Accelerating ISV growth in the AWS Partner Network

First of all, great to be here. Um great to be in the Partner Expo. I think it really goes to show the strength of the Amazon Partner Network. Looking around at all these amazing partners and how you can help grow and scale your ISV.

We're gonna be spending 15 to 20 minutes here today. But ultimately, I want to get to the bottom of one question: How can you grow your ISV by utilizing the Amazon Partner Network and ecosystem? How can you move away from just seeing AWS as a vendor towards taking advantage of the wider opportunities available?

I always like to see sort of the, the sort of people we have in the audience today. Hands up who's familiar or has heard of the APN, anyone familiar? Ok. A few. Marketplace, AWS Marketplace. Awesome. Ok, cool. And do we have startups, enterprises, something in the middle? Funerals of heads? Ok, great.

So this is a slide where I have to convince you that I'm worth hearing for the next 15 minutes and it's worth talking and not checking your emails. Um by my global head of sales at VF and I'm, I'm gonna start off with a little bit of a confession. For the past six years, I had a gold lanyard at these events. It was previously at AWS and in my time worked with thousands of ISVs and SaaS companies helping them grow and scale on AWS. And there were some similarities amongst all of them and some huge opportunities there. We'll touch on to those in a, in a little bit of a second.

But I want to introduce VIA, if you indulge me, we're, we're sponsoring this talk. So we're a partner, surprisingly enough of AWS, we're an Advanced Tier Service, Advanced Tier partner and a resell partner. And we were built by x AWS alumni who all saw a very similar challenges that ISVs were facing and that was ISVs either weren't aware they didn't know how or they couldn't execute on building their alliance with AWS. So going beyond just the technical to look at commercial and other benefits that you can get through your partnership with AWS.

And if you think about AWS, a lot of people just go, it's tech, it's just pure cloud vendor, it's just pure tech, but it shouldn't be just that it should expand among multiple different in internal uh teams. And so you've obviously got CTOs that's the obvious one, building the technology. But in my time, I spoke with numerous CFOs, if you think about cloud and tech costs, it's usually the second biggest cost behind staff and so they want to know where that money's going. They want to know if there's an opportunity to save money through savings plans. Maybe you're eligible for private pricing, getting a discount from AWS in, in terms of a commitment, the different payment mechanisms, you've got 30 days, you can pay on a credit card, you can pay on an invoice. These are all things your CFO should be involved in and aware of and, and understanding the cost and why that cost is growing as your ISV scales.

There's loads, there's gonna be loads of CPOs here. Chief Product Officers, most of them spoiler alert are gonna be interested in gen AI understanding how they can put it into their next offering. What services AWS has, how can they put it into their next iteration of their product? And then even more interestingly in my favorite CROs Chief Revenue Officers, how can you utilize AWS to create revenue? How can you speed up deal cycles procure faster, sell into enterprises through AWS?

And if you have a look around all of these companies here, they're all gonna be Advanced Partners. They're all gonna sell through Marketplace and there's a number of different reasons behind that and we'll, we'll get on to that in a second. But what we saw in VR was an opportunity. We want to be the one stop shop for all ISVs regardless of size, regardless of scale, regardless of life cycle. Because although companies are very different and have different priorities, there's one thing that runs parallel through them and that's their relationship with AWS. They still go through the same processes, they still use the same tools, the same programs and the same mechanisms. And so, although VUP was born to help start ups, what we found is we're adopting more and more enterprises, we're helping more and more customers really improve their alliance with AWS and showing them how in simple commercial terms, rather than going to simply a quite a lot of jargon.

The best thing about it, we're a partner of ourselves. We're cost neutral, AWS, love what we do. They pay us to work with you. Lovely folks at no cost to yourselves because they see benefit from it. You grow, you scale your business in AWS, we get to help you with that. Your business grows, everybody wins. And so that's gonna be the theme of today, which is better together. AWS is a very partner centric cloud. Let's make the most of it.

So what are the similarities that we see across our customers now? VUP is only around six months old. We're very, very young, but in that time, already over 6660 customers across multiple different GOS. And we found that our customers serve multiple different verticals, but they all have very, very similar themes going on throughout.

