10 Top AWS Partner Announcements From re:Invent 2020

Amazon Web Services Partner Network members from AllCloud to Lemongrass to World Wide Technology boosted their AWS profiles with new offerings and designations tied to the cloud computing provider.

The AWS re:Invent conference is not only time for Amazon Web Services to shine, but also its tens of thousands of partners showcasing new products, services and designations tied to the top-ranked cloud computing provider.

AWS disclosed during this month’s re:Invent conference that it adds 50 new organizations each day to its AWS Partner Network (APN).

“Companies are looking for AWS partners who can deliver end-to-end solutions, develop cloud-native applications in addition to managing the cloud infrastructure, and have deep specializations across industries, use cases, specific workloads like SAP and AWS services,” AWS channel chief Doug Yeum said in his re:Invent partner keynote address. “AWSPartners who can meet these customer requirements and truly understand that speed matters -- there will be lots of opportunities. And AWS is here to help you capture these opportunities together.”

Here’s a roundup of some of the top AWS Consulting and Technology Partner news tied to the conference from Alcide, AllCloud, CloudCheckr, Cloudreach, Deloitte Consulting, InfoStretch, Lemongrass, Navisite, Rackspace Technology, SingleStore,Syntax, Tenable, VoiceFoundry and World Wide Technology.

AllCloud Announces Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS

San Francisco-based AllCloud, a cloud professional services company, unveiled a new multi-year strategic agreement with AWS that will expand its collaboration with the cloud provider.

AllCloud, which has been an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and AWS Managed Services Provider since 2008, has completed more than 3,000 cloud deployments.

It will work with AWS to accelerate AWS adoption by onboarding new startup, independent software vendor and enterprise customers. It will benefit from AWS resources including training, marketing and solutions development assistance that it will use to extend AWS services in the United States, Israel, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The company will develop a framework of services, including advisory, consulting, integration, migration and managed services, to attract large customers. It plans major investments in its upcoming Solutions Factory, which will provide enterprise-class solutions tailored to multiple industry sectors. And it will double down on its data, analytics and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) practices that are growing rapidly, according to AllCloud.

“This strategic collaboration agreement not only strengthens our relationship with AWS, but more easily allows our customers to accelerate the value they realize from AWS and more quickly move to a state of continuous cloud innovation,” AllCloud CEO Eran Gil (pictured) said. “Having worked with AWS for the past 12 years, we’ve built expansive AWS knowledge and expertise, and we look forward to using these resources to help more clients realize the value of AWS as the foundation of their cloud and digital transformation initiatives.”

Deloitte Partners With AWS Professional Services

Deloitte Consulting is teaming up with AWS Professional Services on a cloud migration and modernization drive for enterprise and public sector customers under a new three-year global collaboration.

The collaboration will marry New York-based Deloitte’s cloud and consulting strengths with AWS Professionals Services’ technical expertise and capabilities. Deloitte also said it would use its accounting and tax expertise to help customers self-fund their migration and modernization efforts.

“As enterprises look to migrate large and complex workloads to the cloud, our innovation outcome-focused collaboration with Deloitte will help our customers maximize the value from their AWS cloud investments,” said Todd Weatherby, AWS’ vice president of professional services. “The modernization vision jointly developed with Deloitte provides an end-to-end approach from strategy to managed services.”

Deloitte customers start their cloud journey with its Cloud Transform Labs, which helps expand their cloud plan beyond migration to business process modernization through AWS services including data analytics and AI/ML.

“With the strategy in place, the joint delivery with AWS Professional Services ensures strong governance, adherence to AWS architectural best practices and access to migration and modernization patterns developed by AWS Professional Services,” Deloitte said in a statement. “The delivery model also ensures that adequate domain expertise is available on the team leveraging Deloitte’s deep industry and domain expertise to cater to complex, domain-intensive workloads and regulatory requirements. The end-to-end approach also provides managed services options to our customers.”

AWS’ Managed Service Provider Designation For Syntax

Syntax has earned AWS’ Managed Service Provider designation. The Montreal-based company is a cloud-managed, enterprise resource planning (ERP) services provider and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner based in Montreal.

Syntax said it exceeded several milestones showcasing its proficiency managing AWS cloud environments to earn the distinction. They include the July 2019 launch of the Syntax AWS Academy, a six-month program that immerses recent college graduates in the AWS platform through shadowing and training before they seek certification as AWS Solutions Architects. It also built its Intelligent Autonomous Platform, a serverless business application platform constructed on top of AWS; developed an ERP-focused AWS Well-Architected Framework methodology that it embedded in its migration practices; and created a cloud center of excellence.

“Being accepted into the AWS MSP Program confirms and solidifies our standing as a dependable, technical and functional services provider that can support customers through their entire digital transformation,” said Christian Primeau, Syntax’s global CEO.

