AWS Global Partner Head Doug Yeum called upon the partner community to take advantage of new services to deliver greater value for customers.
Speaking at the 2020 AWS re:Invent Partner Keynote, Doug Yeum AWS brought the attention towards new services and major features announced by Andy Jassey and recognised partners passion and perseverance during pandemic year to help customers and communities.
“I wanted to recognise all of our partners for demonstrating your passion and perseverance this year as you’ve continued to help our customers and communities. It’s been truly impressive to see how quickly so many AWS partners have responded and rose to the challenge when needed. Without your incredible support, this year would have been so much more difficult for many of our customers and communities. So from everyone at AWS, we thank you for everything you’ve done,” he said.
Doug Yeum highlighted the fact that agility, flexibility and resilience are emerging as the key guiding principles for future success. He said all companies will look to leverage the advantages of cloud computing for their business strategy.
“They don’t have enough in-house cloud specialists to execute these projects. They need help. Companies are looking for AWS partners who can deliver end-to-end solutions, develop cloud-native applications in addition to managing their cloud infrastructure and have deep specialization across industries, use cases, specific workloads like SAP and AWS services,” he said
AWS Global Partner Head said partners who can meet these customer requirements and truly understand that speed matters, there will be lots of opportunities.
“And AWS is here to help you capture these opportunities together. Together, we thrive. Without your incredible support, this year would have been so much more difficult for many of our customers and communities. So from everyone at AWS, we thank you for everything you’ve done,” he said.
Besides consulting partners like Accenture, Slalom and Rackspace transforming into cloud-first companies, he highlighed the pointed out that companies like NEC, Orange Business Services, AllCloud, Amdocs and OutSystems have all made strategic decisions to double down on their investments to grow their AWS practices and build solutions on AWS.
“Our goal is to help our partners to maximize the value of their existing assets — their customer relationships, their deep industry experience, their unique offerings — to deliver differentiated value to their customers. We will help our partners become better prepared for the future,” he said.
Partners who’ve been working with AWS for a while and have leveraged the AWS platform, people, programs, they were clearly better prepared to respond to the pandemic.
He pointed out that AWS customers have always told that the number-one reason why they move to the cloud is the speed and agility it gives them.
“And that is why we’ve continued to innovate faster than any other cloud provider. We want to make sure our customers and partners have access to the broadest and the deepest set of services. Having the right tool for the right job matters. This allows builders to build and innovate faster.
One group of builders who have really leveraged the breadth and depth of the AWS platform are ISVs and SaaS providers. There are many ways in which the AWS platform help ISVs and SaaS providers.
“ISVs and SaaS providers are integrating AWS services with their solutions to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to their customers. For example, Tableau, Sisense, Domo, Qlik have all integrated SageMaker Autopilot to put predictive-analytics capabilities in the hands of business analysts who have no or little experience with data science.
Partners can easily enhance and differentiate their solutions using just a few APIs from AWS. Delivering a service rather than shipping software is different. It requires a new approach to application development, testing and delivery.
ISVs and SaaS providers are using AWS services like EKS and other container services to modernize their processes. A good example here is Snowflake, who is using EKS to run millions of simulations across different scenarios, configurations to quickly catch defects and build more resilience into their service. Solutions from AWS partners like Okta, Elysian, PagerDuty, CrowdStrike, Slack and Zoom — these now make up the new best-of-breed [cloud] IT stack for modern enterprises.
And as enterprises use more SaaS applications, interoperability and integration are critical. Without them, enterprises will be left with siloed data, fragmented workflows and security gaps. While leveraging AWS services like EventBridge, AppFlow, PrivateLink, SaaS providers can easily offer more security, flexibility and data-integration opportunities for their solutions to the enterprises that use them.
SaaS Factory team provides ISVs with a broad range of technical enablement for building and migrating SaaS on AWS. AWS team also provides business enablement to help ISVs think through the new SaaS business-model and operating-model elements like on-demand pricing, billing and metering, SLAs and provisioning technical support.
