Partners give their take on AWS' strategy during 2022 London Summit

Some partners have given their view to CRN on the summit

AWS' 2022 London Summit was held at the ExCel centre last Wednesday, with multiple partners having set up stalls at the event to talk to customers.

Among them was Premier AWS partner Kyndryl, which said one of its highlights was being able to engage with a wide range of technology firms across areas of cybersecurity, Edge, AI, Data and Cloud.

Joseph Toma, alliance and partnerships leader at Kyndryl UKI, said: "As a Premier AWS Partner and Gold Sponsor of the event, it was fantastic to be able to engage with customers to hear about their experiences of adopting and building on the AWS platform, and also to meet with the broader AWS partner ecosystem to discuss new ways to bring value to our mutual customers."

Toma added that there has been an "unprecedented rush to the cloud" following a surge in digital transformation over the pandemic.

But he said this has left many enterprises "without the knowledge and capabilities to manage their expanded cloud capacity effectively".

"This is where AWS has come to the fore," he said.

"Given the ever-worsening digital skills gap currently facing the industry, AWS has sensibly committed to upskilling those in the tech sector, providing the education and technical know-how that will enable enterprises to optimise their cloud strategies. Initiatives such as the new strategic partnership between AWS and Kyndryl are absolutely critical to achieving this.

"Our organisations will invest in the education of more than 10,000 Kyndryl professionals by the end of 2022, whereby employees will be upskilled in a wide range of AWS skills to support its customers' rapid adoption of cloud services and solutions around the globe."

Toma added Kyndryl has "invested heavily" in developing AWS competencies and has built an experienced team of AWS-certified services professionals through the Kyndryl Academy for AWS.

"In fact, as part of the global partnership, Kyndryl will establish an AWS Cloud Center of Excellence (CCOE) to offer state-of-the-art customer solutions and services for supporting mission critical infrastructure, next generation technologies and modernising applications and workflows across industries," he said.

Another partner at the event was AND Digital, which said the summit was "enlightening".

James Sharpe, chief of strategic alliances, highlighted discussions around closing the skills gap.

He said: "We've got a mission to upskill 200,000 people and we have similar programmes and cultures around bringing young people, particularly women into engineering."

He also said that AWS plays the "biggest part" in terms of cloud operations that AND Digital does.

Sharpe added: "As a partner, they recognise that our skills are as important as the skills in the open community and helping us develop our teams.

"Developing programmes like maps, the migration programme, that helps smooth the curve of occurring double cost for a period of time before you migrate into cloud or further optimise into cloud.

"All of these are good initiatives that help us as a partner engage on the things that matter for our customers, which is great."

He added: "AWS are great partners, that's the only way you can describe it. There's so much opportunity in the marketplace and there's a recognition from AWS.

"It's not why should we be in the cloud, its how do we get there now, which is really exciting. The initiatives, the technology and the relationship unlocks that value."