Amazon Gives IoT Partner Superstars 'Stamp Of Approval' With New AWS Competency

AWS wants to motivate its partners to get bigger Internet of Things deals with a new AWS Competency for IoT, Amazon's professional certification for specialized businesses.

The new competency, unveiled Tuesday at the company's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, aims to draw partners closer to AWS' IoT efforts with new business, technical and marketing efforts.

"The AWS IoT Competency showcases industry-leading AWS partners that provide proven technology and implementation capabilities for a variety of use cases including … intelligent factories, smart cities, energy, automotive, transportation, and healthcare," said Kate Miller, Strategic Communications Manager for the AWS Partner Network, in a blog post.

[Related: AWS Channel Chief: New AWS Competencies Will Help Channel Partners Stand Out, Meet Customer Demand]

IoT competency partners receive specialized differentiation from others with a dedicated brand and logo that they can use in their marketing materials, preferred access to market development funds and other resources.

Scott Udell, vice president of IoT Solutions at Boston, Mass.-based Cloud Technology Partners – one of the consulting partners to receive the designation – said that the competency was a "stamp of approval."

"This is a strong recognition of our work around IoT, and it will help us gain traction in the marketplace," he said. "We're excited that AWS is recognizing the importance of IoT. There's a lot of noise in the market, and this will help AWS customers navigate through all that noise to find who really has the expertise, leadership and skills."

To become an IoT Competency Partner, solution providers need to provide use case-specific customer references and complete a third-party audit of their IoT solution or practice.

Chris Wegmann, Managing Director for the AWS Business Group at Accenture, told CRN the IoT Competency would help his business stand out with customers.

"Overall, we see this competency as a recognition of our skills in the IoT area," he said. "Partners with competencies have early access to the technology and product managers at AWS. We can now bring that back to our customers and have that differentiation."

Accenture, which specializes in IoT solutions in the insurance and connected home verticals, is continuing to build out its AWS service offerings around IoT as interest in the space grows, said Wegmann.

"We're continuing to expand our IoT capabilities with data analytics and artificial intelligence," he said. "We're deepening our AWS relationship as more customers have some sort of IoT project in the pilot, development or even production phase."

So far, eight consulting partners have been branded with the IoT Competency, but AWS has also awarded the competency to platform provider, gateway and connectivity partners.

The new consulting partners, which play a role in designing and implementing IoT solutions and integrating the multi-vendor system, include Accenture, Aricent, Cloud Technology Partners, Luxoft, Mobiquity, Solstice, Sturdy, and Trek10.