Scale your software company with AWS growth programs

My name is Jeff Klaus. I am responsible for global ISV strategy. I've got a cast of characters to come up and reinforce the programs that we're going to discuss. My role here is to ensure that we have from end to end a more appropriate environment for software companies. That's my role. It spans from ensuring that we have account manager coverage that's appropriate, how are we reinforcing the engagement and commission incentive programs for this team all the way to programs and capabilities from a product perspective and also from a go to market perspective.

We have learned from IDC in particular that US customers are very interested in the technology, but equally as important are the go to market capabilities and resources there. So that's what this session is going to focus on - go to market and activities that we have for you to take advantage of.

It's a little bit murky going forward. We have a challenging environment. We're not sure from an interest rate perspective what's happening. We've got some unstable environments in parts of the country. So what typically happens when you see fog up ahead is just slow down, right? You're not sure what's around that corner. You slow down to kind of make sure that it's safe and you might be a little more conservative.

So we're going to show you a couple of options and I know you're gonna see a ton of sessions this past few days, but I want you to leave with two specific things - take two from this session to talk to your account team. And if you don't have an account team or appropriate coverage, then you're gonna reach out to us on LinkedIn and find the appropriate person in order to get connected to these services.

So in a murky environment, we're going to show you something that's a bit more conservative, a little closer to the front and then we'll have another set of options that are a little further down the road that might be a little more investment, but it's based on your risk tolerance. So we'll capture these and put them in perspective based on very simple terms.

We're gonna talk about, you know, sell more of what you have, how can you do that? How can we help you to sell something new? And then we'll talk at the end about selling in a new geography. You can kind of see the continuum and the risk tolerance as we get towards the end. So that's what we're gonna focus on.

So the first piece is selling more of what you have and you know, don't take it from us, but take it from a Forrester economic study looking at the capabilities of one of our foundational elements for go to market - and it's AWS Marketplace.

Foundation - we think that this should be a part of your go to market strategy. It's an additional channel for you to consider on your path to go to market. And I know it's not "if you build it, they will come". That's not what happens here. It's a set of challenges in order to get into and get set up with Marketplace, but it is the foundation that you can build upon.

And we've had customers repeatedly tell us that this is an area and in particular, we'll talk about a specific customer example of how you've used Marketplace. It doesn't always have to be a SaaS solution. You don't think of Marketplace as an area where you just click and download something. There are a number of paths that you can take by using this as a foundation.

It is a simple one. It is very low cost. It's at the front. When you're looking at that fog, it's closer to your comfort level because it's easy. So Marketplace, we're talking about transforming customers using this as a strategic channel and not necessarily ensuring that it has to be SaaS.

We have customers that are selling hardware that accompanies a software solution on Marketplace. And there are paths to introducing combinations of customers through the engagements that Marketplace brings. So we see that this accelerates deals because you've got a fully vetted and listed solution that's available for you to research.

It can certainly scale not only within a small transactional environment, but it can also scale into new geographies that the Marketplace team takes care of the entity requirements and other geographies. It also takes care of currencies and the challenges you might have there. So it abstracts the complexity of being in multiple markets in order to have that foundational sell.

Coal is an important piece of that also. And when you're aligning a sales team to target a certain persona and a certain target market, Marketplace can be a reinforcement path in order to have that transaction go through.

Significant amount of customers - you're not alone there. There are a significant amount of customers that are going to Marketplace to see what's there. It's displayed by categories and there's also a set of competitive vendors that are there as well. So you're not alone. And that's why I think it's important as a foundational element to your go to market strategy.

I'm gonna give a quick example of a company called W&A. They were looking for a solution that was kind of using their data more in a more logical way to log in and generate data insights. And they turned to Sumo Logic as the starting point. But they also determined based on the engagement with Sumo that FiveTran was also going to be an important ingredient customer there.

