Migration and modernization: Become your customer’s strategic partner

Vanessa: Good morning. I'm Vanessa Cordero. I support our Global Partner Migrations team. We also lead the partner component of the Migration Acceleration Program. My team also supports a number of our other scalable go-to-market investments such as Market Development Fund, Innovation Sandbox, Proof of Concept, and Customer Engagement Incentive.

Nick: Hi everybody. My name is Nick O'Brien. I've been working with Vanessa for about six years now in the partner organization. Vanessa is all about designing our programs for our partners, and my job is to make sure we are running them effectively worldwide. We've been working together on this for a long time, and this session is about sharing some of our practices and observations of partners that are working well and how they're implementing things to help grow their businesses.

Vanessa: Let's get to know the folks in the room. As Nick mentioned, we've been with AWS for 6 years. How many partners have been working since the APN started over 10 years ago? Wow, you need a red badge! How many partners have been here since MAP launched in 2016? What about Partner MAP launch in 2020? Wonderful. We're also interested in your positions. Let's start with the bosses - any founders or executive directors? Great. What about on the sales side - sales, business development? Got some people, excellent. What about on the delivery side where the rubber hits the road - anyone from delivery? Things that make it all happen. Lastly, we want to understand your cloud migration expertise. How many have done more than 10 large migration projects? What about between 5-9? Who's done 1-4? Well done, everyone's done larger migrations.

Vanessa: Let's move to the agenda. At AWS we talk about flywheels and mechanisms. You want to be intentional about building a migration/modernization practice. Nick will talk through that. Then, once you've built it, what are the benefits and how it aligns with the partner experience transformation? Today we'll announce changes coming to the Migration Acceleration Program in 2024. Nick will close with best practices.

Nick: If you've listened to Amazon, flywheels are something we think about a lot. Partners want a repeatable, scalable business with multiple opportunities. Our job is to share things to help you pursue that. I wanted to outline the "holy grail" for partners to bring everything together.

First is go-to-market. I was in the expo hall and thought of Arnold Palmer saying "the harder I practice the luckier I get." Some partners are lucky because of the effort they put in to engage customers. One stand had eye-catching giveaways. Someone asked if I wanted to win one for a raffle. She put a ticket in my hand, said the draw was in 8 minutes so I'd stick around. Someone told me content, scanned my badge - that's just the start. There's follow up, lead nurturing, sales team integration. Our top partners build that mechanism for growth.

We want to help with ideation and angles to capture imagination and trigger conversations. Build that into programs so you can use our support to take conversations further, land your delivery people into accounts and get them working. As you convert, use our tools like ACE and PFP. Some partners get quick approvals because they get the details right - we want to approve them quickly.

I was on a panel with a partner and customer who were so happy to share their story. It felt effortless because of the work behind the scenes, leading to great customer experiences. I'll share examples later, but know huge effort goes into these flywheel cycles. That's what our top partners have done. We want to share those successful practices, but first Vanessa will address those just starting - is the market still open?

Vanessa: We've done thousands of migrations to AWS. The game is not yet over!

And so what we understand we're only at the tip of the iceberg. Really, IDC states that by 2027 there's gonna be a $1.3 trillion opportunity as customers are moving to the public cloud.

And so, um and there's originally, we might have started with infrastructure as a service, but you are helping our customers actually move from being an ISV to a software as a service company built on AWS. And that is a huge market. 52% of the move to public cloud is actually customers becoming SaaS companies while running in the public cloud.

And then also there's a platform as a service that's 23% of that opportunity. Awesome. And, and just what about the the profile of buyers? How's that change?

Yeah, so you'll you'll hear this term which is like buyers are looking for different business outcomes and buyers really need partners with a strong delivery capability. So one you know, we've seen in the pandemic that there was a huge amount of growth in terms of the budget that was spent in the public cloud.

And even with some of I think right now, don't quote me, I'm not an economist, but I see some of that transition happening from where there was the the macroeconomic environment and we're seeing a shift in terms of again, renewed growth. But I'm curious here as a former engagement manager, how many of you here have ever had a project that was behind plan? Anyone?