AWS Consulting Partners Offering Professional Services On AWS Marketplace

Cloudreach, InfoStretch, Lemongrass, Rackspace Technology, VoiceFoundry and World Wide Technology (WWT) are among the first AWS Consulting Partners offering their professional services on AWS Marketplace.

At re:Invent, AWS said it would start letting its APN partners quote and bill labor as professional services directly through AWS Marketplace, its digital catalog of independent software vendor offerings that run on its cloud. Customers will be able to procure and be billed for both software and associated services in a centralized place with standard contract terms, instead of having to contract separately for the professional services outside AWS Marketplace.

AWS Premier Consulting Partner Cloudreach’s professional services offerings include solutions supporting migration, application modernization and managed services.

Now on AWS Marketplace, Cloudreach’s Migration Quickstart provides a short introduction to cloud for enterprises, with the ability to quickly conduct a total cost of ownership assessment, and pilot migration to the cloud. The managed service provider’s Kubernetes Launchpad is designed for enterprises exploring cloud-native development and container technology. It leverages Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) to help enterprises cut through planning cycles and get “hands-on” with a proof-of-value application replatform using Kubernetes, according to the company.

“Now our customers can access thousands of cloud software solutions and our associated services to help them implement and manage their workloads on AWS, from one centralized location in AWS Marketplace,” Cloudreach CEO Brooks Borcherding said.

Infostretch, a digital engineering services firm and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, has three services available to customers on AWS Marketplace. The Infostretch Free AWS Well-Architected Review Assessment helps organizations minimize potential system failures and operational costs for cloud workloads. Infostretch Startup Cloud Activate provides cloud strategy support for startups, and Data Dip is a data pipeline validation framework to solve challenges with data pipeline validations distributed through a deployable code framework integrated with AWS.

“The availability of professional services in AWS Marketplace represents a very streamlined and simple option for customers,” said Rutesh Shah, founder and CEO of Infostretch, which has its headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. “Our engineers have worked tirelessly to develop digital packages that help customers deliver the greatest possible value from their cloud infrastructure, and now those initiatives are going to be conveniently accessible via AWS itself.”

Atlanta’s Lemongrass focuses on migrating and operating SAP solutions on AWS.

The AWS Premier Consulting Partner, which also is an AWS Managed Service Provider, was the second company globally to achieve the AWS SAP Competency.

Its Lemongrass Application Archiving, automated by Lemongrass Cloud Platform, is among its professional services offerings on AWS Marketplace. It enables an SAP customer to move an old or relatively unused SAP system into a low-cost, easy-to-access cloud platform and is suited for companies that must retain and provide access to historical data held in their SAP systems. Examples include validated environments or orphaned production systems resulting from a merger or acquisition, according to the company. Lemongrass also is offering Disaster Recovery implementation services powered by CloudEndure, for which it will perform an assessment of a customer’s existing SAP environment -- whether the workload is on-premises, on AWS or in another cloud -- and then design and implement a disaster recovery architecture.

San Antonio, Tex.-based Rackspace Technology , an end-to-end, multi-cloud technology solutions company, also is among the inaugural AWS Consulting Partners to quote and contract their services in AWS Marketplace to help customers implement and manage their software on AWS.

“The addition of Rackspace Technology Professional Services to AWS Marketplace can accelerate customers’ ability to leverage AWS and provide greater access in harnessing the company’s deep AWS expertise,” Rackspace, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, said in a statement. “With professional services from Rackspace Technology, AWS Marketplace customers have a simplified way to purchase and be billed for both software and services in a centralized place.”

VoiceFoundry orchestrates end-to-end customer-centric cloud solutions for enterprises and focuses on Amazon Connect, AWS’ cloud-based contact center solution to help companies improve customer engagement, and associated AWS services. The Englewood, Colo.-based AWS Advanced Consulting Partner now is quoting and contracting end-to-end customer experience-as-a-service solutions (CXaaS) in AWS Marketplace.

Its Pilot professional services on AWS Marketplace helps customers move from legacy contact center environments to Amazon Connect by providing discovery and requirements workshops, design, deployment migration services, post support and training bootcamps.

“With professional services in AWS Marketplace, we can now provide full solutions that include third-party software and our first-party services to our customers worldwide quickly and efficiently,” said John Marino, head of VoiceFoundry and group vice president for the AWS practice at parent company TTEC.

Solutions provider WWT’s launch of professional services in AWS Marketplace provides its customers access to integration capabilities for solutions including Terraform Enterprise Quickstart by HashiCorp., which helps automate infrastructure provisioning, security and networking.

“As organizations work to rapidly provision their software on AWS, they need flexible, more agile frameworks for decreasing time to market, while reducing deployment risks across on-premise and public clouds,” said Joe Weber, director of cloud architecture and engineering for the St. Louis-based WWT, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner. “WWT’s support of professional services in AWS Marketplace gives our customers a convenient solution for accessing thousands of cloud software solutions with our consulting and integration services from one centralized location.”

