Key partner comments from the AWS Partner Summit London 2023
CRN caught up with three AWS partners to get their view on the hyperscaler’s current channel direction
Generative AI, growth opportunity, and the power of the marketplace were just some of the main takeaways from the AWS Partner Summit in London this week.
CRN was in attendance to hear from AWS partners and get their perspective on a few of the latest announcements to come from the cloud hyperscaler.
Generative AI was inevitably part of the conversation during AWS director of worldwide systems integrators Chris Sullivan's opening keynote (pictured).
While Amazon's recent Q1 results showed that AWS cloud growth had slowed owing to customers trying to save on costs.
All this and more were at the forefront of three AWS partners' minds when they sat down with CRN.
Mohamed Zamzam, global partnership leader AWS, and Lizzie Willett, head of partnerships at BJSS
Headcount: 2,800
Headquarters: Leeds
BJSS is a systems integrator that bills itself as the UK's largest privately owned technology and engineering consultancy with a managed services proposition.
How do you feel about the content of the keynotes heard today?
Mohamed: "It's very reassuring to hear that at the senior leadership perspective, there's that focus on partnerships.
"The mechanisms and the programmes and encouragement that AWS leaders put in place to push the staff to work with partners is a good thing and hopefully that will translate into practice as we operationalize our function."
Lizze: "From my perspective I think Chris highlighted well the headroom for growth and the opportunity there that there is actually room for everybody in the market.
"There is almost unlimited potential in terms of what you can achieve the way the market is at the moment."
What are some challenges you're facing currently from an AWS partner perspective?
Mohamed: "Without a doubt, access to talent. The UK is a highly competitive market with a large number of system integrators and consultancies.
"Yes, the demand is high for skills, but getting access to talent, even to deliver, is very hard.
"We as an organisation try to stand out with the training programmes that we offer, the locations that we base ourselves in, the way of working, the career development side that we offer our staff.
"We look for younger talent that we can nurture to gain experience with us. So we have the BJSS academy that we've developed and have won the Princess award on a couple of occasions for what it offers, not just for young talent but also people that are looking to change careers and returns to work."
Lizzie: "From a client perspective there's a huge focus on costs and we have seen clients wanting to reduce budgets and tighten the purse strings.
"But I think with a focus on cloud, that is a way that we can support them through that. So a focus on cost optimisation and sustainability. And that is something that we have been strategically focusing on throughout our marketing and go-to-market messaging as well."
Mohamed: "To add to that, another thing is how can we deliver value faster and quicker, which is something that obviously other partners would offer and do as well, and AWS advocate that the market. But it's about who executes best and I think we are best placed to do that."
What's something you want to see more of from AWS?
Lizzie: "There's a lot going on with generative AI at the moment. I think what's interesting is a couple of the other hyperscalers have come to the market with their offerings. Everybody knows about ChatGPT and OpenAI and we're really excited to see what AWS is bringing to the market and how they are differentiating themselves.
"I think there's more to be seen. I don't think we're waiting for something to be pulled out of a hat and I don't think we've seen what's fully from AWS at the moment but I'm hoping that will come to light quite soon."
Mohamed: "What we want to see from AWS is more guidance on where they think the market is headed and what they think partners would offer in that space. We started to get snippets of it today, but more specific guidance."
Amazon recently Q1 results showed AWS cloud growth slowed. What's your reaction to this deceleration as an AWS partner?
Lizzie: "My view goes back to my point earlier about costs. In a contracting market it is still growth. So that doesn't really worry me as long as you're still seeing that growth, that's quite a positive story."
Mohamed: "If we look at ourselves we had significant growth over pandemic the years and we hired accordingly, but that growth decelerated as well.
"It wasn't a surprise to see the growth decelerated, it's more about seeing what they're doing to address it.
"From the engagements that we are having as BJSS and AWS - I don't know about the other partners - it seems like we're focused on helping our customers to get the most benefit out of the cloud, like cost optimisation, and so forth. But also thinking a bit more longer term beyond the immediate contractionary market."
Continue reading to hear from two more partners from the AWS Partner Summit London...
Key partner comments from the AWS Partner Summit London 2023
CRN caught up with three AWS partners to get their view on the hyperscaler’s current channel direction
Sally Hunt, regional head of digital partner alliances EMEA at Iron Mountain
Iron Mountain is an ISV AWS partner that was founded 72 years ago out of Boston, US, and bills itself as an information storage and management business which has been on a transition to become more of a digital organisation over the past five years.
Headquarters: London
How do you feel about the content of the keynotes heard today?
"The main piece for me was the power of the marketplace, the power of three. We're looking to get as many of our solutions onto the marketplace to take advantage of the reach that gives us.
"And also the access to different buyers and access to cloud committed spend, which is something Iron Mountain has not traditionally done. We've been very much a direct sales organisation and in the last 18 months we've started to look at partnering."
What are some challenges you're facing currently from an AWS partner perspective?
