Following quarterly revenues of over £120 billion in March, AWS addressed partners in London with a key message: “We need you.”
Standing on stage in Westminster’s Central Hall, Jeff Johnson, AWS Director for UK&I Commercial Sales, signed off a Partner Summit that would give hope to anyone in the channel.
Throughout the day, representatives from AWS arrived with one simple message, ‘we rely on partners’.
It may not be as cut and dry as that but the substance is the same. Throughout every presentation, in every department, the common theme was working with the channel in order to provide innovative solutions to businesses.
This is something attendees were able to find out as Johnson spoke to his own directors as part of the final session of the day.
Jeff Johnson (JJ): Tell us more about the partner strategy for SMB?
Amanda Sleight, Director, UK&I SMB Lead: “If you look at the government national statistics, there are 5.7 million SMBs in the UK, making up over 61% of organisations in the UK. That’s a huge opportunity, and as we think about that my team’s mission is to help each and every one of those customers innovate and use technology to drive better business outcomes and to achieve faster and more exciting results than anyone anticipated.
“If we are going to extend our engagement we need organisations with experience, expertise and vertical knowledge to help companies to use technology. Our strategy is a partner first strategy, we fundamentally believe that we need partner expertise to deliver projects on time and improve the experience for our customers.”
JJ: How can partners operate most effectively with the enterprise customers segment in the UK?
Jyoti Ball, Enterprise Sales Manager: “One of the key trends that we’re seeing across enterprise is that 50% of tech buyers no longer sit in IT, they sit within our lines of business. When we talk to them, they want to buy a solution from us, they don’t want to build their own solutions, and their priority is accelerating time to value, which is where partners are absolutely crucial.
“At AWS, there’s three things that we see partners that are operating effectively across enterprise do. The first one is thinking about and investing in delivering incremental value on top of AWS. The second is embracing partnering, not trying to go it alone and thinking about how to bring in AWS. Third is working out how to bring together the capabilities of consulting and integration partners, the solutions that ISV partners are bringing and the native services.”
JJ: What role do partners play in building and growing the startup ecosystem?
Tricia Troth, UK&I Startup Sales Leader, AWS: ”If you think about the startup quandary, the greatest challenge is actually how do we speed and how do we scale. Ultimately, they need to grow their customer base, and expand into new markets at pace whilst managing costs and keeping investors at bay, all against the backdrop of being extremely time and resourcing-poor.
“The unique role that partners can play is twofold. One is on the go-to market side of things, helping them to acquire new customers and expand into new markets via different channels and platforms.
“Secondly, every single founder and startup that I’m speaking to at the moment is asking where the expert technical resources are right now, because they are trying to scale but are struggling to do so.
“Where I see partners leading successfully is deploying resources on an augmentation model, or they’re providing short discrete packages and projects that work on DevOps, modernisation, migration, and re-architecting to make sure platforms are able to scale efficiently and securely.”
JJ: How can teams and partners do more together to help grow the mutual opportunity in education?
Ken Harley, Head of UK&I Education, AWS: “What I’m really trying to drive within my team is a partner-first strategy where we engage together and build trust early. I’m challenging every one of my account managers to take our partners into first customer meetings rather than six meetings down the road where it’s often too late.
“We’re trying to change our internal perception of partners. Too often we expect partners to bring us opportunities. I think we should be looking at it the other way around. We should be putting in the opportunities to our partners.
“A little example of this is when we had a customer who had a challenge with their call centre leading up to student clearing, which is a critical system for them. Because we engaged straight away with a partner we delivered a successful solution to that university in six weeks we would not have done that without the partner.”
JJ: What skills gap exists for our Digital Native Business (DNB) customers and how can I maybe want to characterise our customers?
Chloe Warren, Senior DNB Account Manager, AWS: “DNB customers are good at building products, bringing them to market quickly and capturing market share. Where we are seeing these customers reach out for partner support is in three main areas.
“Firstly, international expansion. If a DNB customer is headquartered in the UK, built their product, and proven it works, they want support expanding it globally, and they’re asking for support around scaling, regulation changes and customer behaviour changes.
“Secondly, doing things smarter. Because they believe in pace and speed bringing products to market they might not use the most efficient way to architect to build processes so they really appreciate that fresh set of eyes that a third party provides.
“The final point is, with all the changes in the macroeconomic climate at the moment, KPIs are super, super important. We are used to growth at any cost, whereas now we’re seeing EBITDA profitability, everyone’s doubling down. That efficiency and help from a partner perspective to support our customers in this tricky climate, which we’re all feeling, is hugely appreciated at the moment.”
JJ: As we see the SaaSification of the market, what opportunity in the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) space?
Paddy Fitzpatrick, UK&I ISV Lead, AWS: “What we’re seeing is a strong demand in the market for SaaS. As people have moved from building to buying software, they want to buy software as a service, and pricing based on how much they can consume.
“So the first thing we do now is help ISVs or software companies get SaaS ready, showing them how to build an application that can rapidly scale on modern architecture. Then secondly, around the business as well.
“When you move to a SaaS model, there are challenges around making sure the salesforce is able to sell SaaS or Cloud to customers who’ve never been on Cloud before. Then there are things like licence and pricing models to think about, rethinking multiple elements of the business. So we’re helping people on the business side and the technical side of it.”
