AWS CEO on business transformation: 'Don't wait, the ditch only gets deeper'
Andy Jassy highlights the key differentiators for successful business transformation
Business transformation can only be successfully achieved when every person and facet in the organisation is on the same page, stated Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy.
Speaking during the opening keynote of the cloud provider's annual re:Invent partner event, Jassy warned the crowd that undertaking significant business changes should be started sooner rather than later.
"When we thought about what we should choose as a theme for the keynote, we kept coming back to the question we talk most about with customers: how should we think about transforming ourselves? How can we reinvent our business and our customer experience so we can be meaningful and sustainable over a long period of time?" he explained.
"If there's a big change that you have to make, you don't want to procrastinate - in fact, the ditch gets deeper."
The chief exec then outlined four differentiators between those companies that successfully transform and those that pay lip service to the topic.
His first piece of advice was to ensure that every person on the senior management team is aligned and leads their team with conviction about the importance of transformation.
"Inertia is a very powerful thing and it's easy to block in various parts of the organisation - sometimes for well-intended reasons and some for self-interested reasons," he declared.
"If you don't find a way to have that senior management conviction and alignment that you're going to make that change and find a mechanism to get the issues on the table so you know you're making progress…you won't make that change."
Ensuring that the transformation goal is aggressively pursued through at all levels of the company and adequately training employees are other differentiators Jassy picked out, as well as not being put off by the challenge presented by overhauling business processes.
"Don't allow your organisation to get paralysed if you haven't been able to move every last workload," he said.
"In fact, companies almost always find that so many workloads are easily able to move to the cloud…and inform a lot of the later, harder-to-move workloads.
"Once you make the decision to move to the cloud, you want the broadest capabilities and you don't want to be slowed down.
"Your developers want to be able to move as fast as possible; they don't want to be constrained and want all the capabilities that they need to build anything they can imagine, and nobody has the capabilities that AWS has."
AWS also announced during this week's event that it would be expanding its Seller Private Offers programme to all registered sellers with a public listing in AWS Marketplace.
Seller Private Offers allows sellers to offer clients custom contracts, where they can negotiate price, end-user licence terms and payment schedules before signing up to the seller's third-party software in AWS Marketplace.
"Many enterprises prefer to purchase through Seller Private Offers since it allows preferential pricing and terms, while using AWS Marketplace to provision, meter and integrate software charges into [their] AWS bill," the vendor stated.
From Q1 of 2020, all sellers will also have a simplified fee structure and reduced listing fees when an offer is extended through Seller Private Offers.