So they looked at this kind of private offer and had a conversation after discovering and being aware of what Sumo Logic can do for them. And then Sumo was able to bring in these insights that could be provided from FiveTran. And this is an example of a private offer that's not, you know, the typical view that you see when you look at Marketplace as being just a download and transactional element. It's a lot of additional introductions occur as a starting point for what Marketplace can provide.

Don't take my word for it. I'm going to bring on a customer who's been in Marketplace, been in that environment and I wanted to introduce Kenta from SODA to come and talk about his personal experiences there.

Hello everyone, I'm Kenta, CTO and Co-founder of company SODA. Let me talk a little bit about what we do. We offer a smart connectivity platform for IoT. We have been offering LTE, 4G, 5G radio for IoT devices to get connected to cloud. We have covered more than 160 countries worldwide. We also have LPWAN and satellite connections so that we can cover everywhere. And our vision is to connect everything, everyone from everywhere so we can achieve a truly connected world together with our customers and partners.

When it comes to customers, we have more than 20,000 customers worldwide. Our customers are virtually in all the verticals including oil and gas, smart agriculture, EV charging, asset tracking, trucking, and so on and so on.

What makes us unique is that we have built everything on top of AWS. We have implemented software network elements that are needed for running cellular IoT core on top of AWS. What does it mean from customers’ perspective, from customers’ IoT device point of view? When they connect to local cell tower, let's say AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, their cell tower, the next hop is already AWS because we have integrated with our carrier partners.

The devices can talk to AWS endpoint without going through the public internet. The devices can use our eSIM or eUICC as an authentication token to authenticate to AWS endpoints and call API. If you are running your IoT backend in AWS VPC, we can also create a bunch of private gateways that has VPC peering link to your VPC, so that we can create a secure isolated environment for your devices and your servers. So in a way, it's a hardwired AWS direct connect for cellular.

So it's highly appreciated by our enterprise customers. Building everything on top of AWS has also helped ourselves. When we started back in 2015, we were a startup and we couldn't actually have funding for starting an MVNO business. Nobody, if you are trying to start an MVNO business, you would have to have a large upfront cost to start the business.

But since we implemented everything on AWS as software, and we have applied all the AWS best practices and using AWS services such as ECS, Amazon MQ, DynamoDB and so on, we could start from small and then grow as a global IoT player as of today.

Although I mentioned those technical benefits of using AWS, it's not only that - the support that we get from AWS for business growth has been tremendous, especially when it comes to expanding our business globally.

Our AWS relationships has helped. Let me give you a few examples - we have been in touch with global IoT business development team in AWS, not only in Japan, but also in the US and Europe. We have been having closer relationship and whenever they have a customer who is looking for secure way to connect their remote devices to AWS cloud, we get a lead and opportunities and we work together.

Whenever we post an opportunity to ACE, that's AWS's opportunity management portal, the account team gets reached out to us and we jointly serve the customer. That has enabled us to provide the best customer support and customer care for our joint customers.

And also another thing I'd like to mention in this context is AWS Marketplace - we've been using AWS Marketplace and we have listed our smart connectivity offerings there. And as you can imagine, in order to use our service, you would have to get a SIM or eUICC to connect your devices to the network.

So it's not pure SaaS, although most of our service offerings are based on SaaS condition and business model. But still, the AWS Marketplace has a very flexible model. We could actually register our service credit as a way to wait for our customers to purchase and then they can apply that service credit to our usage.

So the customers can order SIMs or eSIMs separately from our Amazon.com shopping site or our direct website and then apply the service credit that you get from the AWS Marketplace.

It also helps uh not only helping the customers know about us whenever they need a solution to connect secure device devices, security to aws. They also, it also helps the aws account team to find our solution when they need to uh support their customers for connectivity. So it has been helping uh both us and customers and also uh the aws account team to build the right solution for customers iot journey.

And also the edibles marketplace allows flexible custom pricing offering as well. So it's not only for self service customers, you can also create a private offering for large opportunities that helps us to create a catered uh offerings to our customers, enterprise customers as well.

