Amazon squares up to infrastructure giants in channel drive

Cloud giant's global partner boss Terry Wise talks us through his channel plans

After the launch of its first formalised partner programme earlier this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to tempt resellers away from the infrastructure vendor giants as it aims to make a bigger splash in the enterprise.

The Amazon Partner Network was unveiled in March and includes a track geared towards ISVs – Technology Partners – alongside one for integrators, resellers and services firms – Consulting Partners. Partners come in at Registered level, before graduating into the programme proper, which contains Standard and Advanced tiers.

The firm currently has 68 Consulting partners in EMEA, comprising 13 at Advanced level and 55 holding a Standard badge. Terry Wise, head of worldwide partner ecosystem at AWS, stressed that the vendor's go-to-market strategy is increasingly channel-centric.

"We have thousands of partners and, in almost all cases when we look at the enterprise customers we are supporting, there is one or multiple partners in place", he said. "Today [our high-growth areas are] around web licences, rich media web applications, lots of content, lots of storage and lots of compute; that is really the low-hanging fruit."

Wise stressed that traditional resellers can work with AWS initially on a "purely transactional" basis.

"We have Reserved Licences which are one-to-three year subscriptions that are charged upfront, as you would a software licence," he explained. "There is a great opportunity not only for a partner to get a transactional revenue, but also to generate recurring revenues."

The AWS channel boss claimed his firm "does not spend a lot of time thinking about the competition", but admitted that he sees the long-standing hardware manufacturers, rather than other cloud providers, as his main competitors.

"Traditional or legacy approaches would be our biggest competition: adding storage and servers to an existing datacentre and getting 15 per cent utilisation of those assets – that is the model we are trying to break. When you pay for what you use, you can get 100 per cent financial utilisation."

More partner recruitment is planned for next year, but Wise outlined his commitment to being "fairly selective" and bring on board partners possessing expertise in certain technologies or verticals.