Yeah, hopefully it's like if you don't, if you've never had a project behind plan, please come and meet me afterwards, i will go and buy you a drink. Um but like 38% of projects are behind plan and what actually is astounding to me. And I can't believe this 75% of cloud migration projects are actually over budget.

And so what customers are looking for is like, how do you help me move to the cloud where i can say on plan and then also on budget and i think where we are today, kind of having been here for over six years at AWS, like the tooling that we have in place either through AWS tools as well as our migration competency, competency, software partner tools and in the future, the gen AI tools, that's gonna be amazing.

So the other question that we get quite a lot from partners is um ok, we can understand about, you know, a ARR annual run rate and how that can be good for ourselves in AWS. But what research have we done when it comes to? What are the benefits from our partners? And where do they make their money?

Yeah, so there i, i'll talk a little bit about, you know, what are the benefits to being um an AWS migration and modernization partner. So how many of you here were at reInvent last year? Oh, wonderful. Thank you for coming back.

Um so there was a analysis study that was done last year that interviewed a number of our partners and said, for $1 of AWS revenue, you can earn 6.4 in terms of your own profitable spending. And actually a major of that is gonna be related to migrations and actually related to migrations in the earlier phase.

So you are helping customers advise you're advising with our customers. You're acting as that consulting partner, trusted advisor, you're helping to design what does the future look like? I mean, i've been hearing with a number of partners this week and every single customer as an example is testing gen AI and they want you to be the one to tell them like what is this gonna be looking like in the future? We're all kind of learning together.

Um and then you're also gonna be building this for our customers. You're the one that's moving the customers over and helping them modernize and transform as part of the cloud cool and something else that we get asked a lot and i i just level set with all of you. Is everyone familiar with the MAP as a program? Is there anybody who doesn't, isn't familiar who does that know about MAP?

Ok. Cool. So migration acceleration program MAP program, that's effectively been our technique for the last few years to put a great big funnel over our organization and then bring anything that we think is going to be useful for our partners and bring it down to them and try and bring that in a concise way.

Um we have worked pretty hard and we've got, you know, we have a proserve division as well that have worked in terms of like improving the methodology. There is so much really high caliber resources in there. If anybody has been familiar with the migration readiness assessment, i've run a few like over the years and i found them really engaging exercises with customers, they really help do that sort of like preparatory work.

And it's a sort of resource which sits within our methodology that really helps sort of like understand and derisk projects. And it's just like one example of loads of different tools that we have that are available to partners that we kind of like bring down and make it, you know, make, you know, you know, to sort of like eliminate a lot of the work that you might have to do, sort of like get your practices up and running so loads to explore in that area.

If you're new to it, obviously, we do loads around software tooling, you're probably familiar with the migration of it, evaluate. So we've got a lot of other different tools as well. Uh and that again is just to try and like, you know, speed things up with our customers, take a bit of risk out of it, improve like quality and make decisions with data.

Um we have an abundance of certification and training. We like to pull all that together for our partners in particular, you know, we want a framework which could just allows you to do self study some sort of like facetime study, you know, formal tuition as well. So a lot of bring you up to speed in like all areas of migrations um MAP is mostly associated with funding.

It is a very rich program. When it comes financially, we know that if we eliminate the costs as much as we can from our customers, then it moves away from being a conversation about trying to sell them a project rather than actually trying to convince them to make a change and then start using the benefits of sort of like moving on to cloud. And that's been like absolutely a catalyst for us in terms of sort of like engaging with partners and sort of like moving our business.

And finally, you know, topically, there's a lot more stuff around sustainability and we're trying to build that as well into our program and give you resources that you can use and enrich your conversations with partners. So that's what i mean about funnel. There's a lot of different, you know, subject matters. We pull it all together, we put that all under the migration acceleration program.

We, we, we benchmark our customers quite regularly on some of the key things about why they should move to the cloud, whether that's about resilience, cost savings, um you know, various different like business agility and things like that. And we see like good results when our customers move to the cloud, but when they move with MAP, it is magnified so much more.