So to summarize my points, uh the aws has helped both from technical and business perspectives for us to grow without their support for both business and technical aspects. We couldn't uh get started as a uh a player in iot and uh glow as a global iot player as of today. So we have really appreciated the support from aws and uh partnership network. Thank you. That's it for my super. Thank you, ken.

So good example of a customer that has hardware coupled with software using marketplace successfully also looking to go outside of their own market in japan into other markets. Uh with this as a foundation.

Ok. The next path that we want to talk about is um selling something new. Now, this is uh aaa bit more uh harvesting of what you currently have on this program. Um this program is something that's been around for just about a year or so. And I wanted to start off with a couple of quotes from customers that have uh gone through this and i'm gonna relate this back to uh my brother-in-law who's a struggling actor in uh in los angeles. And one of the things he always says is that nobody ever rejects you face to face. You know, they basically say, hey, don't call us, we'll call you or we'll get back to you. And that typically doesn't happen as well when we have customers giving us feedback on a program.

Um we have some, certainly some bold, bold customers that all give us direct feedback immediately. But most of the time it goes through the account manager with this program, in particular, some of the quotes from customers have been, you're blowing us away. So we've achieved more uh in this past session for weeks than we've had in a couple of years. Um is, is the one that also with a start up having a big brother here is certainly uh an ad, an advisory type role that we'd like to, to see. So the trust is built with the account manager.

There have been some programs that we want to um to bring in and you, you've, you've got to deliver on the capabilities. This program is called the road map acceleration program. This is essentially looking at what you're currently doing as a company and where do you want to go and how can we connect those dots? It is part of a growth strategy.

The individuals that are working in this program are not on a plan, so to speak, to sell you something. They are people um who i'm going to bring up jeffrey hammond who has broken some eggs before when he made, he made his omelet. He's made some mistakes as an ex kind of cpo like individual who we can learn from.

Ok. These are people with a lot of experience and jeffrey's looking to expand his group of facilitators globally. It's already expanded, but we're continuing it because of the demand we've had for this solution. Essentially what this does is that it gets a small team of decision makers with the company and, and he conducts a, a 90 minute discovery session.

Um when you have a, a broad perspective of many types of either traditional non s a software companies or uh the uh board in the cloud sass uh environment uh companies. You can have aaa solid perspective to be able to look at the various trajectories and paths that those customers are going on and have a strong tool chest of comparable capabilities from those uh from those organizations.

Certainly the rule of 40 is something that, that has been discussed broadly, which essentially says that uh that that growth, pleasure profit margin for start ups should be over 40% growth rate plus profit margin is the kind of rule to guide new projects by. But this session starts off with a very clean discovery session we have uh there's an inter interlock that happens there. Then there's some, some kind of homework that the team does in order to come back with a set of recommendations in this bubble chart that looks at here are your conservative options that will cost less as a uh as a set of solution paths to go down. And here are the relative size of them. And then here's another set of options that might be more risky, but they could be larger opportunities. And there's a lot of variables in between.

So it is a uh a longer road type of uh solution. It's a relatively low process oriented um path, but it starts with that. And i think we, we continue along that journey with a customer and, and continue to follow up as, as this um as this continues and gets delivered.

So the customer at the end of the session gets their, their report with a set of recommended actions. We've had uh customers actually bring this to their, to their board, uh bring it to a set of uh founders or advisors. Uh so it can be used in multiple fashions to, in some cases reinforce what the management team has already been. Uh speaking about to, to the advisers or to potentially go off into a new trajectory.

So that is the road map acceleration program, a couple of additional quotes from uh from customers. So it's getting this external view, you know, we see and talk to a lot uh many software companies globally. And by category, we are deeply invested in trying to look at our business by categories and by industries so that we can get ma general ah set of knowledge by uh categories like infrastructure biz apps and verticals. But then we can get deeper within those subcategories to be uh more of an expert advisory type ah role that we would provide to you.

