AWS Channel Chief Terry Wise: 11 Reasons Why Partners Can't Ignore Amazon

Amazon's Channel Push

Terry Wise, director of the Amazon Web Services worldwide partner ecosystem, is in charge of building a channel around a public cloud that is so popular it's starting to generate its own powerful gravitational pull.

Nowhere was this more apparent than at AWS' re:Invent conference in mid-November, where some 13,500 attendees crammed the halls of the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, rushing from session to session because they were afraid of missing even a couple minutes of information.

Once used primarily for software testing and development, AWS has morphed into a place where entire companies are running thriving, innovative businesses. Increasingly, enterprises are getting in on the action, and so are solution providers in this space who've previously avoided working with AWS because they didn't see value in doing so.

Wise sat down with CRN at re:Invent to talk about how traditional solution providers can make money on the platform, and what sort of skills they need to take advantage of the opportunity. Following are key excerpts from that conversation.

ON AWS DOUBLING DOWN ON PARTNER INVESTMENT

Wise said AWS is planning to more than double the investments it's making in partner benefits in the coming calendar year. It's a significant-sounding move, even though Wise wouldn't say how much AWS invested in partners this year, other than to say it was "substantial."

AWS is coming out with a "whole laundry list" of partner benefits, many of them focused on go-to-market activities. These include help with lead generation, subsidized proofs-of-concept for new customer wins, and credits for development of new types of solutions, Wise said.

"We're actually investing quite a bit of budget to help those partners build their businesses faster," he said.

ON WHY AWS NEEDS PARTNERS TO SUCCEED

"The channel is becoming super important in this space. I really want to make sure it's a value-added channel because those folks are really good at delivering a solution, and new service delivery capabilities, on top of the AWS platform."

The opportunity now is significantly greater than it was two years ago, or even last year. Coca-Cola has made a substantial investment in AWS, and Conde Nast shut down a data center and migrated a whole bunch of applications to AWS.

ON HOW PARTNERS CAN MAKE MONEY WITH AWS

"We have a really strong ecosystem of partners that can deliver whatever workload is needed," said Wise. "The winners in this space are the ones that are making their revenue streams larger by moving up the stack and providing infrastructure managed services, application managed services, selling software licenses and doing strategy and security architecture.

"The more of those layers you deliver, then you start getting into multiples of 10X. If it's just sheer resell, with little value-add on top, the multiple isn't that interesting," he said.

ON AWS' PLAN TO DEBUT MANAGED SERVICES COMPETENCY

AWS has sold managed services through partners for some time, but now it's turning that into a full-blown channel program. It's doing so because demand for its cloud services is so high it can't possibly handle all these business opportunities on its own.

"We don't have enough partners in the ecosystem who really understand -- and can deliver -- cloud managed services," Wise said.

Many AWS MSP partners have taken a traditional approach, but they're missing things like orchestration and automation, and the whole concept of DevOps, where developers and IT operations collaborate closely to speed the release of new software, Wise said.

The new MSP program aims to fill these gaps. "We've packaged up the best practices that we've built up over the last eight years, which aren't just about moving one or two applications to the cloud, but doing a full-scale transformation to managed services," said Wise.

ON AWS' CHANNEL EXPANSION IN THE PAST YEAR

AWS is seeing huge growth in the AWS Partner Network ecosystem, with membership growing 75 percent in the past year, from a substantial base, according to Wise. "We're talking about many thousands of new partners. And these partners are distributed globally, and we're seeing huge growth in the geographies, because they're seeing the business opportunities for customers," Wise said.

AWS isn't looking for volume when it comes to partners but, rather, ones that can add value around the platform. They can do this by putting in the work to attain partner competencies, he said. "You're starting to see us look more to those sets of partners that are going all in with AWS, making substantial commitments to the platform, driving training and certification goals, and working with us proactively in the field. That list is growing every day," Wise said.

ON WHY PARTNERS SHOULD WANT MSP STATUS WITH AWS

The MSP program includes training and enablement for partners, and Wise said AWS pays close attention to what service-level agreements they offer, how they're handling management and monitoring, and whether they're adhering to security best practices.

In return, partners get recognition that they're a managed services partner of AWS, as well as "a whole bunch of go-to-market benefits," Wise said. This is where the doubling of funding kicks in. More importantly, these MSPs are earmarked by AWS' field sales organization as partners the company should be working with to serve top clients. AWS has come up with best practices for engaging with customers, and partners that follow them are poised for good things to happen, he said.

"Do these things with us, and you will win the hearts and minds of our field organization, which is now substantial," said Wise.

ON THE RISE IN TRADITIONAL ENTERPRISE SOLUTION PROVIDERS STARTING TO WORK WITH AWS

Wise said there are a number of partners in the AWS ecosystem that have previously sold more traditional platforms, such as VMware. "It's an interesting shift. Some are some are moving faster than others, and some are definitely resisting," he told CRN.

"We're definitely seeing some of the bigger-thinking partners in this space saying they're going to pivot to the cloud and AWS. I think the core driver is customer demand," said Wise. "When you have companies like Conde Nast shutting down data centers and moving to AWS, the market for on-premise infrastructure, with virtualization licenses and everything that goes with that, gets a little bit smaller.

"It's not just on the channel resale piece of the business, where some of these guys have traditionally made 70 [percent to] 80 percent of their revenue, with a bit of value-add on top. They realize that revenue stream is shrinking, and they have to retool and provide higher-level value-added services if they're going to have a meaningful revenue stream."

ON ENTERPRISE SOLUTION PROVIDERS TRYING TO KEEP THEIR AWS RELATIONSHIP QUIET TO AVOID UPSETTING OTHER VENDOR PARTNERS

"To be candid, we do see a little bit of that. But one of the quickest ways to turn our field organization off is to not be proud of what you're doing with us, either directly in front of the customers or by not celebrating the success in case studies and references. Because our customers are looking for those public references."

ON WHY THE AWS PROFESSIONAL SERVICES TEAM IS CHANNEL-FRIENDLY

AWS has built up intellectual property and assets from its customer engagements over the past eight years, which Wise described as "an incredibly deep set of IP." The AWS professional services team held a five-day "boot camp" for partners a few weeks ago where it shared what it has learned from working with enterprise customers.

The training paid close attention to things such as security, scaling and compliance, and the methodology behind a cloud transformation journey.

"Our professional services team is training our ecosystem in best practices. People typically think vendor professional services organizations compete with the partner ecosystem, but I can honestly tell you that this is the most partner-centric professional services team I've ever seen," said Wise.

ON AWS PLANNING TO DEBUT NEW PARTNER COMPETENCIES

AWS plans to roll out several new partner competencies next year, spanning the Internet Of Things, security, health care, financial services, cloud migration and digital marketing.

"What's happening is that customers are coming to us and saying, 'Point me to the partners in my geography that are really good at SAP, or big data,' " Wise said. "They want to deploy SAP on AWS in production, and not all partners are qualified to do that. There are some partners that are awesome at digital marketing, but aren't as good at Oracle."

ON WHY AWS ISN'T AFRAID OF GOOGLE, MICROSOFT OR OTHER CLOUD PLAYERS

"We're aware of the competition. We're really focused on the customer, and they're telling us they need more partners with AWS managed services capability. We need more partners that can deploy SAP effectively on AWS, and partners that know digital marketing and the Internet of Things," said Wise. "So it's really driven by the customer -- that's why you're seeing us invest more."