New AWS Solution Launches For Rackspace Technology

Rackspace Technology also launched several solutions during re:Invent.

Rackspace Cloud Native Security services provide 24/7 monitoring and rapid remediation of security threats for customers on AWS by certified security experts in the Rackspace Security Operations Center (SOC).

MLOps Foundations enables customers to accelerate automated ML lifecycle management with a 10-step lifecycle that can be achieved within weeks, according to Rackspace.

AWS Outposts Managed by Rackspace Technology is a turn-key solution for implementing and managing AWS Outposts, AWS’ fully managed hybrid cloud offering that extends its infrastructure, services, APIs and tools to customer data centers, co-location spaces or on-premises facilities with compute-and-storage racks designed, installed and maintained by AWS.

Rackspace also earned the new AWS Travel and Hospitality Competency.

Navisite Achieves Amazon RDS Service Delivery Designation

Navisite has achieved the AWS Service Delivery partner designation for Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) with Amazon RDS for Oracle, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL, Amazon Aurora MySQL and Amazon RDS for MySQL.

The designation recognizes the managed cloud service provider is qualified to deliver new implementations and migrate AWS customers to Amazon RDS, which makes it easy to set up, operate and scale a relational database in the cloud.

“We have been an AWS Partner since 2013, and our team is dedicated to helping companies achieve their technology goals by leveraging the agility, breadth of services and pace of innovation that AWS provides,” said Jim Ball, vice president of global alliances for the AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, which is based in Andover, Mass.

Alcide An Amazon EKS-Distro Launch Partner

Alcide is a launch partner for AWS’ new Amazon EKS-Distro, a Kubernetes distribution based on and used by Amazon EKS to create reliable and secure Kubernetes clusters.

The AWS Advanced Technology Partner offers an end-to-end security platform for Kubernetes deployments and has previously had successful integrations with AWS through its Security Hub, Bottlerocket and Outposts offerings, according to the company.

“Companies are racing to implement Kubernetes-native applications,” said Amir Ofek, Alcide’s CEO. “As a launch partner for EKS-Distro, enterprises can rest assured they have access to an approved, real-time security solution out of the box.”

SingleStore Managed Service Hits AWS Marketplace

Data platform provider SingleStore is now offering its SingleStore Managed Service, an on-demand cloud database service for analytics and cloud-native applications, through AWS Marketplace.

Providing SingleStore Managed Service in AWS Marketplace improves SingleStore’s ability to co-sell with AWS customers such as Samsung, the AWS Advanced Technology Partner said.

“With the onset of COVID-19, marketplaces have rapidly increased in importance, as companies double down to accelerate their digital transformations,” SingleStore CEO Raj Verma said in a statement. “AWS Marketplace gives customers a simplified procurement process that is based on standard contracts and terms, fast access to tools and greater ability to track and manage IT through consolidated billing and use pre-allocated budgets for new and existing projects.”

CloudCheckr API Integration With AWS Control Tower

CloudCheckr, a cloud management platform provider, announced a new API integration with AWS Control Tower that allows customers to easily provision accounts with better accuracy. The AWS Control Tower service enables customers to enforce and manage governance rules for security, operations and compliance across all their organizations and AWS accounts.

Through the new API integration, CloudCheckr CMx enables customers who create new accounts in AWS Control Tower to have it simultaneously configured in CloudCheckr.

“With API access to AWS Control Tower, CloudCheckr CMx users have a simplified and consistent process for creating new AWS accounts according to the specifications set by their company, enabling better consistency,” said Tim McKinnon (pictured), CEO at CloudCheckr, a Rochester, N.Y.-based AWS Advanced Technology Partner.

Tenable’s Frictionless Assessment In AWS Marketplace

Tenable’s Frictionless Assessment, its cloud vulnerability management solution, is now available in AWS Marketplace.

The Frictionless Assessment sensor in Tenable.io leverages native AWS Tools, including AWS Systems Manager and the AWS Systems Manager Agent, to continuously assess EC2 instances for vulnerabilities, without having to configure a scan, manage credentials or install agents. It can predict which security issues to remediate first, according to the Columbia, Md.-based security and cyber risk vendor. The capability will use AWS Systems Manager Run Command to allow users to remotely and securely manage the configuration of their cloud instances without interruption.

Legacy security tactics were built for a much slower, on-premises world and have no place in the cloud, where workloads can change by the second, said Renaud Deraison, cofounder and chief technology officer for Tenable, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner.

“Security teams working in cloud environments need purpose-built sensors that leverage native technology to perform instant, continuous and efficient assessment and deliver holistic visibility,” Deraison said. “That’s the best way to confidently harness the benefits of the cloud, and that is precisely what Tenable is offering with Frictionless Assessment.”

Frictionless Assessment, which is being rolled out in a phased approach by region, now is available to customers in Asia Pacific. It’s slated to be generally available to all customers in the fourth quarter.