So we're looking at this uh from a consultant uh perspective. And rather than me talking about, i want to have jeffrey come up and give you some specific examples.

So jeffrey, thanks, good morning. Uh so, so it's been fun over the past 18 months. Uh putting together the wrap program, i want to go into a little bit of details about why we've done that. But first of all, uh interesting little fact, uh something i didn't necessarily know when i uh joined amazon, but uh it kind of makes sense if you think about how large of an organ is. Uh we are uh there are hundreds uh multiple hundreds of employees at amazon that at one point in their career were either a cpo or a vp of product, a product decision maker who have been in the shoes of the folks that are thinking about what uh bets you wanna place when you're creating new products. And so one of the things we wanna try to do is harness those people and, and, and make it possible for them to be a resource for our isv and our dnb customers. But it's not as easy as it sounds.

And one of the things we do regularly is we have uh sessions where we listen to product decision makers, uh things like the cpo forums that we run so that we can understand the challenges that they face so we can figure out how we're going to work backward from those and, and help with those challenges.

Um it was at a cpo forum um right after i joined that, i heard one cpo express this problem. And what he said was, you know, at aws, you guys have really built a set of services for builders and it's great, but it's challenging for us, for me, it's like walking into the lego store and i see hundreds or thousands of different legos and there are no instruction sets. Ok? I know what i want to build. So help me figure out what i'm going to build. And so the rap roadmap acceleration program is an attempt to help create the instruction sets on a customer by customer basis for our product decision makers to help them put the lego blocks together in the ways that are going to drive growth. That's the problem we're trying to solve.

So how do we do that? First of all, very low ceremony, all you have to do if you're interested in a rap session is tell your, am that you'd like to do that and they get in touch with us. We get on the horn and we can schedule something in as little as two weeks. We don't take a lot of time. We ask for about two hours worth of total time commitment from your product decision makers, whether it's a cpo uh vp of product, we've even done one with the chief architect, uh or even a director of, of a product. Uh at some of our larger isv customers, we take 90 minutes of that time and we run through our structured discovery technique where we look at what your innovation priorities are, what your priorities are for top line growth, any priorities that you have to deliver your products faster and challenges that you're investing in to improve your operational excellence?

Now, why do we do that because of the external conditions that you're trying to create products for your relative priority and focus on those different areas may be changing as an example. When we first started 18 months ago, you talk about the rule of 40 it was growth, growth, growth. So topics like geographic expansion, going up, market, mergers and acquisitions, adding additional products were things that were very much top of mind for our product decision makers. But what did we see toward the end of last year? A little bit of a shift because of the change in marking conditions and the fact that cash wasn't free anymore.

So i think about the first wrap session i did this year in 2023 with one of our customers. Number one priority for the cpo. I got to take 15% out of my cost of goods sold this year operational excellence. And so we had to figure out ways that we could put together the lego blocks here at aws to meet the priority of that cpo. But then again, in april, something really, really changed. And it felt like every single conversation that we were having were about how are we going to build new products that allow us to take advantage of generative a i as a technology?

So the conversation shifted again and became around conversations like uh rag based opportunities and natural language generation of queries for data that folks were supporting or to uh drive on boarding. And so connecting to lego blocks like pace labs or the generative a i innovation center uh became uh really important.

And now even even now, it seems like we're starting to see the early signs of green shoots and shifting back uh to some of those new product growth and expansion types of drivers. So that's what we capture in that 90 minute structured conversation.

Then we take it and we analyze it and we build the bubble chart which is customized and we come back in a couple of weeks. Uh to that team and present our findings. Anybody here ever played planning poker in the agile world? If you have, you'll know that it's not so much about the estimates that the developers put out there. It's in the discussion behind why they chose the particular value that they did. That provides the most results because it allows them to compare their mental models over estimation and get a better understanding of exactly the task at hand.

