Accelerate innovation with AWS and AWS Partner solutions for telcos

Tammy Wyman: Partnerships bring mutual growth in an accelerated fashion. Yet we find many firms end up being a partner on paper without truly getting the benefits of a partnership. I'm Tammy Wyman and I lead partnerships for the global telco industry at AWS. And today we'd like to speak to you about how you can truly reap the benefits of being a partner with AWS in the telco industry.

So today with my colleague, Samir, we're going to talk about, is there a market opportunity? And how big is it? And then who do telcos trust for transformation both internally and with their customers? How do we partner and what are the different building blocks that we see? And then looking at AWS for telecom, all the different facets and domains that we can partner with you no matter what type of uh of solution you provide to the industry. And finally, it's important to know that not one model fits everyone. We'll give you some frameworks that can help with the discussion, but it's important that we take this to the next level and start having a detailed discussion about how to partner with AWS.

So how did we start our partnering journey. As you can see, we have been evolving as the in the cloud industry has been evolving. Our journey started in 2019 approximately. It's hard to put a aaa finite line to that. But certainly 2019 was an accelerator of our partnerships. That's when we created internally our telco business unit. And that is when we launched our wavelength service, starting with those customers that you see outlined there in 2019.

So the creation of the telco business unit meant that we were bringing talent from the industry into AWS. And now having about 300 specialists in the telco industry, directly serving our largest customers. And now you can see how we've really grown exponentially in terms of our partner base. So many that we could have many more that we're putting onto the page here.

Now, when you think about what's happened over the past year with gen a i, you've probably noted even more of an explosion of the discussions around partnership to take advantage of gen a i. We can see that no one single entity is able to offer the compute the data, the edge solutions. We even need civil institutions to talk about the ethics of a i to bring together this full suite. So we expect that next year when we come together, we'll have even more logos, partnerships built around the telco industry and accelerated by gen a i.

So one of the first questions we're asked is is there still an opportunity, you know, is it cloud hasn't cloud been around for a long time? Uh isn't the telco industry really saturated with different partnerships? So we wanted to show some data looking at where c os over the past 12 years have stated that they are going to be investing, right? They've got lots of differing tensions, differing needs and you can see that digital transformation or digital capabilities is pulling away as the main factor that ceos of all industries will be investing in.

When you take into consideration my earlier comments about ja i, we expect that next year that's even going to bump up even further. And this really mirrors what we're seeing at aws as well, that there is definitely space to continue to transform both telcos internally, as well as telcos to transform themselves to offer new services to the market. And we'll be looking at both of those different motions today.

So when you look at, when we ask actually the telco industry, telco leaders who do they feel is most suited to help them in the transformation of either internally or externally to their customers. Uh this is a study that's been done by the i dc for the past couple of years and you can see that cloud providers are at the top of the chart and growing. Uh even ahead of some of the, you know, classic transformation partners like solution integrators, consulting partners. Um or uh even some of the equipment vendors who have been really leading transformation of the industry uh since it began.

And when you ask which cloud provider telcos are most interested in partnering with, you can see that AWS again at the top of the stock and growing. So it's very encouraging for us to see this data. And I think for you, if you're sitting there and you're, you're considering partnering with us or you've started, maybe you feel like you are a partner on paper. The question you really need to ask yourself is have you considered your relationship with AWS as a strategic asset? And if not, let's make sure that we have the conversation uh because you'll be finding that your competitors are likely engaging with us and trying to, to leverage the power of the cloud providers in their own transformation.

So how do we start? We like to look at a framework that is uh quite robust, right? I think one of the things uh about partnerships is we often find that we get really excited about the product piece, right? We, we have engineers that come together and we're doing really cool things with technology. Let's face it. That's exciting. You, you do something you, you break into a new area and you feel like that alone is enough for us to be successful.

But it really is important, first of all, to take a step back and start with the alignment piece. What is the strategy? How committed are we together? Um do we have unique assets that we can come together? Is there a strong business case? Do we have the investments or are we gonna have to do some incremental investments and bootstrapping of that? And we get to a point where we are agreeing on that partnership, then we can move into the product domain, right?