So we know that that programmatic structure is really helping our customers actually like move with confidence and realize their business outcomes. So that's really what migration acceleration program is. Is it sounds like you're all really familiar with it. I sometimes think that too much attention is on the funding because there's so many other rich resources also available for partners there. But we're evolving.

Yes, i mean, we're, we're evolving like just kind of you mentioned, it's a program, right? So there's a number of different areas that we wanna be able to evolve. Uh we wanna be able to allow us for scale and we're gonna be, is gonna be sharing next, i think, right? We'll be sharing some of the, some of the details related to that evolution.

I think this is, do you want, i will do this one? Yeah, of course. Um so obviously for, and i've been here for a while and we launched the program right in the very beginning of the last couple of months of uh um 2016 and um 2016, we had a very small number of partners. Uh you know, we wanted to sort of like expand that so we could have greater coverage and customer choice in all these different regions around the world.

And um our original model with uh the migration acceleration program is that we would provide financial resources, we'd make that available when customers were committing through PPAs, that proves like quite difficult in a way because it's like the, the customers on the edge of making a big decision and they've got to go for a project, they may not have had much experience and they were making a commitment.

So it was how we worked and it certainly grew and it grew over the first few years, we had a lot of bold customers and they were like our lighthouses happening all over the world. But really when Vanessa um sort of made the changes around MAP 2.0 that's where, you know, we really hit the um hit, hit the hit, the acceleration.

So we've been extremely fortunate in terms of like the way that partner migrations in particular have grown since we introduced in 2020. Some changes. Uh if you're not familiar with what those changes are, uh they're predominantly about the fact that we didn't just say you have to sign a PPA which is a commercial agreement over a number of years, you could also have it through credits, so we could get some financial benefits coming through credits as they migrated.

And we introduced most importantly, some partner cash elements. And that made the program really interesting to our partner community. They could have some investments up front which would help them run, assesses, help them build business cases start to sort of like build their relationships with new customers.

And then we would like, move into like the mobilized phase where again, they could use some of like, you know, the, the assets that we had and we would be financially supporting those changes. And we could see that customers were more willing to do that because we were taking away some of those initial costs in the P&L for that particular year.

And, and really what that had fueled for us and it's been like a great experience to see is that like, you know, our partners had had exceptional growth, they're expanding rapidly, they're expanding their sales teams, the delivery functions as well. We were, we were loving the fact that loads more companies were then applying for the migration competency.

I think i'm safe in saying it's the largest competency. So, yeah, so i mean, for, but, you know, again, it was a demonstration of the maturity of our partner network that they had like, you know, they, they've been validated through that experience and we were getting, you know, huge coverage around the world from that.

And, you know, if you've been through that process and you've been, you know, with us along that way, we really appreciate the steps that you've taken with us. And we've also seen like this whole area of specialization really improve. Um we've got lots of different angles and areas to get into customer accounts are sort of specialist workloads or those enterprise applications.

And we saw, you know, huge organizations really develop their skills in that area. And along likewise, we've sort of seen this expansion of ISVs bringing sort of like tooling and to help, helping to improve the process as well. So, so there's been some great things that have happened in this sort of like, you know, three years.

Um and i've got some quotes on this slide and i don't, yeah, maybe you can read all of those. Um but they're really rewarding to us to see our partners talking and giving testimony about the things that they've been able to achieve with our program.

You know, we love the fact all cloud telling us about the speed of their conversion rate. We know when you put your energies with us into your sales cycles, you put the trust that, that your customers have with you and you're taking them along this journey. We, we're really pleased that you have high conversion rates and we love it when we see that our customers are saving money by moving to us.

Uh some of the complexity on the second quote, you know, really talks about how they can use some of the assets and help them deliver with confidence. Um there's nothing that we to read more than seeing our partners growing 280% year over year. That is staggering growth and that's great for people's careers. It's great for our partners, you know, for the equity that they have in the business.

And when we get compliments from Cloud Comrade at the end about saying how you know, useful it is as a, as a, as a program in the channel. You know, we're delighted to hear that too. So we've had some really nice um feedback and you know, the culmination as as Vanessa was saying is that, that has translated into a lot of business for us combined.