That's what the bubble chart does. It provides a model. It's a very lightweight way to begin the discussion point about how we can help move your priorities forward. And then based on that, our account teams and our customer success representatives, our sass all have a common model that they can use to support the product decision maker.

As i said, we've been doing this for about 18 months

we've done about 100 sessions across dn bs and isvs so far and we've seen some, some really great results. uh we're seeing uh folks that are starting to renew uh the rap sessions doing them again for the second year. uh and it's uh it's led to uh informing uh strategic collaboration agreements um helping folks understand what programs are the best to take advantage of and connecting those dots.

so even though we don't have the printed instruction sets to build everything that you want at any time, we do have the customized ability to help you realize what you're trying to do with new product development. so if you're interested, talk to your rep, tell them you're interested in wrap session and we'll get you on the list. that's it. awesome. thank you jeffrey.

so, is anyone surprised that we have this program? is, is this shocking to anyone? that's not? yeah, i mean, it's not something you would think that it comes from an infrastructure company and it is additive and consultative, very high value that um we're excited about and so much so because of the feedback, i mean, it's a continual loop.

our responsibility is to ensure that we provide end to end value added capabilities for software companies. we've heard the feedback. so we're adding more facilitators in multiple markets to be able to run the session. and it's complimentary, it's a complimentary session. we are successful if you're successful. so this is looking at customer outcomes and trying to help you navigate the building blocks and our services in order to achieve those outcomes. that's the design of this program.

so when i said marketplace and then a little more conservative, it's still pretty conservative. like we're not, we're not uh uh going into fifth gear around the curve in the fog yet because these are just the, the only cost you have is your time an opportunity cost and you, there's certainly some significant individuals at your company that have to spend time with jeffrey and his team in order to uh in order to evaluate this. but we believe that it's been valuable and hopefully you can join that uh that group.

so the last thing i'm going to talk about is selling into a new geography. very excited about this program. we are essentially launching it here in a, in a broader way than we have before. we had a pilot operating and had some really good feedback and you'll hear from a customer who's going through that uh soon. but what we're gonna talk about here is just global growth in general and how challenging that can be depending on the size of the company.

we've observed that, you know, if you're, if you're a large organization, you're well funded, you can certainly get a, a deloitte or a uh a uh a consultant to kind of help you manage this, even some portfolio companies with their, you know, private equity firms, they may have a division of the company that specializes in this because it's complex. i mean, there are a lot of major decisions that need to be made, we believe based on feedback from, from you and from customers that, that this is an area that is of interest and that you want help with navigating. so we're trying to build that muscle memory in order to uh in order to advise and to put a more uh a more strategic and step by step kind of path to consider here when this occurs.

you know, i've talked to customers that have gone global. sometimes they go to the middle east because, you know, they had a family member there or they have gone to another um uh environment. i know a company from the uk going into the us just because they had a customer that called them. and all right now we're global, we're in the us. so, one of the paths here is to just take a step back and say, is this the right strategic vision for my company and make sure that it's um a part of that, that bigger landscape.

we're also um seeing challenges with uh the regulatory markets. you know, we have individuals that are focused on the european market to ensure that we're aware of the rapidly changing rules that occur. when someone wants to go into, into uh that, that market in particular, then you've got changing client demands that uh that we've talked about. but i think the regulatory pieces is one that really is challenging for, for a company that might not have the, the uh the funding or liquidity to be able to just hire groups of consultants in order to do this. you know, let us, you know, try to be that, that advisor on this path.

so we've divided passport up into four strategic areas. i'm gonna talk about each one of them is strategic evaluation. make sure that we understand the path and the steps. what are the security and compliance capabilities here. and then operationally when you land, what are the potential uh land mines to be aware of and how uh can you navigate those? and then also we'd love to be able to put a pipeline of customers together. wouldn't that be nice? you land in a new market? you've got a pipeline of customers to be able to take advantage of when you, when you land that makes the ro i and the acceleration that much uh easier. and that's the design of this program, those are the four components.