So i, i do want to emphasize that when i think of uh maybe even a couple of years ago, we were often looking at partnership purely from a product space. And then we, we go to market and say, well, you know what happened? This hasn't been successful. Oh, well, the sales team didn't know about it or the sales team were incentive to do the opposite uh with this product that we thought they would or we just simply didn't have enough people. We weren't able to find the talent to build this new cloud industry.

So based on that experience, we really need to make sure that we're covering all of the building blocks. Or at least we have got a plan. We've got an acknowledgment, which of these we're strong in weaken which of these we need to get further alignment and keep on our road map of partnership.

So a clear example of one communication service provider who really leveraged this process really well is british telecom, we spent months with them on this initial of alignment because they want to ensure that our strategic collaboration agreement was truly aligned to their strategic priorities, that it wasn't a notion or a wish to be successful, but that we really looked into very specific pillars. We'll get into those five pillars a little bit later in the presentation. But it was very intentional to spend the time doing the upfront alignment and ensuring that we had all those building blocks in place. And this resulted in a $500 million agreement with AWS, which was signed this year to collaborate on go to market activities together.

So how do we kind of start? We want the in partnership to be very intentional as well as running at the pace that you feel comfortable with. So we do have a way to step through the process. Some will jump right to the top ladder, um others will decide they only want to stay on the first rung and see the success.

So the first step is being part of the AWS Partner Network or APN, you might hear you referred to and i'm sure many of you already belong to the ABAPN. This is a way to start engaging with AWS starting to have some of those programs and, and benefits and support from AWS as a partner. It's a really low initial investment and it's a tiered program so you really can decide what's the path for success, that path for success often then goes to the next level, which is around all of the partner programs that we have.

We've got, i'm just on the website this earlier. I didn't even check the number of competencies, but we probably have three dozen competence that you can earn because we're constantly recognizing that partners are unique and that they can bring things. So you might have competencies around specific workloads in a specific industry or around a particular AWS product. And we're trying to find the ways that help you be better known in the market by earning these competencies.

And then we get to that last step, which is truly this purpose built, intentional strategic collaboration. This is when things become very customized as referring to the BT agreement earlier. This is a stage when you kind of move from being like a partner to having a true partnership, long term commitment, purpose built resources from both entities that are creating this partnership.

A great example of one of our partners who have stepped through the process and been intentional about going from kind of each rung is Fastweb, an Italian fixed line provider owned by Swisscom. So Pat Fastweb started with us less than two years ago just by joining the APN. They quickly earned one competency and six service designations as part of the APN. Those uh six service designations are the highest amount that we have in of any of our partners in the telco industry.

So they knew that it was important for them to have something differentiated in the market. They really focused on public sector as well as the S and B market building on their strengths. And they were named in 2022 our regional partner of the year. So if you look at, you know, what would be the ideal path, Fastweb really took advantage of stepping through these programs to achieve success and to also get new business coming to them from AWS.

All right. So now that we've heard a little bit like the mechanism of how to partner we want to go and start looking at all of the different ways that uh you can, let's say dissect the telco industry in all of its domains. And with that, I wanted to welcome to the stage, my colleague, Samir, who's gonna talk to us about the telco industry so much, Tammy as Tammy introduced me. Uh Samir Vu. I have the privilege of running the global business development org for all 1500 plus telcos worldwide and the IV ecosystem, the SI ecosystem that supports them.

I've been very lucky to listen in and see the innovation that our telco partners have built on IWS. And I want to share those stories with you today. But first, let's talk about how we view the telco industry. Everything below that purple line that says powered by is a set of services infrastructure that AWS offers telcos and let me step through them one by one.

You you know about all of our availability zones within the regions. The hybrid edge is something we have invested in where to make AWS available everywhere a customer needs it. We've invested in specialized silicon. We've announced Graviton 4 today. For example, we've been doing arm based custom chips that save a lot of power for the last decade and that is directly leading to the sustainability goals and the energy reduction that is so important to our telcos today.