And we definitely want to take this opportunity just to say, thank you, thank you for your commitment. And working with that, we saw those wave of hands of people who've done 510 plus deals and it is really appreciated.

Alright. So as I mentioned, this is an evolution. We've done thousands of migration to AWS and there's an opportunity for us one to really be able to scale. So why are we making these changes you advance to that are one of those build ones?

Yeah. So we're scaling MAP to be able to support every migration with a partner. And actually earlier this year, Mark Arm and said, make sure that we win every migration. So we're looking to each of you as part of the new program changes, we'll be able to have them two, we wanna accelerate customer success.

So our scalable proxy to be able to determine if a customer is successful is actually to be able to use revenue growth as a proxy for understanding how they migrated over. Are they realizing the innovation on AWS three, we're addressing partner feedback to help to simplify the funding approval process.

I've met with, i think like over 100 partner this year and uh receive feedback of how complex and consistent some of the changes, some of the approval processes. So we'll be addressing that as part of the 2024 changes for, we're also addressing partner feedback that you know, for, for a mobilized funding today, it actually caps and so in the future, we'll be able to, to have a mobilized funding that will be able to scale.

And then five, we're introducing strategic uh we're gonna be introducing strategic partner incentives aligned to the different strategic priorities where you are critical in being our scale, our customer uh success arm.

Oh i've gone too far. Let's rewind that. So we want to share more and more details with you. Um the first thing i would just say about this slide is uh in terms of being armed and dangerous in, in the world of uh AWS, we're trying to consolidate all of the different options that are available commercially just to one slide.

So you can, if you understand this, you can basically understand how we support on deals from like $1 up to $10 billion.

So those are like, you know, so, so it really is the lion share of our business right. And um as uh as, as Vanessa was saying, you know, we, we are really keen to preserve, assess, um what we find is that it's a really nice link from like marketing and early sales engagements as a call to action to bring people there. So we're making money available for that activity. And again, in terms of mobilizing, you know, we're retaining like our investments there and um and we're making that available for larger deals as Vanessa was uh referring to as well.

And credit is another way which is super important just for sort of like eliminating some of the costs that our customers incur early and can put them off migrating. So we're sort of making some changes there. And then as, as we've already talked about two other things, strategic incentives around modernization. We want you to really push yourselves and design highly modernized solutions for our customers. Our customers love them. The technical people in the room want to sort of persuade customers to go down that route and we want to encourage that as well.

And the other thing that we want to do is we want to find greenfield customers that, you know, it's important for us to help us grow. But we know that our partners love getting into new accounts as well and really opening those up. So we the fine and we know if they, if they, if they haven't done anything, then they need a little bit of financial support. So we're gonna be adding some more money onto that and there's also some extra incentives as well because some, some of the workloads like sap databases, they're ones we really wanna win. So we want to bring them ones over as well.

So, so we're gonna get more and more information about what the numbers are on that. This is about as far, unfortunately, as, as we're allowed to share in this forum. But effectively what i hope our partners are reading when they see this is this is aws trying to say to our customers use partners. That's what i hope that you'll see in this message, there are some options that customers can go alone. But really if they want to open up, like, you know, to get the best benefits of working for aws, they engage yourselves, that's super important for us. And i hope hopefully you'll see that on the slides.

Yeah. And really, we are over investing compared to what we have today and you are so critical to our strategy. So as an example, we want you to help us win tomorrow's customer. They're not on aws yet today. And you'll see that as we're looking across the portfolio of investments. Right earlier this year, my team helped to launch the customer engagement incentive as part of map. Now we're gonna be introducing the additional incentive for greenfield customers. So we need your support to help us win smb greenfield sb greenfield enterprise, greenfield customers. So and working very closely with our account teams to be able to do so. And even in some areas, it's amazing. We're doing a partner first approach to being able to go after these customers.