"The biggest challenge for us at the moment is scale with AWS. We don't have enough ISV managers in all of our countries across Europe.
"So, building out a strategic investment plan and committing to it on both sides is our next objective for us to get more resources.
"We're in 26 countries across Europe, our main countries being the UK, France, Germany and Spain, so we need to match that footprint."
What's something you want to see more of from AWS?
"We do a lot in information management and governance, so generative AI I think is really interesting but we need some rules and regulations around it from a processing of buyers perspective.
"But I think it's got huge ambitions and opportunities that come with it.
"We're looking at it ourselves for retention policy, so we've got a product that sits on AWS called ‘policy centre', and it applies all of the governance and legal rules and regulations that apply to an organisation's data sets, wherever they sit in the world.
"And being able to feed all of that information that we have into generative AI will mean hopefully an organisation can have an Alex-type experience, saying ‘how long do I need to keep this document for in this country'.
"So they're the sorts of things we're looking at with generative AI but with that cautious note of rules, regulations and biases against it."
Amazon recently Q1 results showed AWS cloud growth slowed. What's your reaction to this deceleration as an AWS partner?
"I think it's the same across all cloud organisations, it's not just an AWS thing.
"Everybody rushed to the cloud during Covid, also accelerated by the political situation in the Ukraine. Suddenly countries that didn't like cloud were rushing to cloud from a safety perspective in case of invasion.
"I think it's just a market balancing. People are now looking at hybrid. I've seen in the financial sector the rush is starting to come back a bit, with some things moving back from cloud.
"So I think that there's a balancing of the market at the moment and I'm not worried about that at all."
Key partner comments from the AWS Partner Summit London 2023
CRN caught up with three AWS partners to get their view on the hyperscaler’s current channel direction
Seth Finegan, UK CEO, Informed Solutions
Headquarters: Manchester
Informed Solutions is an AWS consulting partner and systems integrator. Established 30 years ago it bills itself as an privately owned SME specialising in digital transformation, data analytics and AI.
What are some challenges you're facing currently from an AWS partner perspective?
"It's a blend of opportunities and challenges that are two sides of the same coin.
"The opportunity in the UK marketplace and globally at the moment is to take advantage of AI driven data science, data analytics and automation to completely transform not only our economies that but how society operates.
"In that opportunity, there lies challenges well. The challenge of helping society and economies understand how data and technology can be used, how they can trust the use of new capabilities like AI, and how they can take advantage of that opportunity in what is a dynamic and vulnerable economic situation.
"There's loads of opportunities to do really clever stuff, but with constraints and considerations around investment, trust, skills, and the ability to deliver.
"How does AWS help us? It provides a very comprehensive suite of functionality, security capability, hosting capabilities, scaling capability, that is actually quite coherent and easy to access by our engineers.
"That means we can take advantage of AI capabilities with relative ease, certainly compared to say five years ago. The platform makes it quite easy for us to access that type of capability.
"The way that AWS organises itself, in terms of our ability to upskill our staff, I think that's really helping, because we can go through quite well defined and mature AWS upskilling pathways as well. So, that framework helps us upskill our staff to take advantage of the technology that's available.
"And finally, the partnering approach of AWS is extremely proactive we have found both in the UK and internationally.
"We're not filling out lots of forms and going through loads of different gateways to talk to people that really want us to do well and to understand what AWS has to offer. And that really helps us as a business, particularly as we're mid size scaling business, I don't want to go into partner frameworks that are overly laborious, and AWS makes it easy to be a partner."
What's something you want to see a bit more of from AWS as a channel partner?
"We are specifically interested in natural language processing and identity recognition.
"We want to see AWS' response to that, and at the moment we're looking at how those types of tools can support our business and our clients.
"So we're just interested to see how AWS matures its investment proposition in that space."
Amazon recently Q1 results showed AWS cloud growth slowed. What's your reaction to this deceleration as an AWS partner?
"Part of the answer is, we work in complex, specialist areas and so the macro moves of the market don't immediately impact us quite the same way as some of the other AWS partners and resellers.
"More broadly I'm interested in what's the journey towards digital transformation and part of that journey towards cloud.
"It's interesting if it's stuttering or flattening, and I think we'd recognise that pattern that a lot of digital transformation has taken place in the last ten to 15 years but there's so much more to do.
"I think a few factors are at play there.
"Like any curve, you'll have that sort of early adoption curve, and at some point, you'll have a longer tail will be harder to transform and buy into a cloud first approach. So I think there's probably some of that going on.
"I think the other thing that is going on is, to achieve deep digital transformation is a far more complex job than anyone maybe really realised at the beginning.
"The ability to take advantage of the broad range of AI capabilities is so reliant on you having data properly managed, properly accessible and interoperable. And there are so many organisations, public and private, that are just still miles away from having an estate and an approach to data architecture that would allow them to take advantage of some of these new capabilities.
"I think that in simple terms, we've done some of the easy stuff. And actually the complex stuff, the multi agency stuff, the sharing of data and interchanging data freely and easily, is still a problem."