And of course, we started with our telcos in the enterprise IT space. It's been a long, almost 15 year partnership since the first telco started using AWS and they started using it for IT. But just like I migrated to the cloud, we are now starting to see network workloads migrate to the cloud. So that's really where we are deeply partnering on those network components to work with the likes of Erickson, with Nokia, with Maria and so on to make sure that the network functions are now cloud native, that they run on AWS and that they run well and at a very cost optimized point on AWS.

But then we didn't stop there. We basically said, what kind of value added services can we build together with the partners together with the IVs, the network equipment providers? And so we started co inventing in a lot of areas. The smart home was one example where we co invented with, tell us and said, look, you can bring any device from any ecosystem into your home. You don't need an app to provision it. It just works so you can go get it from a samsung ecosystem, you can go get it from wise, you can go get it from any of 200 ecosystems. And that's something we co invented together.

And then finally, we are investing heavily in actually exposing the capabilities of the network and all of the other capabilities that a telco has internally through APIs AWS was built on APIs, that's how you access our compute. That's how you access our storage. The next step is that we want you the developers to access connectivity through APIs provided by our telco partners.

And with this set of core competence, the telcos are basically first using it to transform their internal operations, how they go to market and then using that acquired competence, having learned how to do it for themselves to start digitizing industries in the B2B space and to re invent the consumer experience for all of you who own a handset today or are a home broad broadband supply, uh subscriber.

So let's uh talk about who's really doing what in the internal transformation, we have invested heavily in bringing hundreds of partners on to the AWS ecosystem. We are all about choice. We do not build network functions. So we invested in bringing almost every BSS supplier onto the AWS ecosystem and they're available today, orchestration suppliers, RAN suppliers, and it's been a very long, very high investment journey to bring this whole ecosystem into the cloud.

And then we started building accelerators to help you use these partners that we have brought on board in conjunction with our own services. I'll take a couple of examples. Amazon Connect, for example, uses telephony from our partners, but it uses our Contact Center as a Service service on top. And so we are reinventing how contact centers are built and moving from a on prem model with high capex investment to a pay as you go model a pay per minute literally in terms of how you use it

And so when you put all of this together, what we're basically seeing is that there are three personas within our, within the telcos who we really feel are leaning in with us benefiting.

And on the IT side, I think that's self evident. So I won't spend too much time on that, the network clarification.

Two years ago, we announced that Dish has built a whole network on AWS. And earlier we announced that NTT DOCOMO has now agreed to build their core on AWS. So you will see a lot more announcements coming out in the space as telcos invest in the cloud just for the standard reasons that you would invest in it, which is elasticity scale global presence and the innovation that it brings.

And then finally on the CMO side, uh we are working with telcos, with our partners from Amazon Ads, which is now the third largest ad supplier in the world to basically re invent how you reach customers. But once you have acquired those customers, how do you actually keep them happy, uh keep them for a lifetime just because they're so happy with your service.

And so those are the three areas that we're starting to see and you see that all the customers that are listed on there have used us to some extent or another. And that is how telcos are transforming internally and with the partners themselves, we have multiple ISVs that we're working with.

In this particular case, our intent is to make sure that every single partner that leans in with us has generative AI infused into their offerings over in the fullness of time. You will see hopefully every single partner encased in a gold box here, but the ones that are in a gold box today are available down in our demo room and you can go see how gen AI is infusing them so that they can go serve there customers as well.

But let's talk about, well, let me not talk about actually let our customers talk about what they have seen with us. So this is from Globe Telecom:

"Hi, I'm Karthik Krishna, Head of Product and Digital Growth at Globe Telecom. We believe customer experience is the true differentiator here at stellar relevant. We also recognize that only within the technology, we can help our clients to deliver the finest customer service. That's why as an AM company, we have been an AW strategic partner since 2008, we call it the collected customer journey.

CCJ has three pivotal goals, first real time issue resolution, second, enhancing operational efficiency. Third, elevating customer lifetime value. We have built a platform that equips Globe with the ability to track their individual customer experiences by ingesting data from any or cross channel interactions, usage patterns of the network network performance, marketing and offer campaigns and aggregated customer experience indexes.

It then uses this data foundation to predict the journey that a customer is going to have and proactively remediate or improves these journeys. Thus providing customer with the next best experience suited for each individual customer.