Along with its SaaS Factory partner Cohesity, global cloud service provider announced data management as a service, which is a collaborative effort between Cohesity. Commenting on it Cohesity cofounder and CEO Mohit Aron said AWS do data management for some of the biggest enterprises in the world.
“Here if we look at the infrastructure there are some remote offices, some data centers and some cloud platforms. The problem is that your enterprise data is fragmented across this whole environment. We refer to this problem as the problem of mass data fragmentation. The result of this is that you’re juggling multiple vendor. It’s very inefficient with lots and lots of copies throughout your infrastructure. And your data is dark, which means it’s very hard to extract insights from this data. We radically simplify enterprise data management. And we unlock limitless value from that enterprise data,” Cohesity cofounder and CEO Mohit Aron.
In a legacy enterprise backup environment customers have to go buy backup software from one vendor. Then, they have to go buy media servers, master servers, proxy servers from more vendors on which to run their backup software. Then, they need to go buy target storage from yet another vendor on which to put the backup data. And if they need to throw some data in the cloud, they need a cloud backup product. So this is how complicated legacy enterprise backups are.
“So what we do is that we have built a hyperscale software platform both for on premises, shown on the left, as well as for the cloud, shown on the right. And as a first step, we eliminate that complicated enterprise backup platform in the legacy world and consolidate all of that on Cohesity. And once we have simplified our customer’s backup environment this way, we start looking at what else can we do. Well, our customers have file-and-object needs. They have archival needs for long-term [retention],” said Mohit Aron
Cohesity platform put a level of manageability on top and this single UI runs as a SaaS service on AWS as one logical platform. It is called Helios data platform.
Cohesity is just one of many ISVs who have leveraged the AWS SaaS Factory programme to transform their applications. Other companies include BMC, CloudZero, F5, and Nasdaq. Nasdaq is interesting here because they aren’t your typical ISV. Nasdaq has been a longtime enterprise customer of AWS. So they understand the power of cloud computing very well.
After finding an increase in demand for a SaaS Factory programme, AWS decided to scale up the company launched the AWS SaaS Competency during the beginning of 2020. This competency recognises AWS consulting partners that have deep experience helping companies build SaaS and cloud-native solutions on AWS.
AWS has 27 consulting partners who have attained this competency. Partners such as Mission Cloud in North America, Itoc in APAC and AllCloud in EMEA are all helping customers build the right foundations required to either migrate or build SaaS solutions successfully on AWS.
AWS Boost
AWS Boost, a free open-source SaaS reference environment to help customers with traditional Web applications modernize and operate their applications in a SaaS-delivery model. [applause]
The SaaS Factory team has taken its experience from hundreds of partner engagements to build a prescriptive framework and set of tools to minimize the undifferentiated heavy lifting of launching a SaaS application.
Tools include application configurator, multi-tenant manager, analytics and metrics dashboard and admin and user-management UI for onboarding customers. The open-source nature of this code can be adopted as-is. Or a developer may choose to modify it to fit their own requirements.
“I am really excited to see how SaaS Boost will be used by ISVs to accelerate their application development. It’s really gratifying for all of us at AWS to see that the support we’re providing our ISV partners is leading to higher business growth,” said
ISV Accelerate Programme is helping partners prioritized access to AWS co-sell support teams who facilitate the overall co-selling motion connecting AWS sellers with our partner sellers. AWS provides financial incentives. These are special incentives to AWS sellers for supporting these partners with co-selling. The company also provides opportunities for these partners to educate AWS sellers on their value proposition.
AWS ISV Partner Path
AWS continues to look for ways to provide more ways to add more value to ISV patterns and achieve their desired business outcomes faster. The company launches AWS ISV Partner Path, which makes it easier for ISVs and SaaS providers to access tailored programs and benefits.
“Based on their business objectives, they will gain immediate access to most relevant programs and benefits such as sandbox credits for product development, opportunity [to] acceleration funding and access to AWS sales, marketing and partner team resources, all without needing to meet tier-based requirements.
With ISV Partner Path, AWS is moving away from badging a partner as select or advanced using tier requirements. And instead, the company start badging individual solutions from our partners.