We also want to encourage modernization. Yes. So one step modernization is actually really important. And actually, um we were talking with our business, our migration business development team earlier today and you'd share actually part of our feedback is that, you know, if you do the lift and shift and the customer is gonna do the modernization next, it's actually a a second sale cycle for you. It's a longer lead time. And so what we wanna do is we wanna invest in the one step modernization. So how does the customer modernize as part of the migration? And so who here knows the six modernization pathways or who when?

Oh, there's actually a majority of you haven't heard of this. So there is six modernization pathways and there is so much more detail that our partner solution architect team can share as well. And so it's moved to cloud native, moved to containers, move to manage database, move to open source, move to manage analytics and then move to modern dev ops. And actually, as part of every single one of these path ways there are specific services so we can share all of that with you. Um and if you attend, i think there might be a session still tomorrow. Um and their sessions will be available on replays where we go deep into each of these different modernization pathways and, and it's worth saying, isn't it cos uh you know, in the background for the last few months, we've been doing all this modeling around the financials and things like that and, you know, first things first is that you guys are doing a lot of modernization already. Ok? We see that right? You can see it in the stats. Um but we do see there's like big more opportunities and we really want to encourage our customers to think, ok, i could get some extra access to some financial support to make those changes now. So we want to encourage them to be thinking, you know, like immediately about making those changes and there's definitely areas moved to manage database. That's probably the one of the strongest ones, open source. We can do a lot more there, right? And we really want to encourage you to be doing a lot more there, there's a lot of windows stuff that comes over and we'd love to see a little bit more open source there where our customers can save some money.

So as i mentioned, we've done thousands of migrations to aws and this is why customers migrate, you know, during some of them, the macroeconomic headwinds that we had um customers are still focused on cost savings and that is a huge driver for them to be able to move to the to the aws cloud. But there's a number of different other areas and specifically wanted to focus on a im and ml. So if you advance next, i mean, in every single keynote today, everything is around generative a i. And so, so yeah, and so one of the things we know is that generative a i is gonna be able to transform industries. And i understand like as an example on adam's keynote when he highlighted amazon q i was like for a customer to be able to say, hey, what's my migration strategy like, you know, am i going to to modernize, like which services? I think that's gonna help actually, probably both the delivery timeline for you. So you're able to have more and more projects. And so i think it's gonna be a game changer for us and we're gonna be building the moderni or gen a i into the modernization pathways. So we'll be sharing more details related to that. Um and then we'll help to keep you informed with us as we continue through the, the gen a i journey.

Ok. So we talked earlier when we were talking about the flywheel about um you know, behind it, there are like thousands of techniques and decisions and uh you know, time and effort that is sort of like employed by partners to really make themselves stand out. So what i thought i'd do is i'd sort of try and consolidate some of my observations and sort of share those with you. And i've sort of like taken a few different themes. So i just um just kicking off uh with differentiation.

So um part of our program is that we want to help our partners get leads, right? We sometimes say that we're not doing enough of that. It's a part of our business that we definitely do. And if, if, if you want to talk to me about that a bit more, more than happy, we run loads of campaigns concurrently for our partners. And that does give us an ability to sort of like look across quite a large volume of partners. And, um, you know, we build out digital ebooks, we put um uh sort of like uh videos together. Uh we help with first call decks, we kind of create a huge amount of templated material and i read a lot of that and, you know, and i see quite a range, probably too broad a range where you see some stuff which i think is absolutely brilliant. You know, it's extremely well written. It's like, you know, really engaging content. It uses data really well, it's thought provoking. It's, it's something that you can see a huge amount of thought has been put together and obviously that translates to the quality of reactions and responses that customers get on the other side of the scale. I look at some other stuff. And i think this is very me too.

So i think what i see within some partners that they've really put that effort in and it was a little bit my lucky golfer, uh, talk, uh talking about that earlier is that, you know, it pays off, right? Because then when we run these campaigns, you know, we, we are generating like often hundreds and hundreds of leads for our partners and, and the quality of those comes back to what is put in. So my message is there is like, be really introspective about what it is in particular has been, you know, you know, incredibly valuable about your stories that you've done successfully in the past. And so like, and, and sometimes that not, that's not easy, right? If you live in, you know, if you work in very large partner organizations, maybe there's an offshore delivery center, it's not often easy to understand some of like the precise challenges that some people have faced, but sort of like actually cycling that data and bringing those stories back into the marketing is like hugely valuable.