CC's generative AI based recommendation system is a game changer, generative AI powers, personalized communications, including retention offers marketing campaigns and other customer care messages.

CCJ is also tackling the issue of churn with real time machine learning and dynamic customer segmentation. It enables us to understand when and how to interact with customers for the best outcomes.

What does all this mean for our customers? Let's say the Globe, customer is experiencing difficulty in recharging their prepaid balance on an unfamiliar channel with not only can we proactively identify this but the platform can learn from similar such journeys drawn from the specific customers overall experience and recommend the next best experience to them.

The technology behind Connected Customer Journey is impressive. It leverages Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Neptune and L and Amazon S Maker using the right machine learning tool for a real time predictions, journey segmentation. And this is the future of customer experience. And we invite you to join us on this journey at AWS re Invent."

Extremely pleased to have Kartik and Liath talk about what we did there. And you can see that uh down in our demo area as well. But I want to you on this theme but this time with an IV, uh this is far from uh Snowflake who's been deeply leaned with us forever, but I'll let him talk today. We'll take you on a transformative journey. Showcasing the immense impact of gen AI powered service and network management in the telecom industry called Network Telecom Service.

And network operations are intricate processes that mean extensive data analysis troubleshooting can be time consuming, taking hours or even days. And this is where JAI comes into play, simplifying and accelerating of team musician task with interactive guidance and prompts to solve this problem. We need various data sources including billing data, open cell ID data, geo special information, customer loyalty data and data from different networks network.

Ge streamlines the process by capturing parsing and enriching complex telco data using digital route users engine, private edition. The data is then stored in Snowflake and enriched with reference data from Snowflake marketplace. Amazon Bedrock is then used for extracting insights from that data.

Now let's fast forward to the post genie world where telecom operations are transformed for the better neogene bridges. The gap between OSs and BSs data effortlessly. Data integration is no longer a roadblock but a streamlined process troubleshooting is now faster and more efficient. Thanks to insights provided by gen issues could be resolved in minutes, ensuring a smoother customer experience and cost savings.

The needle in a haystack problem is no longer insurmountable, leading to higher customer satisfaction. Say goodbye to the inefficiencies and complexities of the past and embrace the future where Network Gen integrates data accelerates troubleshooting and ensures customer satisfaction. The future of telecoms here and gen powers it.

As you can see, we're deeply leaned in with partners to do this for us and with us. But let me move on to what this means for the opportunity for telcos in the B2B space.

As Tammy mentioned earlier, we have partnered with multiple telcos worldwide and the intent is to go to market together on innovative services and that only the combination of a telco and a cloud provider such as AWS can provide.

So what are we doing in this space in the B2B space? I'll touch on a few, we touched on contact centers earlier that continues to be a really strong growth driver for revenue for our customers.

We launch something at MWC called Integrated Private Wireless which allows private networks built by telcos or indeed anyone to be listed on the AWS marketplace and to be consumed, ordered and consumed effortlessly.

We have invested heavily in building out MAC multi access edge compute with our telco partners. That's Outposts that is Local Zones. We've announced dedicated Local Zones now and Wavelength and multiple variants of that depending on the particular geo that we are addressing.

And then what are the primary workloads that are driving revenue on AWS for our telco partners? Private networks is absolutely one. And now you have the ability to build a private network very, very quickly on AWS. Pick from any of the core vendors that we have on boarded, build a network, deploy it and start monetizing immediately with all of the telco applications. But more importantly, all of the line of business applications that reside on AWS and its 100,000 plus partners in multiple industries, D1 and transport.

One of the trends that we're starting to see is the rise of the global telco, which is historically geographically limited telcos are now able to serve their B2B customers wherever those B2B customers are just by using the AWS backbone, getting to the closest POP internationally, building an SD1 endpoint or a private network, endpoint or a CDN endpoint, whatever that may be so think of um a bank in a British bank and they're going to expand in Auckland, New Zealand. It's literally a matter of minutes now to create that POP and serve that same bank in New Zealand where it was not possible before it took months.

The CAS market, the Communications as a Service market, our partnerships with Vonage, for example, exposing their APIs with Trio, all of these players and the inherent C capabilities of voice and messaging from our telco partners is driving immense growth.

