AWS marks a decade of partner network

AWS is marking 10 years of its partner network, and having established a channel and ISV base, the firm is now looking to carry out more co-selling to drive growth.

A decade ago, the AWS Partner Network was launched and the firm began working with ISVs and partners that wanted to list their wares and services on the cloud giant’s marketplace.

Over the years, refinements have been made to allow private deals to be struck and for partners to have more flexibility with customers but, by and large, the model of verifying and listing offerings has remained the same.

Going forward, the belief at AWS is that more success could be generated through co-selling and increasing the interaction between the firm and its partner base.

“We are in 2022 and 10 years ago, this programme was established,” said Nicolas Pujol, ISV partner management leader, EMEA at AWS. “So essentially, you know, we’ve had a decade of partnerships under that umbrella. And we’ve done many things since then.

“One of the first thing that AWS did was to allow the software vendors to list their products in a marketplace. And so it started really as a self-service tool. Over time, the marketplace and the software community and customers asked for more sophistication from us. One of the things that happened in 2018 was that we introduced private marketplaces, and then private offers, a way for all partners to customise terms and pricing and to sell through the AWS Marketplace with more flexibility.”

Pujol added that as more features became standard with a cloud package, some of the basics were covered so well that it had driven the channel up the value chain, so they could continue to offer more value to customers – and that was driving further evolution of its relationships with the channel.

“What we see are higher-level value-added services in the partner network and an expansion of what would be a pure resale model to a co-sale mode,” he said.

The way that model works is for the partner to continue to sell their wares via the marketplace, but for AWS to underpin it with its infrastructure as well as helping to drive user demand.

“The marketplace today has over 2,000 ISVs and over 900 consulting partners, so these are the kind of players on the supply side of the equation,” said Pujol. “On the demand side of the equation, you have all the customers and so there are over two million active subscriptions from customers on that marketplace. So it’s a phenomenon that is very, very much at scale right now.”

AWS is also open to adding more ISVs and consulting partners to the programme and expanding as it moves into its second decade.

“The partner programme is open to everyone,” said Pujol. “We see incredible startups every year popping up, and sometimes, you know, becoming very successful. There are over 2,000 software solutions on the marketplace and there are many more that will also list on the marketplace very soon.”