Vendors, show SMBs some love: AWS partners talk 'infinite' market opportunity

Partners talk up the “massive” opportunities in the SMB space after AWS makes moves to drive growth in the market

Vendors overlooking the small and medium businesses (SMBs) market are missing a trick and should arm their channel partners with the necessities to go in and win more business for them.

This is the energy following the launch of the AWS Small and Medium Business Competency.

Partners aligned with this competency deliver solutions and offerings across the full spectrum of needs of SMBs, including:

Platform solutions: Migration and modernisation, security, data storage, disaster recovery, and artificial intelligence/machine learning.

SaaS solutions: Accounting, resource management, customer service, and/or relationship management.

To achieve this specialisation, AWS partners must undergo technical validation and assessment of their AWS solutions and practices, including review of architecture and customer case study details.

Two of these fairly new AWS SMB Competency partners spoke to CRN about why this is a significant move.

"It is the biggest opportunity in terms of number of businesses and entities by a long shot," said Simon Walker, managing director at Cloud Bridge.

"I think the market is more agile, forward thinking and less risk averse than the kind of mid sized large enterprise that are slowly moving to more innovative cloud based services and solutions."

Walker says there are plenty of SMBs of a reasonable size keen to be innovative, but don't have all the resources.

"That's a real benefit for suppliers like us, because we can obviously complement their teams with our resources.

"The other benefit is they're also open to do new, innovative type technology projects, which our teams really like doing.

"People who overlook SMBs are missing a trick but we're more than happy for them not to look at SMB because we're doing it."

Aaron Rees, CEO of Rebura, meanwhile, thinks the opportunities are limitless.

"The opportunity is infinite in SMB. There are challenges, but a large chunk of businesses in EMEA are classified as SMBs. The market is absolutely massive.

"One of the good things you get working alongside SMBs is not just how many of them are out there, but it's also their willingness to engage.

"You often will speak to SMBs who run their business on an outsourcing model, so whilst the market is huge, it's also the appetite that SMBs have for outsourcing services, which is so good."

With AWS taking strides in this market, the duo touch on whether other vendors should follow suit and up their game in this space.

"Yeah, 100 per cent. I think everybody looks for that kind of holy grail with 100,000 seats or 100,000 servers or whatever the big number might be," says Walker.

However, he adds SMBs can pose a risk to new vendors whose biggest customers are SMBs.

"Where if you've got 100 smaller customers you're lessening that risk and I think those types of customers in the SMB market probably have the ability to scale up to midsize as well.

"To miss out on that opportunity because you're chasing the big numbers I think is a mistake.

"In terms of bang for your buck from a vendor's perspective, you're more likely to see some traction with customers of that scale."

Rees agrees vendors should "absolutely" consider a bigger SMB play, sharing insight into how the 50-headcount partner works with independent software vendors.

"We are AWS only but that brings with us opportunities to work with the AWS Marketplace, so we're often working with ISVs to drive their solutions into SMB.

"There's a definite split. A lot of the more historic ISVs aren't necessarily focusing on SMBs because it's a fundamentally different business model that requires a huge amount of sales effort. Often it will be the same amount of sales effort to work with an SMB customer, as it will to work with enterprise customers. A lot of vendors have set their sales model up to target enterprise customers.

"What we often do with ISVs is help them relook at their offerings and design new offerings to fit the SMB market.

"So, whilst fundamentally yes, I do think vendors should look more in the SMB space. But I think it's difficult, it's a business change and not just you know, take what you currently offer to SMBs.

"We often get asked from potential customers why they should work with a partner and not just AWS. I think AWS creating an AWS competency really shows their commitment to serving the SMB market and becoming a partner first organisation."