We've created B2B to X marketplaces where a telco can basically list all of their products on AWS and from all of our partners as well and reach their end customer basically with an easy to use self serve portal. And all of this is driving real impact to the top line of telcos today.

Now here's a few examples, SK Telecom, for example, launched Computer Vision as a Service where they're basically deploying 4K cameras all across South Korea. But more importantly, that same platform is now available for anyone to deploy worldwide and they could not have done that prior to our partnership together. So not only are they deploying it in their home market, but they're offering it as a platform to anyone else system integrator or telco who wants to deploy it anywhere else in the world.

On the other side, uh with Lumen, we just announced today, a partnership with an ISV called Alianza where we have moved all of the historical soft switch market to a cloud native version on AWS. So now you actually have a cloud native CAS platform that you can build on. And there's many here that I don't have time to get into. You will see these slides.

But again, it's all about partners. So let me hand it over to Salesforce and tell you what they did in the B2B market:

Salesforce: "Hi, Jonathan. Thank you for joining us this afternoon."

Jonathan: "My pleasure. Thanks for having me."

Salesforce: "I'd like you to kick us off with explaining a bit what we're doing together AWS and Salesforce, especially in the telco domain and Communication Cloud."

Jonathan: "Sure. So we see from our customers that they're really faced with a couple of interesting challenges, they have to increase the risk, decrease their costs. And at the same time, they need to incorporate these new technologies and so to do that, they need help. And that's where we together come in by providing them tools for automation. And more importantly, more recently AI and that has been for years predictive AI machine learning based. But now we're seeing many more use cases of generative AI and doing new and different things for the service providers. And that's really where our partnership is so powerful because we can now bring to our customers, the communication service providers, these new technologies that really enhance their operations. Let them meet those objectives of increasing revenues, decreasing costs and adopting technologies."

Salesforce: "Can you bit on the challenge and opportunity?"

Jonathan: "So this is a great one where together our teams had some really good successes in the last several months. Looking at that problem of unpaid bills or where the revenue is leaking out of the space. A huge problem for all service providers. They want to capture that revenue that they've contracted for. And so the capability that was developed with the teams to go and look at the existing contracts to look at unpaid bills and analyze. Why was this bill not paid? What happened that we didn't capture that revenue? Yes, I think this is one of the important use cases. We just developed an impact of up to 10% of the revenue for most of the Turco."

Salesforce: "What's next? The sky is really the limit. There are so many different use cases. I mentioned, you know, sales and service and marketing and fulfillment. There's no limit to what we can do. I'm sure there's gonna be people listening to this video that will dream up new opportunities and that's really the power of interviews and Salesforce together that we have that open ecosystem, we have the ability to extend and develop much beyond traditional use cases. I'm really excited what the future holds."

"Thank you very much, gentlemen."

And you will see Salesforce down in our demo area and what they're able to achieve.

Finally, I want to talk a little bit about reimagining the consumer experience. We talked a lot about the business experience. So we've been working with telcos on a plethora of things all the way from smart wi fi with our eero solutions through to the media streaming and cloud dvr aspects of it. So that the whole TV infrastructure that is delivered by our telco partners gets modernized and then impacts the customer experience.

We launched the smart home platform with tell us that i referred to earlier, we launched something called Subscription Hub with Optus out of Australia, where you now have a single place provided by your telco to manage all of your subscriptions, whether that's Spotify, Peloton, Netflix, everything and this is the future of home entertainment and home management that we're working together but doesn't stop there.

Now, telcos such as Vodafone, Germany and Boost Mobile from Dish are now using Amazon.com or Amazon.de in the case of Vodafone Germany to actually start selling plants.

So when you search for a phone now on amazon.de in Germany, it comes up with Vodafone's price plans and you can subscribe right there on Amazon. And so we're inventing together in a lot of these areas and the intent is really to help and partner with our telcos to monetize that huge investment that they have made on 5G and fiber to the home really.

And so that's why it's so important for us that we're aligned on how to go to market together. And you will see multiple different use cases all the way from sports streaming to the home, to the subscription hub, to video broadcast modernization. All of these are happening right now to impact the consumer experience.