The, the second thing that we see um is about the superpower. So uh this is a sort of like quite difficult conversation sometimes because it, it never feels comfortable to be put in a pigeon hole, right? That's, that's like, that feels like something, you know, it's like we, we would impose and, and that's, that's certainly not the, like the culture of what you have as a business. But what we do see is that those partners that are, that are very clear about what they are good at and then, then build like, you know, a whole load of content and justification around that are really similar successful, particularly it's sort of like getting leads from us as a business.

You know, what, what i would say, like our map program, we have a lot of data, we look at a lot of data and actually the balance of trade is a really important metric for us in terms of how much is coming in and how much is going out. And what we see is actually, it's, it's parity within our business. So like, you know, by and large, the same volume of deals come one way as go out the other way. But it's not parity for every partner involved in the program. Some are hugely net benefit fisheries and some of those are not getting enough back from us. And what i see often is the ones that have got like very clear identity around their superpowers that are attracting the most uh deals.

They, they are excellent when it comes to designing a solution. Like when i listen to a partner describing how they're going to build an sap environment on aws. And they've got huge depth of knowledge about how they're going to design that it comes across really compelling. And sometimes i'm in a situation, i've seen multiple partners bidding and that they don't have that specialization and it just doesn't come across as strong. So, you know, i think that is so important in our business. Hopefully you're taking it the right way. But you know, what we want to be, really encourage you is like to build out all those different competencies and superpowers in your business. And of course, back to our flywheel really align that to your go to market strategies and bring those stories out into the full. That's what i would definitely encourage from um a differentiation perspective.

The other thing in terms of just like being like really successful. And again, we see a lot of custom, a lot of our partners that want to go big with us in terms of uh you know, transforming themselves as a partner organization, maybe they come from telco or something like that, which is not naturally associated uh with cloud. That means a big change for their selling community. Uh it needs dedicated sellers, it really needs executive commitment from the very, very top. And so training, you know, the the, you know, sales, i was a salesperson for most of my career and you know, we live off confidence, right? And some of us, we get our confidence by being trained and feeling really comfortable about what we're gonna say.

So, you know, that cannot be overlooked, the importance of having like really highly qualified people are familiar and sort of understand like some of the programmatic aspects that i was referring earlier and it also helps if their compensation is aligned. And that also can involve quite a bit of change. You know, we talked to earlier about aws and about how we use our funding mechanisms. Some organizations, they're not necessarily able to pay commission to a seller because the money has come in from aws rather than from the customer themselves. So there's these little things that they have to get right in order to get a team of people highly motivated. And like what we see is like all of these attributes is what they're building up these lucky golfers. They're just like they're addressing all of these points and making sure that they're effective in the sales cycle.

Yeah, i do have a question

How many here are Migration Ambassadors? You can actually go into, if you don't know, you can go into the AWS Skill Builder, you'll get an accreditation that's called a Migration Ambassador, it's Migration Ambassador 2023. And what I hear that's effective too is like the VP of Sales will say every single person in my organization, every sales person needs to become a Migration Ambassador. So if you're not aware of that AWS Skill Builder, Migrate Ambassador, that's one great way to actually help build that.

So yeah, and if I can praise Vanessa here on this one, right? Like I think it was last year, Vanessa took a goal for someone like in her team to get 10,000 people through the Sales Ambassador to really encourage our partners to adopt that. I think we ended the year like 15,000. It was incredible how many people took it up and like, again, we really appreciate the investment people make in putting that that time together.

Um I've got a few more. Um got like loads of stories. Sales effectiveness. Now my first point here about cohesion and speed so I, I can sort of flush this out with um you know, a short anecdote, but we realize that, you know, a, a partners organization is consistent. You know, we talked about this a little bit about where you all came from and there was like a really good spread. We had like leadership people in the room, we had people from sales presales delivery, a real range of people and in an engagement with a customer, all of those different actors come onto the stage, there's lots of different handoffs and in piece of people being involved. And what we know is that when that works well, when there is cohesion amongst all those people, things can fly.

