Doug Yeum’s 7 Most Memorable Remarks At AWS re:Invent 2020

‘Enterprise customers want to unshackle themselves from the rigid, expensive and brittle monolithic IT stack -- like Oracle, for example,’ says Doug Yeum, Amazon Web Services’ channel chief.

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“Together, we thrive,” Amazon Web Services channel chief Doug Yeum told partners yesterday during his keynote presentation at the AWS re:Invent 2020 conference.

All companies will look to leverage the advantages of cloud computing for their business strategy, but many face a key challenge: They don‘t have enough in-house cloud specialists to execute these projects, Yeum said.

“They need help,” he said. “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. Partners 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.”

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Reinvention And Leadership

Reinvention requires strong leadership. When I look at some of our consulting partners like Accenture, Slalom and Rackspace, who are successfully transforming into cloud-first companies, the leaders of these companies play an extremely important role. These leaders have strong conviction about the cloud, set big audacious goals for their companies. And as they transformed, they were not afraid to cannibalize some of their existing businesses if necessary. They were willing to make this hard trade-off in order to lead and shape the future of their companies. This takes a lot of courage. Based on my conversations with partners this year, I‘m feeling more optimistic, as more CEOs have shared that they are now willing to make this trade-off.

Speed Matters

Speed matters a lot right now. Having a sense of urgency is important. Fortunately, I‘m seeing more partners moving faster this year than ever before. Just this year alone, companies like NEC, Orange Business Services, AllCloud, Amdocs and OutSystems have all made strategic decisions to double down on their investments to grow their AWS practices and build solutions on AWS. In return, AWS is making big investments into these partners to help them with their transformation journeys. Our goal is to help our partners to maximize the value of their existing assets -- their customer relationships, their deep industry experience, their unique offerings -- to deliver differentiated value to their customers. We will help our partners become better prepared for the future.

Innovative Solutions And Quadrant Biosciences

Partners who‘ve been working with AWS for a while and have leveraged the AWS platform, people, programs, they were clearly better prepared to respond to the (coronavirus) pandemic. I’d like to share one interesting story of an AWS partner that used their deep understanding of the platform to help a small business thrive. Quadrant Biosciences is a life sciences company working with universities across the U.S. to develop and commercialize solutions for early detection of neurological disorders. In December 2019, they launched Clarifi ASD, the world‘s first saliva-based test to detect autism spectrum disorder. With the onset of the pandemic, they wanted to help their community and quickly decided to develop a saliva-based COVID-19 test kit. However, before rolling out this solution, they needed to make sure that they could cost-effectively analyze the samples collected from the hundreds of thousands of people who would be using this test kit. This was an important step, because as a small business, they had financial constraints.

So they reached out to Innovative Solutions, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, to see if they could help assess their diagnostics platform which runs on AWS. Innovative Solutions used its expertise in conducting well-architected reviews and found ways to optimize the platform to reduce the operating costs by 70 percent. Using the newly optimized diagnostics platform, Quadrant successfully tested over a half-million people so far with their COVID-19 test kit. This story is a great example of how working with the AWS platform and AWS partner has given a customer the ability to innovate at a much faster clip than they would have been able to do on their own.

Partners And Amazon SageMaker Autopilot

One group of builders who have really leveraged the breadth and depth of the AWS platform are ISVs and SaaS providers. There are many ways in which the AWS platform helps ISVs and SaaS providers. ISVs and SaaS providers are integrating AWS services with their solutions to accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to their customers. For example, Tableau, Sisense, Domo, Qlik have all integrated SageMaker Autopilot to put predictive analytics capabilities in the hands of business owners who have no or little experience with data science. Partners can easily enhance and differentiate their solutions using just a few APIs from AWS.

AWS SaaS Factory

Cohesity is just one of many ISVs who have leveraged the AWS SaaS Factory Program to transform their applications. Other companies include BMC, CloudZero, F5, and Nasdaq. Nasdaq is interesting here, because they aren‘t your typical ISV. Nasdaq has been a longtime enterprise customer of AWS, so they understand the power of cloud computing very well. They successfully leveraged the AWS platform to innovate the way they deliver solutions to their customers globally. Nasdaq represents an important trend, where enterprises are increasingly becoming SaaS providers.

ISV Accelerate Program

Our ISV partners want access to the millions of active customers using AWS. They‘re asking AWS sales teams to help with co-selling. For the past few years, we’ve been working really hard to make this happen through our ISV Accelerate Program. For partners who participate in this program, we provide prioritized access to AWS co-sell support teams who facilitate the overall co-selling motion connecting AWS sellers with our partner sellers. We provide financial incentives. These are special incentives to AWS sellers for supporting these partners with co-selling. We also provide opportunities for these partners to educate AWS sellers on their value proposition. These are some of the co-selling activities that are leading to significant uplift in many of our ISVs‘ business growth. Recently, AppDynamics shared with us that when their sellers received co-selling support from AWS, they‘re able to achieve an 11 percent higher deal close rate. And their average deal size is 2.5 times larger. We will continue to invest significantly here to continue moving the needle for ISV partners.

What Enterprise Customers Want

Enterprise customers want to unshackle themselves from the rigid, expensive and brittle monolithic IT stack -- like Oracle, for example. Enterprises want to use best-of-breed solutions that meet their needs -- solutions from AWS partners like Okta, Atlassian, PagerDuty, CrowdStrike, Slack and Zoom. These now make up the new, best-of-breed cloud IT stack for modern enterprises. And as enterprises use more SaaS applications, interoperability and integration are critical. Without them, enterprises will be left with siloed data, fragmented workflows and security gaps. By leveraging AWS services like EventBridge, AppFlow and PrivateLink, SaaS providers can easily offer more security, flexibility and data-integration opportunities for their solutions to the enterprises that use them. This is super important for driving enterprise adoption of SaaS applications.