so the first one, strategic evaluation at the moment, we've partnered with a company that just does this and it's not a large consultant, it's a midrange consultant, but they have offices in um multiple countries around the world and they essentially come in and say, ok, what's the nature of this? what they have a aaa pattern of questions that they go through and why are you looking to go into this particular market in particular? what do you have to be aware of from a competitive analysis perspective when you land, what about a location strategy? do you need to have people? can you um have a remote environment? what kind of products do you have that require local service? and then they get more into marketing strategy and sales planning and then you know who are going to be if it gets to that point, what is the path and the timetable for strategic hires in order to, um, in order to make that, that move a reality, they put a plan together. it's something that you can take or leave. it's an advisory plan based on doing this multiple times with many countries and not just em, or, or europe into the us. they're in multiple, ah, like i said, multiple offices and they handle, you know, inter a pj or a pe c movements in addition to, um movements uh within, within uh within the european environment as well. so that is the um the initial stage to, to set the tone there.

the next one is security and compliance. and this is a team that actually resides within our uh within our um advisory group within, within aws, but they've actually formed a separate entity and they are uh within the pros serve umbrella but formed a separate entity so that they could give advice and not have, you know, the legal implications of, of the advice. so it's called security assured services. this team, they are stocked with individuals that have worked with us government. in the past. they have a number of certifications with regard to going to certain markets that are regulated. and then they also have a strong familiarity of aws services so that they can also connect the dots, get the fed ramp compliance. understand, you know, h ip a if you're going into uh and if you're going into the medical environment and they advise based on your existing solution. is it ready or what would you need in order to go into this new market based on the type of customer that you're targeting and based on the type of business that you are? ok. pro business, we set that group up and they have a strong set of recommendations based on their knowledge.

the next one is, is operational. these are not the obvious considerations when you're going to a new market. but what do you have to consider when you're going into germany leasing office space? is there an alternative? is there a an agent? i know i can't re recall the name now, but there are certain, it's kind of like a wework type space. but is that a path that you want to consider? do you even need to have um someone in that market? so the thi this type of um of of challenges or considerations by market um will continue to build based on the markets of the customers that are, that are in the program in order to have kind of, here's your consideration list to, to um to review before going in that into that space. so we're also looking at trying to provide a co working space with um with the kind of start up groups that we, that we work with. and then there are also considerations around hr guidelines like what do you have to consider when you hire someone in this market? what are the specific rules there that might be different from where you're from? ok. otherwise you'd be hiring, getting advisers in order to, to, to look at this. we're, we're, we're building this um this capability in house.

and then the last piece around the passport program is building that pipeline and this is uh to some particularly in go to market. probably the most important element is, you know, we have a partner team that's focused on trying to take your solutions and target the most appropriate customers in order to build your pipeline when you land. but then we also have communities where we can essentially be a aaa co cell partner with you in order to promote to make aware of the solution, open doors for a solution to go into a certain target market. you've got to close that sale, but having a partner there to be able to ah provide a set of capabilities that lay some groundwork for ah a pipeline is, is where we're we're starting, we use marketplace as the foundational element as well. but there are other communities that we introduce, you know, the these uh customers to.

so we've gone through this or or are continuing to go through this with a set of pilot customers. getting exceptional early feedback. i wanted to bring up uh one of those uh pilot customers. um keith pick from build kite exceptional story. i want to bring up keith to talk about uh what he's doing with, with passport.

uh good everyone. i hope you're having a good re invent uh so far. uh i'm keith, i'm the ceo and founder of bill kite. i am from australia. uh if you haven't tell by my accent, uh i live amongst the kangaroos and the kookaburras in the outback um from perth. uh if you know where that is, i think that's pretty much, i think it's closer to tatooine in the star wars galaxy than it is any other major city in the world. uh and the time zone in perth is 1995. uh so that's where i'm from.