And what we found is number one, there's a very, very strong ratio of AWS spend to your total product revenue, they are directly correlated, the more you sell, the more your technology costs. And it's quite surprising how many CFOs and how many CEOs don't necessarily understand that. And it's how can we then share that information in simple terms as to why bills are the way they are and why that cost is increasing. And also how can we optimize it? And also the model, they operate more and more companies are moving to SaaS at multiple different life cycles, satisfying if you will, whether it's a startup that thinks actually we should get on this early, we should do this whilst it's slightly easier whilst we've got smaller scale or whether it's an enterprise that wants to completely change their model. And it's a, a heck of a lot more complicated, but either way these are the parallels that they face and it's the same for all ISVs uh even at different stages of the life cycle, just sometimes it's easier to execute. Sometimes there's more complications if you're at a larger scale.

And I'm gonna talk through some of the mechanisms because ultimately, as I mentioned before, the mechanisms are the same and I'm gonna touch upon a few of these and I won't go into too much detail to, to go through the whole APN ecosystem would probably take up this whole conference. So we'll rattle through as much as we can in the time we've got, but you've got the Amazon Partner Network and the APN exists and it has multiple different tiers and multiple different different benefits. Whether they're commercial programs that get you access to credits, give you discounts every time you're on board a new customer or they're technical benefits, whether you want to help train up your staff and your team get them compliance and taking AWS certifications and there's multiple different tiers. But ultimately, the main motivation behind it is how can we increase our revenue by utilizing the scale the depth and the size of AWS and their customer base. You can even get to the point where AWS believe it or not will pay their reps to sell your products. There's programs such as ISV Accelerate, there's other programs such as the Workload Migration Program where you'll be incentivized. If you log your opportunity, you say I have a customer coming on board in a week's time that AWS rep will be paid to sell your product and you will get a discount on the AWS bill and not many companies are aware these things exist or how they can access them. And that's the biggest challenge and that's why we exist.

You've also got Marketplace which is essential. I'm a huge, huge Marketplace fan and encouraged all my previous customers to join and you might ask why it's quite a self explanatory name, but it's a marketplace where software vendors list their products for other AWS customers to procure it pretty straightforward. But why, why would anyone do that now, more and more enterprises are getting savvy with their cloud spend. They might be incentivized by, we have to purchase things through Marketplace and for them it's easy. Instead of having to adopt a new line item, get a new supplier in, go through all the compliance. Instead they just go, well, we'll put it in our AWS bill. It's really straightforward, it speeds up procurement and it's faster.

The other thing for them is the security element of it. So if you list a Marketplace, you have to go through a number of exercises to prove that you are, you're worthy, you can go on to the Marketplace, you're safe, you're secure, you're scalable, you're available. And so if you have that badge of Marketplace next to your name and next to your offering, when you go to sell to clients, that's the AWS seal of approval. And so Gartner found that customers or ISVs that were procuring or selling through Marketplace, their procurement cycle was 40% faster than going direct, 40%. So if you've got any deals in your pipeline, you wanna grow your business and you're slowing down, try being your Marketplace, try procuring through, we've even had examples of large enterprise that will only procure through their cloud vendor. They don't wanna go direct, they don't wanna have a huge list of additional suppliers. They just want to go directly through simplicity and ease. And I'm gonna talk to you a bit more about how we help people do that. And what that journey looks like, there's a number of different stages that you can take.

It's really important to understand what your status quo is. A lot of these exercises, you need to understand where your architecture currently is and where it needs to get to. And this is where it can overlap with the technical. So if we look at optimize, let's take a look at what you're currently doing, your architecture. Is it newly built? Are you refining it? Are you iterating it? Have you just done a lift and shift? Are you going through modernization? How far off is that when it comes to the Well Architected Review by AWS, do you have to do a Foundational Technical Review in order to access these sorts of things? Are you handling sensitive customer data? Are you selling into financial enterprises, handling healthcare, life sciences data? Uh you've got security certifications that you need to do? You're paying developers to go through a tick box exercise. These are all the sorts of things that we help customers free their time up. We've done it for thousands of customers before and we try and help you go through these exercises as smoothly as possible cost as well.