But again, um we let the Optus team speak what we're showing here today is a new innovative service that Optus has developed over the last 3 to 4 years called Sub Hub. And what Sub Hub is is it's a allows subscribers to consolidate all of their subscriptions into one platform, giving them better visibility and better management of what their subscriptions are. And Optus then directly bills the subscribers for that service. And so they don't have to get all of these different bills.

So let's think about the subscription economy right now. It's growing at about 20% a year. And so when you think about all the subscriptions that you might sign up for, and so when you look at the number of subscriptions that you may have, it's really difficult to even know what subscriptions you have because they're all on different credit card bills. And in fact, um 35% of all people don't even know where all their subscriptions are.

Now. The benefit that we bring is we put this all on one platform and you can easily add these and subscribe to these right from your mobile phone. You use the same sign on that you do from your my Optus account. And then you can go and pick the various types of offerings that are available. The benefit to the telco is they get an additional revenue stream. Uh and more importantly, they get a happier, more loyal customer. The data we've seen so far is that of our high value customers. We're getting about a 30% churn reduction. So that's significant because everyone knows how hard it is to acquire customers.

The benefit to the content provider is they get a better distribution channel and further reach that they can take advantage of or the telco's strong marketing reach and the benefit to the consumer is they are now in control. And again, you can see that downstairs in the demo area.

Now I'm gonna hand it back to Tammy because I showed you the art of the possible but no one model fits all. So I'll let the expert walk you through how to partner with us better. All right. Thank you.

So, Mayor. All right. Survey. So how many of you relate with not knowing how many subscription services you have? All right. He said 35%. I think roughly that was the amount that I saw. I know I between, you know, me and a couple of teens at home, we definitely have no clue how much money we're spending on subscriptions. So, and you know, I think that that's part of how do you find a relevant consumer or enterprise friction points and decide how to solve that, right?

And there are as many friction points as individuals and companies in this world. So one way that we help to start centering the discussion on where do you, where do we start? We like using this framework which is adapted from Canalys and it it starts showing the flywheel of enterprise services when it comes to digital transformation.

So you have a new customer coming in who will need some sort of advisory of what they do. Um h how do they digitize their own services or their internal processes? And then they'll need someone to design that and build when you look at then what's happening in the enterprise space in terms of procurement models that's also being radically transformed. How do we actually digitize the the procurement process, create marketplaces, use those complex contracts that were referred to in the Salesforce examples and suddenly have that as digitized to build your own complex enterprise contract.

So we're starting to see disaggregation of even some of the processes that we never thought before could be digitized and then who will be managing those services on behalf of the customer. So you can see how this becomes a real flywheel, which we like to use a lot at Amazon. And when you are looking at as a telco or a service provider looking to sell into the telco industry, you need to think about where you want to play and where you have the right to play.

It doesn't mean that if you're only working in one piece of this flywheel that you're not going to be successful, it simply means that others may be bringing in those pieces. They could be someone that, you know, you decide you really want to focus on being the best marketplace for a particular solution. Others will be advising and designing the solutions, but you are going to be there at the clearing house for that particular service.

Others really want to look at managed services. We know telcos are looking for higher margin services, managed services, managed, cloud managed security is one area that we're seeing more and more demand. Others may come in and say we want the full suite we're going to acquire. I talked about the human capital before we want people who are able to advise we're going to acquire a small firm that's very focused in cloud migration strategy like BCE did with FX Innovation.

So this is a way for you to reflect and decide which part of this flywheel you want to participate and that will really help us move into some of these discussions.

So to get into some concrete examples, I wanted to work at three cases. The first one being BT Global, which I mentioned before this as I said was very purpose built. We spent a long time in the upfront definition for phase and it was really centered around BT's five year vision, right? They had a very clear vision from the CEO down um wanting to focus them on revenue generation. And it was about their journey of moving from a connectivity provider to a digital service provider. They knew that they needed to invest upfront. They named an alliance lead to work with us and we ended up deciding on three strategic pillars, IoT industry solutions, AWS marketplace and edge computing services.