um billy is a build and test and automation platform. we sort of do c i cd. um we've uh had some great success in the enterprise and i can almost guarantee at least five of the apps on your phone have been built with bill kite if you've ever ordered a cheeky burrito, uh off one of the food delivery apps we probably built and tested that if you've ever swiped left or swiped right, to find some love. we probably helped with that too. and if you've ever used uh any sort of instant communication at your work, we may have been involved with that too. uh also the world's biggest a i companies we help out there uh as well.

uh bill cod's founding story is a little interesting. i'm an engineer, i'm a programmer by trade. i've always been a programmer ever since i was a kid, very interested in programming. and uh i was working for a company uh that had a um on premise uh sorry, a cloud based c i cd tool. and the security team said no more of that, you can't use the cloud based c i anymore. uh because we were doing continuous deployment, which meant that if you wanted to do continuous deployment from a cloud based c i cd tool, you had to sort of hand over your production credentials and secrets to a third party and security were like, no more of that. bring c i in house, put it on this box in the corner of the office. uh and i was like, yeah, i could do that and i'd used all the self hosted cis before i'd used them all

I won't mention them here, but, you know, the ones, uh there's a few butlers logos for them. Uh and I just couldn't be bothered setting them up again. And as most engineers do they think, you know what? I could probably do a better job. Uh so I tried to build my own t i over a weekend thinking that I could just bang something out and it would be awesome.

Um I'm still working on it 10 years later but it's, it's getting good. It's much better now. Uh and so, you know, i, i built this thing again. I wasn't really trying to make a business. I was just trying to solve my own problems. You know, i had my own set of opinions about how building tests should be done. So i sort of baked them into this thing.

Um, and, and, uh, you know, from there i started building out more of the product and i'd asked people, hey, what do you think of this? Is this cool, do you want to buy it? You know? Uh and i wasn't trying to make a business, i was just trying to solve my own problems and just make a tool that my colleagues would use and, and love to play with.

Um you know, uh and so the first six or seven years of bk was mostly this. It was just if you have, i have to label it, i would call it like a lifestyle business. I wasn't really aiming for growth. We didn't have vc backing, it was bootstrapped. So it was just me and a bunch of nerds just trying to build something super, super cool.

Um what happened though is that uh you know, some developer tools have great, you know, plg bottoms up motions. We were trash at that. Uh we had sort of stumbled into the enterprise very early um mostly by accident because the approach that we took.

So uh what sort of makes our approach of c i cd unique is that instead of being entirely cloud based or internally self hosted, we invented a hybrid model where our customers would connect their own amazon account to our systems and they would orchestrate the build and test within their own compute.

Um the benefit of that was if you do continuous deployment, continuous delivery, you don't need to give us the secrets. We never see a source code, you know. So you do, we do, we, and there's a strong, there's a strong line between us and it turns out that approach really resonated with big companies, you know.

And so we're building this thing from australia. And then all of a sudden we get a phone call from shopify or uber, uh or slack or tinder or any of those sorts of companies like, hey, we wanna use a shit. Uh and that was super cool.

But um you know, the first six or 78 years of bill kite, we were very busy building and scaling the product. We actually did mostly zero effort in go to market, you know, we didn't really do anything because the strategy that we had was one of uh word of mouth and one of hope. Uh and that is not a very clever way to build uh uh a business.

So two years ago, we hired um a sales team for the, you know, we hadn't had it for the majority of bill kart's life. We had a sales team and then things started cooking. We're like, ok, we're getting some more deals now, we're getting some deals closed faster. This is awesome.

Um but uh uh we also use amazon, right? And as we worked closely with amazon, they were like, hey, you know, we can sort of help you out with coming up with a strategy. Have you heard a thing called the marketplace? And i thought, yeah, that's just where people buy stuff. I'm not really interested and they were like, you know, people can use their edp spend and put it through a marketplace and maybe you can get access to budget that you didn't have access to before. And we thought, hm, interesting.

You know, so as we started doing deals now, we're like, hey, you should buy bill kite and they're like, oh, we've not got the money and we would say, but do you have an edp? And they're like, yes we do. I'm like, put it through that and they're like, cool, we'll buy it now.

