Public sector actionable insights: Grow through AWS Partner Programs

Right. Thank you so much. Can you all hear me? Ok, good. Ok, fantastic. Doing these presentations on the exhibit hall floor is always a little bit interesting. So if you can't hear us at any point, just raise your hand and we'll try to work on it.

Uh we're really excited to present to you today. We're gonna be talking about how you can accelerate your AWS business in public sector specifically via our partner programs. My name is Mike Kennedy. I'm the worldwide director of partner programs for public sector and I'm joined here by my colleague, Andres Carvajal who leads program activation for public sector.

And again, today, we're gonna be talking about partner programs and how you can accelerate growth and profitability with us in public sector.

Here's a specific agenda for today:

• We're gonna start by actually walking you through what is our framework with how we structure our programs and how you can grow with us.

• Then we're gonna get into those different stages that you can work your way through as a partner. The first is how you can build your skills and offerings. Then it'll be how do you take those offerings to market once you have them built. And then next, you'll really be in that sell and growth stage. And you'll see that we structure our programs across those stages as we go.

Alright. So let's start with the partner journey framework. The three main stages, as I mentioned, are really build, market, sell and grow. And one point that I'll have here is that we hear a lot from partners that hey, I have different services or solutions that might be in different phases of this continuum. So we often have partners that might be at build with some of what they do and they might be at sell and grow with other things. So you really get to what I call choose your own adventure of which stage you're currently in within our APN programs.

Now, this slide is probably our most popular slide. Just to tell you that we see in public sector, we get the question, a lot of what APN programs are most used in public sector for success. And what you see here on this slide is a combination of programs that are available across all of AWS, but also some programs that are public sector specific and you can see the way that they're structured here.

So we have programs that are on to build part of that journey. We have those on the market part and then we have sell and grow and then we have a few that actually go across different parts of that framework. But in general, this is a general mapping to keep in mind of our most used programs to help you grow in public sector.

And what we're going to do in this presentation is we're going to walk you through some of these a selected group on this slide and we're going to give you examples of how partners are using them to drive success.

Alright. So we're gonna start with that first phase i mentioned, which is the build phase. The first program I'm gonna talk about is the Partner Transformation Program or as we call it, PTP.

PTP is a global program designed to help partners accelerate their AWS journey and build a successful cloud practice. PTP is a mechanism where we actually come in and work with you as a partner and we assess your current cloud capabilities and then we help you develop a 100 day plan to go and build your first AWS solution or practice with us.

I call PTP one of our most proven and successful public sector partner programs. And in fact, over the last five years, we've had over 700 partners go through this program across 70 countries globally. And now we offer PTP in 11 languages.

So if you're just getting started with us or if you're a mature partner and you have a new area you want to develop, we really recommend PTP as a framework where we'll come in and help you create that business plan to create a cloud practice for success.

One new innovation we've had with PTP is as of this year, we're now offering what are called Targeted Transformation Modules. So in the past, the core PTP was just about building that overall practice or new solution. But we got feedback from a lot of partners that hey, we want specific workshops on areas that are of interest for us.

So we have now launched five different Targeted Transformation Modules. And the two you see here, we launched in June of this year. One is actually helping the financial leaders at your organization plan for the change in their margins and financials that they'll have as they move to the cloud. And the second is building your first Cloud Center of Excellence, which is key for those best practices as you think about how to have standards within your companies, of how you want to run AWS.

Our newest module that we actually just announced yesterday is a module now offering to have help partners build their first gen AI solution or practice.

Uh this is currently a pilot and it's available in the US and APJ to start. But then we're gonna roll it out globally as we learn from our partners, but we're really excited about this. So if you're experimenting with AWS services such as SageMaker, and you're really thinking about how do I monetize this, how to actually get a solution or service to market? I would really look at this offering and you can talk to your partner manager about it and apply.

But essentially they are two half day workshops. So not a huge time commitment and then you get three phases within those workshops. The first is we train you on all of the AWS services related to AI. So you have all of that knowledge. But then again, we look at your capabilities and your staff and we help you identify gaps. Do you have people today that can deliver these services or do you have a knowledge gap in your company? Then the final stage is we help you produce your first use case of here is what I actually want to build. Here's the gen AI use case I wanna build in public sector that could be content summarization, it could be text, it could be intelligent chat bots a lot of trends we're seeing, but it really helps you go from what should I do to actually having a tactical plan? And we're quite excited to give you an example of a partner.

Having success with PTP Tidal is a partner we have in Canada who actually used PTP to develop a new migration service. And now they've helped their customers in Canada go on to save an average of 70% versus what they're spending on prem and their prior businesses.

The second program that I'll highlight in the build phase is Sandbox Funding. Now, we have a myriad of funding programs as I'm sure many of you know, but funding in innovation, Sandbox Funding really helps you build solutions on AWS and it's available to partners at Registered stage and higher.