So you can see some of that reflected in the, in the earlier graphic that I showed you. So what do we do? We started small, but we were always thinking big. How can we bring all of these areas of focus together into one strategic program? Um we ensured that we were there partnering with them at the pace that they wanted and getting to a stage where we felt everyone was comfortable with the business case behind it so that we could create a strategic collaboration agreement which would be very successful.

So this was signed earlier in uh in the year. So I mentioned the $500 million strategic collaboration agreement over five years. Um we now have about 60 team members dedicated to the efforts to go to market together with BT. We already have eight strategic developments and we're very well on track. Uh for our first year plan, I wanted to show you this an example of being very specific, deciding which of those areas you want to focus in and deciding which areas you don't want to focus in.

So, for example, they made it clear that they were not focused in the resale space only if it were very large and strategic that they would consider that. But that was not going to be an entry point into their partnership with AWS. A contrasting example would be Verizon. They very much followed a managed service strategy oftentimes with AWS other times building on their own assets, but they knew that they wanted to create platforms that would be serving the enterprise market.

They wanted them to be built on the best technology and they wanted these platforms to be uh robust and adaptable. They built on their strong heritage of engineers, right? I was looking at the flywheel before saying you need to think about where you're strong. Verizon is really great at building products and they've got a strong base of engineers. So they wanted to ensure that they were leveraging that base to build these products. No one else could replicate that in the way that they could.

So how did we begin this process? We had deep engagement with that product team at Verizon. Um and we became a strategic partner for these solutions. So where what has been the result? They've launched a suite of services under the Verizon Connect brand, part of that being fleet management. Now having over a million vehicles under subscription there um they also launched Secure Cloud Interconnect which has reduced deployment times by up to 90% um Network as a Service launch and as well an Asset Tracking solution on ThingSpace, right?

Our last example is another contrasting area. How do we think big together? How do we find that consumer friction point that we all can relate with but seems to not have a solution in the market. And this is the Telus Smart Home example that Samir spoke to earlier.

So Telus it did have experience in the home monitoring solution through an acquisition of Alarm.com. But they knew that there was difficulty in bringing in devices in one ecosystem that created a lot of friction points for the customer. So they had a clear vision that that was what they wanted to tackle. How do we create a platform which is capable of on boarding numerous devices no matter which platform it's coming from probably something we can all relate with, but there wasn't a technical solution available in the market.

And they understood that if they were able to create this service, it would be so differentiated that it would not only be applicable to their home market in Canada, but it would go back to the motion that Samir spoke of earlier, which is how can we sell this telco to telcos? It's a common, it's a common challenge that other telcos have. How do you build a best in class uh platform to manage devices. And they knew that if they were successful, that they would be able to target other telcos as well.

Um so we started out together, bring a full team to, to work on this challenge together. Uh we knew that we had the, the, the technical capabilities, we knew that they had the right assets and we knew that they had the strategic commitment to go at this for the long term.

So what we have uh announced um earlier in the year is a joint solution um which is going to take um that friction point in terms of on boarding new solutions, um take the friction out of that process. And uh we've, we've already got a uh a number of telco operators that are interested in reselling the service uh to their own customer base.

So it's just one example of how do you think a little bit out of the ordinary and think of what's a new way to partner and who do I need to bring on board with us? And we find as AWS we're very adaptable. You know, I went back to that purpose built partnering. We really want to tailor it to the way that you want to partner. And if we see that you have commitment, desire, unique assets, we will put our energy towards helping you be successful.

So I just want to close with a couple of, I guess highlights of our sessions that we're having like the one you're sitting in today. We've got numerous supported by experts from the telco industry and i hope you have enjoyed some of those already.

Give you a second here. And also I want to give a plug for all of the demos that we referred to as well. I say this is very popular. So I want to make sure very fine print the demos that we were peppering throughout the presentation. If you go to the, the show floor to the telco space, you will find demos of all of these solutions.

Um most of them bringing in an element of generative AI quite a diverse set of, of partners and solutions as well. And then finally, I just wanted to, to end by saying, I really um welcome conversations with all types of partners customers and we would really help to start applying some of these frameworks in our discussions so that we can take you on the journey to making AWS a strategic asset within your quiver on your journey to digital transformation.

Thank you and thank you, Samir.