5 channel partner takeaways from AWS re: Invent
CRN caught up with several AWS partners, including SoftwareONE, Crayon and WWT to hear their thoughts on what the hyperscaler announced at the conference
AWS recently wrapped up its annual cloud computing event, AWS re: Invent, held this year at Las Vegas.
The public cloud giant made several announcements during the conference, including the launch of AWS Supply Chain, Amazon OpenSearch Serverless, and Amazon Security Lake, all revealed during CEO Adam Selipsky's keynote.
Catching up with several AWS partners to get the lowdown on what they thought of re: Invent 2022, CRN heard mixed reviews.
One partner, who wished to remain anonymous, highlighted the partner keynote, dubbing it the worst of the keynotes presented.
"It wasn't as expected, it had too many case studies," they said.
"I expected more, but what I understood from the keynote was that the focus on data, AI, machine learning and supply chain management are the strategic initiatives for AWS for the future."
Here are what the rest of the partners CRN spoke with had to say regarding AWS re: Invent 2022.
Alex Galbraith, global director of AWS, SoftwareONE
"There is still a significant long tail of organisations that are only now adopting the cloud. Something AWS has done very well over the years is to introduce new services which make adoption simple and easy for organisations - picking a high-value, but high-complexity, area and driving down the barriers to entry. New services, such as AWS DataZone, appear to be aimed at doing that, which can only help partners to encourage customers to modernise.
"The significant maturation of AWS Control Tower will also ensure customers begin their cloud journey with a solid foundation, whilst allowing partners to add value through customisations has made brought this service into prime time.
"After the amusing, Matrix-inspired keynote skit from [Werner Vogels], we learned about AWS Application Composer, which simplifies building applications using a visual canvas and connectors.
"Even more exciting was AWS EventBridge Pipe. This service utilises event-driven architectures and promises to save countless hours of integration development time; removing the need for many of the custom lambda scripts written by customers and partners to bind AWS services."
Continue reading to hear from Cloudreach, Crayon and WWT...
5 channel partner takeaways from AWS re: Invent
CRN caught up with several AWS partners, including SoftwareONE, Crayon and WWT to hear their thoughts on what the hyperscaler announced at the conference
Darren Bowling, senior advisor, Cloudreach
"From what I did see, security and observability have been major focus points in all of the technology-focused announcements.
"Low code and no code technologies have also had their moments in the spotlight. These technologies will look to support businesses who have limited resources and have struggled with talent acquisition. They will also assist those starting out in their AWS career.
"There wasn't anything completely new, or totally unexpected, like Sagemaker when it was first announced. It was mainly incremental improvements to AWS' existing services, emphasising the maturity of the AWS platform.
"Customer demand for changes is evident, and Amazon responded, and continues to do so, by providing adequate updates and improvement across a wide range of its services. This further demonstrates AWS's commitment to excellence in offering top-notch cloud computing solutions.
"My colleagues at Atos and I loved the 100 per cent renewable-powered environments and water-positive goals AWS set out. It shows they are committed to the climate change cause. Some of the tools to help achieve net zero target, such as carbon calculators are obviously in their infancy, but it's a leap forward from where we were as an industry from just a year ago."
5 channel partner takeaways from AWS re: Invent
CRN caught up with several AWS partners, including SoftwareONE, Crayon and WWT to hear their thoughts on what the hyperscaler announced at the conference
Anders Thulin Røkke, vice president global services, Crayon
"One of the biggest takeaways was the service launch of supply chain management. That is going to be a really interesting component down the road for the industry.
"I think that's going to be interesting to see how we can develop and align with the market and the feedback from how we can position supply chain management going forward.
"Crayon is a global company, we are in 47 countries. So for us it's also working in the different sectors in the industry and supply chain is where we can see huge projects on data and AI. It's more like a leeway into doing more business in our area where we are specialists."
5 channel partner takeaways from AWS re: Invent
CRN caught up with several AWS partners, including SoftwareONE, Crayon and WWT to hear their thoughts on what the hyperscaler announced at the conference
Jack French, director, cloud platforms, and Chris Williams, cloud therapist, World Wide Technology
J - "This event is truly becoming more than just an AWS event. It is THE cloud event of the year. Every major ISV, OEM, partner, consumer, engineer, and executive is at re:Invent.
"In years past, AWS keynotes would spend time discussing why you should move to the cloud, the scale of the AWS cloud, or how you should feel safe in the cloud. This year seemed to shift more to solution development and multi-service partner integration. This is great for consulting partners like WWT who excel in the development of integrated solutions.
"[Ruba Borno's] partner keynote illustrated their continued investment in their partner channel, from marketplace to their partner sales organisation. This was refreshing to hear and I am excited to see what she can do to help the continued growth of their partner programmes."
C - "I'm glad that AWS has pivoted back to developer enablement. The three service announcements of AWS Application Composer, EventBridge Pipes, and CodeCatalyst show that AWS has heard some of the complaints from their user base and are starting to become more rigorous in setting guidelines for usage of their services. These services will assist and accelerate development iteration times for those using AWS native services extensively.
"On Monday of the conference I was talking to the other AWS Heroes about exactly this - wanting to see more developer enablement. I'm glad that I got my wish! Any service that can shorten the time window between 'idea' to 'iteration' is good for our customers' business goals and helps us to get them there faster."
5 channel partner takeaways from AWS re: Invent
CRN caught up with several AWS partners, including SoftwareONE, Crayon and WWT to hear their thoughts on what the hyperscaler announced at the conference
Adi Heinisch, general manager, CloudZone
"This is CloudZone's seventh time at re:Invent, this is our opportunity to come together as an AWS community to meet our customers, AWS and colleagues, get inspired, and rethink what's possible.
"Our strategic focus is to drive our customers value in their rapid pace of innovation. As a Consulting Partner Private Offers, Solution Provider Private Offers and Marketplace Skilled Consulting Partner, we see Marketplace as a key factor in our success. Therefore, the Marketplace announcements were our biggest takeaway.
"The AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights will be a key tool for us in our enablement process for our customers. As a seller this optimizes our risk assessment process and allows us to provide our customers with a fast lead time.
"In addition to this, the Data Visualization Dashboards are a boost to what we can see as a reseller in Marketplace and what we can provide to our customers.
"This streamlines the financial reporting and allows us and our customers to analyze and monitor key trends. We see Marketplace and AWS co-selling strategy as a differentiator in the market and what allows us to accelerate customer transformation."