can gain from the APN is not only participating as part of that network, it's also accessing all of the skills that exist,” Briscoe said.

“So, I can partner to acquire new skills that I may need for a particular customer engagement, rather than always building that IP myself. That's becoming more and more common within our network, but Marketplace has enabled that as well.”