Learn how to grow your AWS business through AWS Partner Funding

Hello. Hi, everybody. Good afternoon. My name is Eric Levitra. I'm a senior manager for AWS Partner Investments and Incentives team. And today I'm going to talk to you about how to leverage the AWS partner funding benefits using the AWS Partner Funding Portal.

For our agenda today:

• We will begin by discussing an overview of what those funding benefits are
• Followed by a brief introduction of the AWS Partner Funding Portal and some of its basic functionality
• Following that I will go into some of the recent changes we've applied to the portal itself to drive better functionality and better partner experience
• And then finally, I will discuss our product priorities and future enhancements with a detailed list of our roadmap coming up here in the near future.

Okay. So what are the AWS partner funding benefits?

These benefits allow you to accelerate various stages of your business development and your journey throughout the APN. This will help you build sustainable business models as well as differentiate yourself within the APN.

Each program offers cash and/or credits as a benefit. And each of these benefits have their own specific requirements for eligibility in order to participate in them.

Again, the objectives of these benefits are to increase your capabilities, build qualified customer opportunities, accelerate your sales cycles and develop wins to prove yourself as a qualified AWS partner.

The funding benefits:

• If you're a partner who's trying to upskill your workforce, why not try Training and Certification, which offers discounted exams, vouchers as well as AWS promotional credits to help you offset any usage for any certifications or tests passed.

• Additionally, if you're trying to develop a solution using AWS products or services, we have Innovation Sandbox credits available to use to help offset those development costs.

• If you're trying to grow your demand generation and sales pipeline, Marketing Development Funds are available in both cash or credits to help you offset your marketing costs to do that.

• Finally, in the sell motion, we have Proof of Concept funding which is allowing you to prove to customers how AWS works, either using new AWS services for existing customers or existing AWS services for new customers.

• Finally, we have a Migrated Migration Acceleration Program funding which has a proven migration methodology to help you as a partner assess, plan and execute a customer migration project.

In addition, we also support several Agreement and Incentive fundings. One example is the AWS Jumpstart program. This is a miscellaneous funding program that helps startup partners who have identified a strategic service adoption need.

We also have ISV Workload Migrate program which is available for software partners who have a SaaS offering on AWS and want to leverage that funding to rapidly migrate customers to their SaaS offering.

A quick note about the overall funding process:

Before you can partake in any of our funding programs, you as a partner must complete your account setup in Amazon Pay eCentral. That is the first step in order to unlock these funding benefits.

Following that, depending on your eligibility for these programs, you can create and submit your request for all those programs I had just mentioned using the AWS Partner Funding Portal which I'll explain in a little bit.

As your request gets approved, you can begin to execute your activity.

If you are requesting credits, after your fund request is approved, you will receive those credits redeemed to the AWS account ID that you have provided in the fund request submission.

After you as a partner have completed your project or activity and you're ready to claim your funding for cash, you will submit your claim with proof of execution in AFP. Once that claim is approved, you will then navigate to Amazon Pay eCentral, submit your web form invoice and receive the benefit.

Now a little bit about the AWS Partner Funding Portal.

The AWS Partner Funding Portal is also known as AFP. It's a self-service tool for partners to request and manage all of their financial benefits in a single consolidated location.

This portal is accessible on the Funding tab in AWS Partner Central and any partner user can access the portal. Eligibility criteria based on each of the programs will allow you either to submit a given fund request at any time.

With the integration with ACE, as well as Partner Paths, partners now have a more frictionless experience to submit quality fund request submissions with ease.

Using this portal, I'm going to touch a little bit about the AFP stages:

If you're somebody who has submitted a fund request before you, these may be familiar to you. It should also be noted that all of the funding programs I mentioned earlier, not all of them have each of these stages, but these are here for display.

I'll touch on a few:

• Created stage is essentially draft. You as a partner are editing the fund request, entering the information, you have not submitted the request for approval yet.

• After you submit, it will move on towards the next approval stage.

• If you're requesting POC or MAP funding, the AWS Review stage and Technical Approval stage will be in the approval workflow path. AWS Review means the request is with an AWS Partner Success Manager for review and qualification. Technical Approval means that the fund request is with an AWS Partner Solution Architect assessing technical feasibility.

• Business Approval stage is our business operations team who review the fund request for final approval.

• Once it reaches Finance Approval, our funding ops team is essentially creating the purchase order for you or generating the credit codes.

• Once it moves to Pre-Approval, you as a partner are receiving that pre-approval email notification which means it's your signal to go ahead and start your project or activity.

• And for cash requests, we have the Cash Claim stage. If you have multiple claim IDs in your fund request, the fund request will remain in that stage until all claims have been completed.

Now to touch on status, this is a little different than stages:

• Status is basically telling you the overall health of your fund request.

• Active status means your request is going through the funding journey and life cycle.

• Pending means your fund request is transitioning in between approval stages.

