Distribution plays a key role at AWS

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has steadily increased its involvement with the channel over the past few years, with distributors increasingly working with the hyperscaler.

The move by the likes of Ingram Micro, Arrow ECS and Westcon-Comstor to gain AWS certifications and enable links between their reseller bases and the AWS marketplace has been a feature of the cloud player’s recent channel activities.

Joe Carroll, UKI director for partners at AWS, has seen the relationships with distributors and managed service providers (MSPs) grow as more offer their solutions and services to the cloud player’s customers.

“Over the years, AWS has been very strong with the developer and engineering communities, democratising access to compute resources no matter where you are on the globe, and over time, this ecosystem of partnerships has grown exponentially,” he said.

Pointing out that the high and varied attendance at the AWS Summit in London in April underlined the progress the firm had made in widening its relationships, he added: “It just shows that the world has grown around us, and that market opportunity is significant.”

Carroll said one of the groups tapping into that opportunity was the distributors that had identified the growth that could be gained from working more closely with AWS.

“The groups that are tapping into that opportunity ... and have continued to grow in the space are distributors. Because we have thousands and thousands of partners in the UK alone, and each plays a slightly different role, the distributors help the many thousands to get onboarded, in terms of access to the services, and help with some of the billing mechanisms, etc,” he said.

“Because there are tens of thousands of partners that are either small or mid-size, that’s where the distributors are playing a very critical role in helping with the skills, the financial management, and the access,” he added.

The efforts made by distributors to gain AWS accreditations and invest in their capabilities have also benefited those that are gaining the most from the AWS relationship and have developed specialisms.

“Customers will only accept an outcome. They’ll only accept a high quality of understanding of their business and their industry,” said Carroll.

He said the focus for the rest of this year was working with a widening partner base to ensure it could link customers with the right service providers.

“The priority is always the customer – customers of all sizes, it might be a government department or a startup or large enterprise – so I think what we’ve seen is some large enterprises use a wide variety of partners, and so that orchestration of the different partners for different roles is quite key,” he said.

“They might be choosing a data platform for that data unification requirement to have a good understanding of the data across the enterprise, but of course they may be using Salesforce and ServiceNow for service desk and customer experience or marketing, and then of course when it comes to the conversation with the CFO, they’ll be more okay with wanting to know the long-term impact on Ebitda or profitable growth, so we work with a slightly different partner to bring that to life and to articulate the value,” he added.

“Orchestration is a top priority to make sure we bring the right kind of choice and the right partner for the conversation or workflow discussion,” he said.

The benefits the channel can bring in terms of widening reach and driving growth have been recognised by AWS’s senior management, and the UK boss recently spoke of the need for customers to talk to partners because of the skills they can offer.

“Top down is absolutely where we’ve got the sponsorship to drive this [channel] agenda, and it sits at every level in the UK,” Carroll added. “There’s never been a more exciting time to be working with our partners, because they’re all driving this change really quickly.”