Partnering with AWS

AWS has truly become an industry leader and every technology company (even it’s competitors) will need to have a strategy to partner with AWS.  In my discussions with a number of companies that are looking to partner more closely with AWS, I put together this discussion document to provide some focus and a framework on this broad topic.  

AWS is similar to most companies in that they leverage Partners to overcome customer objectives, accelerate sales and implementation cycles, and drive growth.  Nearly every technology company big and small is looking to partner with AWS and Partners are often significant customers and/or are involved in go-to-market strategies as well.   AWS has a large organization to support Partners, but to be successful Partners need to have sales alignment, technology alignment, and industry alignment which provides focused value, builds trusted relationships, facilitate and simplify the AWS sales process, and drive customer outcomes.  Further, aligning the Partner Strategy to AWS’s growth strategy in a win-win approach will further acceptance/support by AWS.   In the managed services space, AWS is looking to provide managed services for applications now.  So Partners need to be focused in their approach, be seen as driving customers to AWS, providing industry expertise (which is in short supply in AWS), and be seen as a technology leader by the Services and BD organization.   Partners also faces pressure from the ERP vendors as they look to migrate customers to SAAS platforms.  Most of the ERP/CRM vendors already have large strategic agreements in place with AWS (SAP, Infor, Workday, Salesforce – well not Oracle).  Therefore, Partners needs to change and adapt the strategy to provide complex managed services for which AWS is not well positioned, leveraging their ERP base, with a focus on Big Data, AI/ML, IOT, Application Modernization, and security which is driving the bulk of AWS’ growth.  Further, it is highly suggested that Partners focus on how to leverage and manage Open Source across the cloud, as a broad user base continues to understand and deploy these needed solutions as not to become cloud dependent (Apache, Hadoop, Spinnaker, Pulumi, etc).  A good deal of AWS’s strategy seems to be to take popular open source and make it a service, EKS, PostGres, etc.  Being a leader in Open Source therefore makes you a technology leader for AWS which will play well with as AWS Service teams adapting Open Source to AWS.  But this becomes an issue as Partners and AWS compete for managed service revenue and Partners will need to find an angle to position a higher business value.  As an organization, Partners will need to provide alignment and value add  with Sales, Technology, and Industry, but will need to go further to work with AWS on Service and Customer innovation in order to provide differentiation.  

Sales Alignment

One of the primary goals of the Partner organization needs to be to provide sales alignment so that Partners’ sales teams and AWS sales teams are working closely together on landing new deals.  To provide a high value and maintain mindshare of the AWS sales team, Partners sales should take a open minded approach which focuses on customer needs first, rapid migration to AWS second, and simplified managed support of the complex target environment (which may include AWS, legacy and non-AWS clouds).   All the Partners are looking to establish relationships with the Account reps and they can only handle communications with a few, so providing a single source of support for a customer’s entire workload migration is attractive.  Also a proven ability to migrate successfully reduces risk and they are more likely to engage.  Even though AWS provides lots of Services, Customer’s are still not well set up or trained o manage the environment on AWS and this is where the opportunity is - continuous improvement of the customer environment and rapid adoption of the constant flow of new technologies.    

Technology Enablement 

Building relationships with the technology Service teams will also drive trust and opportunity.  Service and BD teams are anxious for companies that lean forward with their technologies and look for Partners to develop new use cases.  There are a significant number of use case opportunities with AI/ML, Connect, EKS, non-traditional Data bases, Big Data(Data Lakes/Redshift/Quicksite, Glue , IOT, and Security.  Leveraging Partners’ customer base, leaning forward and identifying new use cases and working with the Service teams to bring business solutions to market will generate competitive advantage.

Industry Leadership

While AWS is building industry expertise and sales focus their strength has been IT infrastructure and the CIO.  The Sales teams are now becoming focused on connecting with other C-Level execs which is a current weakness they are rapidly addressing.  Connect, for example, is really their first foray into user applications and it is having broad appeal and will be a game changer in the industry.  To accelerate sales and get access to sales leaders they teamed with Salesforce who is selling directly to their users as part of the CRM offering.  Providing managed services to support Connect Call centers, especially with the need for need for industry focused use cases leveraging AI/ML will be a substantial need.  Further, AWS is looking for industry use cases to accelerate growth and they need implementation partners to address demand.  Introducing AI/ML into the equation necessitates specialized managed services and skills creating a substantial opportunity.  Providing managed services to support and maintain industry focused use cases will provide high value to the sales cycle.  

A history of working with ERP provides Partners with access to C-Suite where AWS is now actively pursuing (CFO, Supply Chain leaders and business leaders).  Partners need to leverage this relationship and maintain account ownership, so AWS doesn’t run over them.  Setting this tone will be critical to the future relationship.  There are also specialized implementation teams for nearly every technology, and Partner attaching to those teams will be a key to success, for example the SAP Migration team.

Emerging Services R&D, Exploration and Innovation Centers

All AWS’ major Partner’s are looking for ways to innovate with AWS and their customers where they control the playing field. They provide sand boxes, free resources and methods to help customers visualize future states and provide POC’s.  AWS sales and Service teams love this attempt because it provides a free sales resource for them as well.  Building this capability can be expensive but it will also be essential to compete.  Determining the focus of this effort, leveraging AWS in the process, and advertising accomplishments will be the key to success. 

Conclusion

While this document is focused on AWS, the strategy will also apply well to Azure and GCP.  Having spent time on the AWS, GCP and Azure platforms, there are similar strategies to adopt open source and provide the technology as a sticky service.  If you have comments or questions, or would like to have a more in-depth discussion, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me directly at [email protected].