Davinia Simon (AWS)
Simon, who took over the A/NZ channel and alliances leadership duties when former AWS head of partnerships and alliances Corrie Briscoe stepped into a regional Asia Pacific and Japan role in May last year, has made it very clear that she wants to keep partners at the centre of what AWS does – a factor that should come as little surprise, given the role partners play in AWS’ overall business model.
“One of the things we’re doing is organising ourselves around the partner,” she said. “We do that very deliberately to enhance the partner experience and to make it easy for partners to work with AWS, and we’ll continue to strive to provide the optimal partner experience and we’ll strive for partnering excellence. That’s certainly one thing that we will build on even further in 2021.”
Certainly, the opportunity that last year’s AWS Marketplace expansions affords is just one of the ways the vendor is working to put local partners in the spotlight.
More broadly, Simon said AWS would continue to organise around partners, continue to focus on the partner experience and continue to focus on making it easy for partners to work with AWS wherever it can.
“We can do that by [using] an operating model where we are taking insights now from the customers and sharing those customers, from the field and what we’re hearing from those customers directly with our partners” she said.
From Simon’s perspective, this approach gives AWS the insight to help it inform exactly where its partners need to spend time, spend their energy and focus on building out the solutions that are meaningful to drive top customer outcomes.
However, while partners are core to AWS’ activities locally, that doesn't mean that its customer focus has waned in any way. Far from it.
“We’re never going to change being customer-obsessed, and I certainly will continue to listen to what our customers are telling us,” Simon said.
And AWS customers are telling the company they want three things, according to Simon: they want to accelerate innovation; they want to increase their agility; and they want to drive down cost savings.
“And we recognise, broadly, across the A/NZ business that it’s our AWS Partner Network that helps our customers do just that, so we feel, and I feel very strongly, that we have to continue to think about that; we have to help our customers be successful, but we’ve got to put a focus on how we deliver outcomes that are meaningful for our customers.
“It’s not about the size of the project, it’s about the impact of the outcome, and I’m particularly interested in partners that share that long-term belief in customer success, that will continue to be our north star,” she added.
