How AWS is using the power of partnerships to innovate for its Australian partners
Chris Casey, director of partners APJ at AWS discusses several ways it’s making life easier for partners and customers.
Chris Casey, director of AWS partnerships APJ says the tech giant will continue to double down on viewing its partners as co-inventors and “force multipliers” for them to deliver innovation to their customers.
During the AWS Partner Summit in Sydney, Casey discussed several ways it is working and collaborating with its partners to ensure they are innovating at speed and delivering the best solutions for their end users.
Casey explained that AWS is always pushing hard on speed of innovation.
“That is one area that that for me, we can never be pushing hard enough on to do it securely, but make sure we're getting the right information to our partners at the right time, at the right speed,” he said.
The APJ partner lead is pushing for more automated workflows to reduce workloads and create efficiencies.
"The more that we can automate some of those workflows that today are pretty manual about a partner, even describing their solutions and products on the AWS Marketplace,” he said.
“Then the AWS salesperson's experience of having a customer challenge or an opportunity, and them having to manually do that, that's hours and weeks of work and productivity that could be streamlined.”
This is when the AWS Partner Connections comes into play. Unveiled earlier this year, the platform allows AWS partners to discover, connect and collaborate with fellow partners on shared customer opportunities.
Casey said this partner matching engine is helping automate those workflows.
“It is resulting in a faster time for customer value. Opportunities that we're collaborating on with partners, where the partner matching engine was involved in linking the partner to the AWS sales reps is closing 27 percent faster than those that don't.
“That speed is showing that, like the customer value can be realised faster if we can automate some of these things,” he added.
The right tools for the job
Apart from helping its partners innovate and work faster and more efficiently, Casey said AWS is also assisting its partners in identifying trends.
“They might frame it as customer demand signals, but it's what's that voice of the customer to help them triangulate what their business priorities are?” He said.
Casey understands the importance of these questions and reliance their partners have on AWS.
“We don't take it lightly that these companies are building on AWS as a customer and a partner,” he explained.
“We value that trust that they have in us, not only from the technical aspects of security, but you have CEOs that are making strategic business decisions on different sectors, different geographies and different markets.”
Casey added, “Our ability to make sure we're equipping our teams – the AWS teams – with the right customer demand signals on different forms of migrations and modernisations that are a key priority for the customers.”