And I saw this with one of our partners where they started with a cold call and I think they had the call on the thursday, something like that. And this was the first time new account never met them before. And they go into that call and they've got a clear idea of where they want to take the conversation. Ok. So they're prepped in advance. And what they want to do is they want to get that call to action, to use our assess funding to get some of their consultants, their brilliant consultants in that account, running discovery in that customer.

So this customer, I think it was in financial services had about four data sensors. It was fairly big, uh big opportunity, but they had never worked with them before. So by the following week, they'd asked us for some money, we'd approved the money. Those people started on the ground, right? So that quick five days they're in there, they've gone from never speaking to this customer. So signing off an engagement and getting working are partners like that.

The second thing is that partners love is they don't like people leaving projects, right? You know, if, if you're managing teams and you've got to sort of like manage those resources, the last thing want to do is like not have the next piece of work lined up. So this same situation, same customer inside four weeks, they'd done the entire assessment quite a big estate. As I said, four different data centers, they'd run that customers engaged customers like interested in more, you know, they were backing up all their discussions and solution designs with data and they were designing like, you know, how they could move on to aws. They went straight, they, their feet never left the ground. They went straight to mobilize and they ran that for a few more months. I think about six or seven months later, all four data centers running on aws. And you just see how much, how many different people in that partner organization have to work there. You have to have the finance people approving it. You had to have like the delivery people comfortable about the risk being involved. You had to have the presales, people know what to do. You've got to, the sales people have got to be clear about that.

So that's what I say, cohesion is speed and it is so important and I really encourage that and like, you know, think reflect to yourselves about your organizations and whether you've, you know, got everybody sort of like in the same direction that has helped enormously with centers of excellence, we see, you know, like, like i say, you know, i talked earlier about when we're, when we're investing in deals that sometimes they just come in and they are perfect, perfect requests that doesn't happen by accident, right? You know, the stakeholders have been briefed, the documents that they have to submit are absolutely aligned. They've sent stuff through ace. There is quite a bit of coordinator for us to sort of like make that happen. And there are people in your organizations that are working on that and getting it absolutely. right. And it does make a massive difference.

Um call to action. CTA I think I talked about that already, but you can sort of see how that flows. right. And having the sellers being able to sort of like, take a conversation in a particular way and then triggering a question, make a customer, make a decision. Do you want to do this exercise with us?

And the other thing that I really like is um i, i kind of alluded to it a little bit points of entry. There's like nine major areas that we've got, which we would say are different points of entry. We've got the enterprise applications and we've got specialists. I'm sure in the room around sap microsoft uh oracle and one more. And uh we've got, we've got 55 workload specializations again, which can be mainframe can be connect there end user computing. So having like, you know, different angles in which you can sort of like try and approach a customer. they, these nine are the ones that are in our experience the most effective and it ties back to the differentiation, right? Like you should actually have a differentiated practice working not just with the migration competency, but all of those different workload competencies, you know, industry competencies.

Some of the other things i love, i mean, i love spending time seeing our partners in front of customers. It's like like a real joy for me. And um and you just see how customers lean in when the content and the stories are there, people wanna know, how do you move an extra data database onto aws a thorny question like that? And when you've got somebody in the room who has done that story and brings that all to life and sort of like, has that authenticity has that, um you know, the scars from those exercises. Again, i'm not underestimating that is not easy to do to bring those stories from large organizations directly in front of customers. But it does make a big, big difference.

