The AWS re:Invent Global Partner Summit Keynote: All You Need to Know
The Global Partner Summit, which was presented by Sandy Carter – Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs; Doug Yeum – Head, AWS Partner Organization; and Stephen Orban – General Manager, AWS Marketplace and Control Services, was the first keynote at re-Invent.
It was a great session and covered different innovations across the AWS landscape. It focused on AWS Partners and how they can build upon AWS developing and deploying solutions to enable customers worldwide across all industries to drive their business forward, scaling with AWS to meet and exceed their business goals.
There were several new announcements in the Partner arena, although not primarily centered around new AWS services, but platform and partner management changes that are worth noting.
New AWS Partner Paths released
Partner Paths have been in place for a while now, and the program provides an opportunity for your business to engage with AWS using resources, programs, and benefits that are specifically designed to accelerate your business within your specific industry. These purpose-built paths provide a platform to enable you to build and sell your customer offerings. This announcement brings a range of new AWS Partner Paths. To view the full range of offerings from AWS, please see the Partner Paths found here https://aws.amazon.com/partners/paths/
New Premier Tier Partners
AWS Partners have been validated by AWS to help you manage your journey to the cloud, giving you the help and confidence that you need to take advantage of the huge range of services and features that are available from AWS to drive your digital transformation faster and more effectively. This announcement highlights that a number of new partners have now reached the Premier Tier, which is the highest tiering available. A list of all the Premier Tiered partners can be found here: https://partners.amazonaws.com/search/partners/?pTier=Premier
AWS Graviton Ready Program
This is a new program designed for AWS Partners that have software products that run and support the price/performance-optimized Graviton-based processors used on EC2 instances. This also falls in line with the newly announced Graviton3 processor which is 25% faster than Graviton2 processors.
Partners that are highlighted as Graviton ready have had their products proven and tested by AWS solution architects to verify and confirm that they are fully optimized to run on Graviton-based EC2 instances. This allows customers to take advantage of whatever Graviton price and performance abilities that suit their operational workload requirements.
To learn more about the AWS Graviton Program please see here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/partners/
AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift
The AWS Data Exchange allows you to find and use relevant third-party data sets in AWS, allowing you to easily load it into Amazon S3 before performing data analysis using a myriad of different AWS services to gather the data you need.
With the introduction of AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift, you can skip the part where you would normally need to perform an Extract Transform and Load (ETL) operation on the data loaded. Instead, you can start using and querying the data without additional processing from other AWS services. For more information on this feature, please see the following link: https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/features/aws-data-exchange-for-amazon-redshift/
AWS Data Exchange for APIs 
Similar to the previous announcement, AWS Data Exchange for APIs builds on the same principle, however, this provides an opportunity for customers to identify, subscribe and take advantage of third-party API products from different providers across AWS Data Exchange platform.
This makes it easy for customers who want to use the AWS Data Exchange to absorb API-based data which can take advantage of AWS authentication and governance and supported AWS SDKs.
AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere
Most of us are familiar with the AWS Marketplace, which gives independent software vendors and AWS consulting partners a great platform to market and sell their products and solutions to a much wider customer base. These products can be searched for across popular categories such as Security, Networking, Storage, Machine Learning, and many more.
AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere provides the same functionality to customers who run containerized environments or workloads and want to leverage partners that provide Kubernetes apps that can be deployed in any Kubernetes cluster environment.
The flexibility offered with this capability enables the customer to have the ability to deploy Kubernetes and manage upgrades in an on-prem or AWS environment when used with Amazon EKS anywhere.
For more information on AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere see here: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/features/containers/
New ‘Energy’ Competency
Specific competencies for AWS Partners are only assigned to partners that demonstrate deep AWS expertise and knowledge in specific areas across a range of industries. To gain a competency you have to undergo an extensive vetting and validation process, and only when AWS are happy you meet the high standards you as a Partner will be awarded that competency. There are a number of competencies that partners can attain, including but not limited to:
- Financial services
- Healthcare
- Government
- Education
- Life Sciences
- …and many more.
This new announcement has introduced a new competency, Energy. This competency allows customers to identify those Partners who have shown a consistent and solid understanding, with deep expertise in supporting the requirements of energy customers across the globe.
Additional Impact Level 5 Partners
A number of new AWS Partners have now reached Impact Level 5 status as defined in the US Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide. This provides a greater pool of partner options available when managing unclassified data and information relating to government agencies and customers.
AWS Think Big for Small Business Communities
AWS Think Big for Small Business, or TBSB for short, has been set up to support small or minority-owned public sector organizations, by giving them access to business and technical resources, providing education, information and collaboration opportunities to build cloud-based solutions across government, space, education, and nonprofits around the globe.
To learn more about this partner program please visit: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/programs/small-business/
New AWS GameDay Benefits for Differentiated Partners
AWS GameDay events are well known, well-received, and great fun, in fact, the last one I was a part of was during re:Invent a couple of years ago!
This announcement provided additional GameDay benefits for those partners who are in Differentiation Programs, and these programs include:
- AWS Service Delivery
- AWS Service Ready
- AWS Competency
- AWS Managed Service Provider
Differentiation programs help customers find a selection of vetted cloud partners that have proven and distinct expertise whose knowledge, services, and solutions have been verified and validated.
As a differentiated Partner you have access to AWS GameDay benefits such as AWS GameDay League or AWS GameDay Quests developer kit (QDK).
The GameDay League draws global partners together to compete against one another in scenario-based challenges, testing their abilities and knowledge and demonstrating their expertise in their field, putting the best of the best together!
The AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit enables differentiated partners to add elements of customization to the GameDay experience by bringing together and integrating their own products into the scenario-based game environment, which is a great method for creating lead generation opportunities with their customer base.
So to summarise the announcements of this keynote, Doug Yeum, Sandy Carter, and Stephen Orban, introduced us to the following
- New AWS Partner Paths
- New Premier Tier Partners
- The release of the AWS Graviton Ready Program
- AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift
- AWS Data Exchange for APIs
- AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere
- A new New ‘Energy’ Competency
- Additional Impact Level 5 Partners
- AWS Think Big for Small Business Communities Program
- New AWS GameDay Benefits for Differentiated Partners
These new changes will hopefully help you find the right partner allowing you to build, scale, deploy and run your operations in AWS using the extensive and proven skills, knowledge and experience that the AWS Partner Program delivers to its huge customer base.