• Terminated means that you as a partner have proactively canceled your fund request and no longer wish to take any further action where it's at regardless of stage.

• Expired means the fund request has exceeded its expiration date, which is 30 days after the planned project end date.

• And then Completed is pretty self explanatory.

A little bit of details about modifying an AFP fund request - what a partner can do versus what AWS can do to the fund request:

As a partner, you have the ability to recall your fund request at any point prior to it becoming pre-approved. So if you have a fund request, it's going through approvals, you realize you need to make an adjustment, you can recall the fund request, take it back to Created stage, which is draft, you can make your edits, apply changes and then resubmit.

It should be noted that when you resubmit the fund request has to go through the approval life cycle again because of the unforeseen nature of how many changes you've made to the fund request details.

You can also:

• Terminate, as I said before, you can cancel the fund request at any point.

• You can also extend the fund request. You have the ability to self extend one time up to 90 days from the planned project end date.

• If you're an Alliance Lead or an Alliance team member, you have the ability to change the owner of your fund request, say one of your team members is out of office or no longer with the company and you don't want to lose momentum on obtaining fund request approvals or submitting necessary claim details. You can change the owner to somebody else in your organization to maintain that momentum.

• And then now one of the newer features we added is Delete. If you have a lot of clutter in your funding dashboard, a lot of draft requests, terminated, canceled requests, you can now delete a request in your dashboard to remove it from view and visibility to have a clean slate of what you're looking at and what you're managing.

Over the past 20 months, since we initially launched this portal, our team has worked to deliver enhancements which strive to improve the partners end-to-end funding experience - addressing needs such as better fund request validations in order to reduce rejection rates, speed up approvals and provide transparency with better dashboard details and notification content.

We've also included better pipeline visibility for your ACE opportunities that are used when pursuing certain funding benefits.

One of the newer features we released in late September is the Partner Initiative Funding template. This can be found on the main menu of the AWS Partner Funding Portal. And basically this template allows partners who are eligible to participate in certain initiative funding to access these and submit self-serve real-time with better notification, visibility and transparency.

Some examples you may have heard in RBA's keynote, the CEI (Customer Engagement Incentive) that is now accessible in AFP if you are an eligible partner for that benefit.

A little note on Operational Excellence - what we at AWS internally are trying to do to maintain this high standard of operational excellence:

We continue to improve, focusing on bringing features to our partners faster by having better internal efficiency. Some of those things include integration and continuous delivery, full deployment of process automation, and fast release features through feature flags.

We aim to optimize the performance through reducing overall page load times by changing our asset bundling process, placing our assets closer to our partners with CloudFront.

We also have fine grain performance metrics and SLAs to help us be proactive when monitoring and alerting for issues before you as a partner see these and observe these in the funding portal itself.

Now, security is job zero here for us at AWS and to ensure that your trust is our top priority, we are continuously reviewing our solutions and features that we release for this product. Every feature goes through an extensive security posture review. We also do file scanning, throttling, and runbook exercises to maintain that quality.

So we're going to continue in our journey here of improving the funding experience for partners such as yourself - providing capabilities to manage your requests more effectively with better essential functions as we move forward.

We want to provide the necessary experience so you as a partner and us at AWS can continue to improve the productivity and quality of submissions with these upgraded functionalities.

We want to simplify the funding experience so that by the time we reach our ideal state, we obtain the quickest possible decision making for a fully realized digital funding experience.

And these are just a few things that we are working on here in the coming year or so:

• Additional resources: These tools are here for everybody to ensure that there is enough transparency of what is available. I would highly recommend taking a look, if you haven't recently, of our updated AFP User Guide which provides details of that Partner Initiative Funding experience that I just mentioned and those supported funding programs that are contained in there. We also have refreshed our demonstration videos available in Partner Central as well.

• One additional item to touch on: We've recently introduced a feedback feature in the AWS Partner Funding Portal. I highly encourage you, the next time you log into AFP, you'll notice in the top right corner a feedback button. If you could take the time of the next fund request or next time you're managing your funding, feel free to drop us a feedback line of information. We highly value that input and we leverage that information to help us iterate continuously and understand where to prioritize our next efforts.

Call to action:

• Read: Take a look at the AFP User Guide and for that matter, even the APN Funding Program Guide as well.

• Watch: Don't be afraid to watch any of our refreshed on-demand "How To" videos of how to submit or manage a fund request using AFP.

• Participate: Like I said, submit feedback directly into the portal. We will collect that information and use that to prioritize the next set of features to continually enhance the experience. Or if you'd like to meet me in person afterwards, you can visit me over at the Partner Network booth #330 after today's session.

With that, I'd like to say thank you to everybody who's attended. And if you have a chance, please complete the session survey in today's session in the mobile app for re:Invent. So with that, I'd like to say thank you and have a great rest of your day.

Thank you!