Really important to understand your AWS bill. Do you understand exactly what you're spending your money on? Do you understand and have you got that granularity of if I want to bring on this customer, it's gonna cost me x and my margin is this. Can you go into that, that depth? And that level of understanding with comes to your billing your tagging your logs and your reports within AWS to be able to take the com the technical and present it to the commercial teams to understand this is why this is happening. And do you understand your baseline spent? If you understand your baseline, you can take advantage of AWS program. Savings plans reserved instances, private pricing to make commitments to AWS in exchange for discounts, more commercial benefits. Who's managing those savings plans? Do you have these savings plans in place? Have you got a private pricing agreement in place? Could you be applicable for one? Are you eligible? Do you want help negotiating it?

A customer that I wanna highlight, um, that we took on this journey? Um, a company called Caddle. So we took them from uh their current spend. We did this exercise with them in 90 days. We realized 90 kmrr of cost savings by right sizing instances by looking at savings plans and making sure that they were maximizing their savings plans were at a risk level according to them and save them just over a million a year in 90 days ago.

The next step that we look at is a bit more strategic. Ok. You've got the status quo? But how can we expand your relationship beyond the tech? Do you want to make your product more appealing when it comes to selling to enterprises? Do you want to speed up that procurement cycle? Do you want to utilize AWS to create a new revenue channel? Diversify your revenue streams? Do you know the inputs required and the tiers available in the various programs that you can utilize to do that? The inputs that are required from yourself? You busy people, I'm sure. And the outputs that you might get from it.

There's various programs that uh two, I'll touch upon which were very, very key for the start ups. I had I to accelerate reps will think of your products. They will get paid. AWS reps will get paid if they sell your products and Workload Migration Program, every customer you're on board, you will get a discount on your AWS bill. Let's help you get there. These are available, ask some of the gold badges around these folks want you to get to that point because everybody wins, you grow, you scale a w helps AWS. It's beneficial for all parties.

And again, another customer example we had um they would find they were in the media space and media companies only want to procure through marketplace. They had some contracts in place and some of these enterprise turned around and said, no, we want to go through marketplace. They didn't have a clue what marketplace was and so took them from zero understanding of marketplace to a full listing within 90 days cost neutral.

There's huge benefits in going through these AWS programs. And it's how can we simplify the terms, understand your business to get you to the point where you know what you need to do to unlock the clear benefits. And the final one is need to keep in mind that end goal. Now, we originally were built to service start ups, which is why I like to keep path to exit in. But ultimately, what we're finding more and more is enterprises are also going through very, very similar challenges. And what we base our work on is not losing sight of that end goal.

Are you an enterprise that wants to become more digital native? Do you want to upskill your team? Do you want to control your cloud costs? Do you, are you spending a lot on AWS and want to build that alliance beyond just spending money with your vendor every month? What are the benefits that you can get in return? Or if you're a start up, you might want to increase your valuation. You might wanna reduce your costs, increase your margin, go to your VCs or in your pitch deck. Put that you've got a diversified revenue stream because you've got money coming or business coming in from AWS and that you've got a proven ability to on board enterprises quickly by Marketplace.

So all of these things and all of these challenges are unique to different ISVs. And so we've only got a few minutes left. So I don't want to go into to too much heavy detail. But if any of these are appealing or you think, how can I utilize my relationship with AWS to my advantage from my use case come and have a chat. We've got our team here who will put their hands up and give you all a wave come. Have a chat. If you've got a use case where you think we're using AWS, how can we make a take advantage of these things? Five minute chat and we can understand how easy it will be. What you need to do to get there and who we need to speak to.

The final thing I'll leave you with is very much copied and pasted off the Amazon Partner Network website cos it's something I've loved and always believed in which is these programs exist because AWS want you to do them. This isn't some way that we can sort of show you the sneaky way of getting more credits or cost optimizing against their will. These will recognize programs that AWS will help and support you on. We work with AWS. You won't lose any access to any of your relationships with your account managers, your solutions architects. But ultimately by utilizing partners, you can grow your business faster.

That's all I have for you folks. But thank you very much for your time. We'll have the team down at the front. And if you've got any questions as to how you can utilize the APN to your advantage, please feel free to have a chat. But thank you very much.