Corrie Briscoe (AWS)
With so many opportunities in the cloud, including migration, digital transformation and cloud security, Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner led business has seen a lot of growth which is being reflected on its partners.
"Partners such as Versent and DiUS are growing as fast as or faster than the AWS business," Corrie Briscoe, head of partner and alliances at AWS told ARN during the vendor's partner summit in Sydney on 29 April.
"I think the impact on the ecosystem is significantly more than it has been in the past few years."
Briscoe was appointed in August 2018, replacing Stefan Jansen who had been named AWS' new head of training and certification in the A/NZ region four months earlier.
"We've put significant investment into both specialist partner resources in the form of technical resources and practice managers to really go and help out partners build up their practices," Briscoe told ARN.
"The other key element is our investment in things like training. We've doubled our investment in a lot of our training offerings for partners and also increased the capability to go and deliver that training."
She explained that AWS' technical resources help partners in the engagement with their customers and also to help partners in their longer-term practice.
Partner trends and opportunities
According to AWS managing director for A/NZ Paul Migliorini, "many thousands" of partners are building their own independent practices across the region.
"Wether that is new services like Amazon connect, partners like VoiceFoundry, or existing services like our EC2 or our Enterprise Application Services like SAP and things like that we are starting to see a lot more partners building native consulting or technology capabilities around the platform and therefore driving a lot of pipeline independently as well," Migliorini told ARN.
He explained that customers are pursuing strategies around internet of things, machine learning and artificial intelligence in a move to innovate, which seems to be happening across "basically every enterprise" in A/NZ.
"In many cases they are looking at rationalise and move off legacy platforms, legacy storage systems, data warehouses etc. And in almost every case, customers are looking to try to find a way to build a modern architecture."
"We have, what I think by far and away, the best partner ecosystem in Australia by orders of magnitude, and customers tell us that regularly that one of the things that they value is the quality of our partners but in terms of investment we want to think about the things we want to be investing in the long term. That is why we brought Corrie in," he added.
There are opportunities in many areas including migrations, which according to Migliorini "virtually every enterprise is undertaking a large-scale migration as we speak".
"That's going to be a huge growth area for the next three to five years," he said.
There are a lot of customers looking into hyper-converged and VMware on AWS. There are also currently 57 per cent of Windows workloads globally running on AWS and more is expected to move to the cloud with AWS expecting many of those to be on AWS.
Another opportunity is on securing customers workloads on the cloud. Migliorini said AWS expects customers to be responsible for their environments, which includes their policies, security key infrastructure and the various things they use to run their applications.
"And we think that is a big opportunity for our partners because partners have to help customers set up their environments, help design and build their applications and make sure their policies are compliant when they do move or build those applications to AWS."
