Davinia Simon (AWS)
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has onboarded 60 new partners to its marketplace after opening it up in Australia and New Zealand a year ago.
The global cloud giant's marketplace has tapped into the expertise of 60 Australian and Kiwi independent software vendors (ISV) and consulting partners for its AWS Marketplace platform, allowing them to sell their products and services to a global audience.
Eight months after first launching the marketplace in the region back in April, Davinia Simon, AWS head of A/NZ channels and alliances, told ARN of the company's plans to take A/NZ partners global by helping customers find a curated catalogue of software, data and services that run on AWS.
Now, speaking again to ARN more than a year after the marketplace's regional launch, Simon said AWS’ local consulting partners have been using the offering to their advantage.
"We announced in December that customers of ours could go into marketplace to find and procure professional services," she said. "And what that meant was that organisations and customers that were looking to buy ISV solutions could take services from local consulting partners that had a knowledge of that ISV business, but could offer localised support and expertise."
“What we've seen since then is a new trend emerge. Our local consulting partners are now developing these bundled offerings on behalf of customers where they're picking ISV solutions; they are wrapping professional services around it and then taking those offerings to our customers.”
Simon added that the vendor was now seeing an increase in “partner-to-partner collaboration”, citing an example of New Zealand cloud specialist and consulting partner Consegna working with Australian ISV Local Measure to adapt two solutions into one offering.
The connection to these two companies moves past this collaboration, with Consegna being one of four partners globally to be accepted into Local Measure's partner accreditation program in early May.
“That's been really wonderful to see that partner-to-partner collaboration take place. It's become a real theme for us and something that I believe we will continue to see more of in the rest of 2021 and beyond,” she said.
Other themes for AWS, she continued, include hybrid work, migration, and data and analytics — the latter of which she forecast will become so prominent, she has called 2021 “the year of data and analytics”.
“It's really about how organisations are thinking about that shift," she said. "And we certainly saw that accelerated last year. Businesses that were already operating in the cloud moved faster; they had the ability to pivot quickly and offer that hybrid working setup."
As a result, Simon claimed there was a shift to AWS' contact centre solution, Amazon Connect. In fact, the shift was so dramatic, she said the solution became one of the fastest-growing services in the history of AWS.
However, Simon added that she considers A/NZ partners’ involvement in the AWS Marketplace to still be “day one”.
“We made those announcements in 2020, and we've been so thrilled to see such rapid adoption of the marketplace platform. But in our mind, it is just day one,” she said.
“We're at the very beginning of a really exciting journey ahead, so we'll continue to stay committed to helping our partners onboard into [the] marketplace.
“The opportunity to extend and grow their revenues and introduce themselves to a new customer base — we believe that's the most compelling way that we can drive value into our partner community.”