So, you know, that was sort of the uh the gateway drug, you know, to start working with the amazon uh uh uh partners. And so we're now part of the, the, the passport program. And what we're doing now is they, they're helping us build, you know, instead of a strategy of hope and word of mouth, they can say, well, where do you wanna go? Who do you want to sell to? Who is your ideal customer profile? What are their problems? What are their needs? What are the ones, how do they talk, why do they talk? Where do they talk? Uh and so they're helping us to put together a whole strategy for, you know, even though we have customers in the us today, they're sort of helping us re-enter the us with a strategy instead of just, you know, messing around and, yeah, a and, and seeing what happens.

So, uh uh the, the, the program has been great so far. If, if you do enter the program, some bits of advice for you. Um you, you get out what you put in, don't half ass it like, don't you like, yeah, we're doing a little bit of amazon stuff. We'll see what happens. Nah, you gotta make it like your a priority. Uh because yeah, they, they amazon tend to respond how you, what, what you put in. So if you put in 100% they'll give you back 100%. So that's what we found.

Um and the other big benefit of the program is, look, i'm standing on stage talking to you now about building a company from australia. That's part of the program. They help open up doors. And so uh uh it's been great so far.

Um we've gotten quite a number of new, be new leads through the program and uh if you do wanna look into it, um you know, amazon like their, their flywheels. Uh and so if you can paint, help paint a picture with amazon where you fit in the flywheel. Uh you know how, if they help you sell your software, they make more money and then you make money and da, da, da, da, da da. So if you sort of paint that picture then uh that you can do that whole co cell piece. And that's been um we've done it time and time again and it's been fantastic.

So that's all i've got to say. Um uh passport's pretty cool. Just check it out. Thank you very much. Super. Thank you, keith.

Um so get an example of someone who has been in the pilot program has um gone through the starting points of the journey. We're still still working with them. And as i said, we're looking to open this up to a next set of customers, talk to your account team and they can get in touch with uh with, with our, our group. They, if you mention passport, sure, they can go and, and uh find it and get a hold of our team.

Ok. So what i've talked about today, i wanted you, you're gonna, there are three thou there are thousands of programs here today. You're gonna get so much input. Please take a email to yourself. Do a, you know, i've got a little piece of paper, old school, you know, writing things down and notes that i can take back and, and uh and look at later, but jot an email down send a note to your account team. Was there something that resonated here? They're pretty low process.

Two of the, uh, the top ones are, are, are, uh, are free to you. I mean, there's no, there's no cost. So some of what you have, we talked about marketplace, that's the foundation we're gonna build upon that. That is a channel that you can use for everything that you layer on top. Ok? That's where we're gonna start with talking about something new.

We've got experts like jeffrey hammond and his team that can come in and advise you on your existing path. But also it's that instruction guide to some degree for that complicated harry potter lego thing that there's no way you could build that by yourself, right? You need some instructions we have at 200 services, but there's many, many more and there's no way you're going to learn about the depths and intricacies there.

So take your development team that might be doing something here, match, make that with someone like jeffrey in order to say, hey, and we could, we could take advantage of an aws service and then we could focus this team on something else that's more higher value. Ok? That's the goal for road map acceleration and it's all entirely up to you. We're just giving you the advice and the path to consider and then the last thing we're gonna speed up a little bit through that fog.

We're gonna come out on the other side of the fog with a broader set of capabilities and a potentially new market because we know it's gonna happen, right. We've been in these cycles before we know that we're, we're um we're optimistic about the fog lifting and us coming out stronger. So invest through the fog. Look at passport program. You can also consider options yourself and consider the other side and, and how you'll structure yourself as a company for that growth. Ok.

Thank you. We have a little bit of time. We're gonna um put, take the group and we're gonna park ourselves back in this corridor. Um fill out the survey and thank you very much for your time. Appreciate it.