AWS CEO Andy Jassy highlights untapped cloud growth opportunities for channel partners

Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Andy Jassy claims channel partners who successfully help enterprises make the move to the cloud could be rewarded with decades of follow-on business.

Enterprises are looking to the channel for help with negotiating multi-year and multi-phased cloud migration projects, said Jassy.

“There are so many customers that need help making this move to the cloud, and people want help doing it, so I think you have a huge opportunity,” said Jassy, during the Global Partner Summit keynote at the cloud giant’s re:Invent user summit in Las Vegas.

"What we see over and over again and over again is our customers who have the most success and are most happy with the partners they work with are the ones who really know the depths of what they’re advising clients on. Once you get through the first couple of projects successfully there is a lot more to come.”

He added: “As people move to the cloud, [they] are picking the partners they’re going to work with for the next 10-to-20 years, and you have an incredible opportunity.”

Particularly as there is still plenty of untapped enterprise IT spend for the channel to  go after, as the vast majority of businesses are really still to get going on their move to the cloud, he continued.

“We’re just at the early stages of enterprise and public sector adoption,” said Jassy. “So there are a lot of mainstream businesses that are just now starting to plan their approach to the way to the cloud."

To this end, they will be looking to the channel to help guide them through each stage of the journey, starting with the preparatory analysis of their end-to-end IT portfolio so they can start prioritising which applications and workloads to move first.

“Which ones are easy to move to the cloud, which ones are really hard, which ones should go last because of dependencies and legacy [IT] requirements, which ones can be lifted and shifted, and which ones should be re-architected,” he said.

Once that work is complete, enterprises will then need assistance with undertaking the mass migration piece of their move to the cloud, and ensuring this proceeds in a timely manner.

“What they want is a migration that lasts 2-to-5 years. They don’t want it to go on longer than that as projects that last much longer than that really start to drag,” he said.