And the other one that i like, and i've seen this with partners as well is sometimes they'll say like here's your rfp, you've gotta do this, you've gotta move this environment onto aws, you know, and then there'll be a number of people bidding and, and some of our partners that like go beyond that. And i think that's really impressive. They'll say like, ok, i can tell you here's your answer to the question, but here's our thoughts about what you could do now that your data's on the platform and they start talking a story about, you know, what the customer's priorities are. They'll do some research on the customer and then they'll sort of say, yeah, and then you could use this to then integrate that to improve your customer experience, for instance, in call centers and things like that. So they go beyond the exam question. And i think i touched on this a little bit when i talked about that sort of sap example earlier about the art of solution. It is just such a skill for those of you that are in the room. I take my hats off to you in terms of like designing really compelling solutions. Anticipating the sorts of questions that customers have, giving them different options and talking about, you know, how they can sort of like move to aws. It it, to me it is like often the crunch thing in terms of winning business is having that absolute rapport with a customer and, and i, i just don't think you can understate that.

And, and the, the last point on this one, i don't know how many more i've got. Um but empowering customers is my last point. And um this is one of the things as well that i can see the reaction of customers when partners behave in a certain way. And uh what i mean by that is uh customers, they wanna come on this journey for the cloud. I a few i see want it all done for them. Like most people want to see this as an opportunity for them to develop their own career and develop their own sets of skills as well. So what they, what so so our partners that like adopt this stance where they say, look, we want to help you do this, we want to sort of like be able to leave you and be able to sort of like complete this. We want to sort of like empower you to do that. I notice that really gets the right traction. That's my observation with certain types of customers.

So finally, program expertise, um we thought i did actually have this written down embassador batch. Yeah, it's a big plug. Um the relationship between your sellers and our sellers can make the difference. And uh when they're talking in a common language and they are clear between each other that is really effective and the technique to simply just like, you know, get some education about the program, understand how the commercial constructs work in particular to be able to sort of like speak about that confidently from the sales perspective and engage with our account teams. There's probably a lot of partners in the room that think we know more than aws often about the program. And that is definitely true. But the technique to do it is often through things like the ambassador's badge and i'd really encourage that as well.

And yy, you know, we only gave you a little bit of an insight into what the new commercial model looks like. But you can see there's lots of different angles there, there's lots of different levers. Uh it does pay to really get, you know, to be un understand that well. And we do make quite a lot of changes you know, we do introduce things quite regularly and just being familiar with those program updates, uh, vanessa's team, run a lot of partner casts and they are really helpful ways of just being able to either do it on demand or, or live to sort of like, you know, to, to understand what's changing in the program.

So, you know, we, we, we're really encouraging, hopefully to, to sort of use the incentives that we've got, i feel like i've talked too much you want. So if you wanna hear me again, actually, um we'll be hosting a number of partner webinars um over the next, well over the next couple of weeks and then over the next several months, really to talk about the evolution of the program again, in terms of how we're simplifying and improving the partner experience, how we're changing some of our investments to really help a scale. So i'm hoping you're gonna join me um where i can share more details than i could share today in terms of what some of the changes are. And that'll be starting uh december 4th december 5th, 11th and 12th.

Um if you don't have, um you can reach out to your partner development manager, um and you can reach out to nick and i, and we can share the additional details. Secondly, there's also gonna be training that's available as part of aws partner funding portal partner central. And so we know that it's critical to really help um create speed and help improve the deal velocity. So again, as part of the program changes that we're going to make, we're gonna be making some significant changes to a pfp for the aws partner funding portal so that you'll be able to help improve the deal velocity. So there'll be more training related to that as well.

And then if you're still not tired of us, uh please join us in the future road shows. So we'll be doing a number of road shows. We're starting in north america, we'll do road shows and a, a um latam as well as a pj. So, and um um we have our partner migration program leads, we have our migration partner solution attacks that will be in every go. I'm hosting these different road shows.

And then lastly, um really the source of truth for everything related to the programs is in the program guide. And so i don't know, has everyone seen a preview or not seen some of the changes that have come through within partner central? There's a whole new user experience to be able to, you know, review content, be enabled in partner central. I hope you're as excited as we were to be able to launch that. And so the program guide when we as part of next year, please make sure that's kind of your source of truth um to be able to help understand all of the different incentives and investments that we have and with that awesome, we finished a little bit early.

Yeah, thank you again. Thank you everyone. Thank you for joining us today.