AWS hails year-on-year rise in leads and deal sizes for cloud channel partners

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has revealed details of how its revamped partner incentives and support offerings are helping its channel better support its customers’ digital transformation plans.

Speaking during the Global Partner Keynote at the AWS re:Invent user conference in Las Vegas, the firm’s vice president of global alliances ecosystems and channels, Terry Wise, shared details of the year-on-year improvement it has tracked in the performance of its partner network.

In response to partner feedback, demanding AWS do more to help them cultivate leads, Wise said there has been a marked uptick in not only the number of leads being passed on but also in overall deal sizes coming the channel’s way.

“In this past year, we’ve delivered hundreds of thousands of new leads through our marketing efforts to our partner community. Last year it was tens of thousands, now its hundreds of thousands,” he said.  

“And the most exciting numbers – if you look at deal size - is the opportunity size is 3.5 times what it was in 2017.”

These changes coincide with the rollout of a number of sales enablement and certifications the cloud giant has embarked upon over the course of the last 12 months, as well as a complete branding overhaul of its channel partner programme.

To ensure this momentum continues, Wise revealed during the keynote plans are afoot to expand the range of technologies its partners can attain certifications in to include Internet of Things (IoT) services and containers.

The certifications are designed so channel partners can formally demonstrate their proficiency in using the firm’s various cloud services to prospective enterprise clients, while its technology partners can use it to mark their own technologies out as AWS compliant.

The IoT Service Delivery designation, for example, is pitched at partners who want to mark themselves out as specialists in the design and deployment of AWS-hosted IoT services, while the Container Competency is aimed at organisations with skills and expertise in managing container-based deployments.

Helping enterprises migrate their data from on-premise environments to the cloud, and out of legacy, commercial database technologies using Amazon’s Aurora technology are both areas where its channel partners are clearing up at the moment.  

But one area it is struggling to keep up with the demand for is in managed services, and it is keen to recruit more partners with expertise in this area accordingly.

“This business is growing two times the overall rate of the overall AWS business,” he said. “There is more demand out there than there is supply within the partner ecosystem, so we need more partners to join us on the managed service provider journey.”