One of our partners, Revere Technologies based in Texas used Sandbox Funding to launch its first solution on GovCloud, which is called Scout PD. And what the funding does is we actually work with the partner and we estimate how much AWS usage will you have for actually building out that solution and then we help offset those usage charges to get that solution to market.

So if you have things, you know, you want to build on AWS but need a little bit of help with cost. Sandbox Funding can be a great starting point to go.

And with that, Andres, I think I'm gonna pass to you for the next section.

Andres: Thank you, Mike. Can you hear me well? Perfect.

So uh now we will transition to some partner programs for the market phase of your journey.

First of all, we're going to talk about the AWS Competency Program. So the Competency program validates and promotes AWS partners. We demonstrated AWS technical expertise and proven customer success.

We have competencies supporting AWS partners doing business in our four verticals, government education, nonprofit and public safety. These public sector verticals are available for services partners in the Advanced or Premier tier and software partners who have completed their FTR (Foundational Technical Review) that partners in their software path have to do to be able to access these competencies.

To get started with these competencies and access key benefits such as partner budgeting, priority listing on AWS partner platforms and funding benefits. You will need to enroll into the AWS Partner Path and choose the competency that you want to have.

So now let's go to one example of a partner leveraging these competencies. This is Amex, Amex Info Technologies is an AWS partner with an Smart City competency. They are based out of Ahmedabad, India and they are helping the Indian city of Nashik tackle pollution by encouraging people to travel on buses instead of cars. The city has made its bus network more efficient using Amex IoT based Intelligent Transport Transportation Management System. ITMS which runs on AWS. The ITMS uses Amazon EC2 and Amazon Lambda, serverless functions and has helped increase route earnings by 100% and 50% as more than 1 million citizens made their daily commutes on the buses each month. This is an example of one partner using this Smart Cities competence.

Now let's go to another example of another partner in a very different vertical, this partner, it's in Education. So PowerSchool is an Education AWS Big Data competency partner since 2020 it's a leading provider of K-12 education technology solutions. Committed to providing a great user experience. Power School wanted to orchestrate releases of its SIS platform and deliver frequent updates to its customers without services interruptions. After migrating the whole platform to AWS Polish School leverage the AWS Partner Network to align with a fellow public sector partner. LaunchDarkly that it's here with us who specializes in DevOps facilitation. With their support. Power School was able to update their platform to release new features in minutes and maintaining a strong customer experience for over 45 million students.

Now we're going to switch programs. We talked about AWS competencies. Now we're going to talk about a program that it's called the Big for Small Business here at AWS. We are deeply committed to supporting small businesses and minority and female owned businesses. Our theme Big for Small Business program is designed to support a small and my minority owned partner businesses providing to these critical partners with expedited access to funding marketing and technical support. This program is available for both services partners and software partners.

What is our criteria for a small business? It's less than 150 employees. If you meet that criteria, you can access this program and get all those benefits that I talked about like marketing and technical resources. Since we launched this program, 825 small businesses across 41 countries have benefited from this program and have generated over 3000 launch opportunities specifically with public sector.

This is one example of one partner that it's using this program. UIS Health Cloud provides security and consulting services for health care customers with a focus on helping customer meet late the local health data regulations. With the the Big for Small Business program, UIS Health further differentiated their practice and validated their cloud expertise by obtaining the AWS Health Care competency, the AWS Life Science competency and joined the Global Security and Compliance Acceleration Program. E Health recently supported a customer who specializes in medical artificial intelligence studies. This customer's technology has been deployed in France, the UK, Greece and the US and has enable the customers to create on demand delivery of studies by building a cloud infrastructure and software environment that can set up studies in hours and before they used to do it in days, four days now it's in, it's in hours now over to your mic.

Mike: Great. Thank you, Andres.

Alright. So now we're moving into that final stage of the framework that I talked about before and that is selling and growing.

First, I want to talk about a program called ISV Accelerate, which is for all you software partners out there that helps you cosell with the AWS field. What we do with this program is we match partners with AWS sellers so that they can work opportunities together because that's what our customers tell, tell us, brings the best experience when AWS and the partners are coming combined.

And as you can see here, the growth we're seeing with this program is amazing. Over th 11,000 opportunities one year to date growing at 100 and 38% year. over year. One example of a partner really leaning into ISV Accelerate is Open LMS and they've had over 100 and 30 cos selling wins with us since joining the program.

The next topic i'm gonna talk about is really key. And that is the topic of distribution. For those not familiar with distribution. it's a really standard way that companies go to market within all verticals, let alone public sector. And the way i like to talk about distributors is they can be real force multipliers for you.

So they are often working with customers that buy all sorts of IT solutions and they can represent you as they talk to the customers about their overall IT mission. And what's really exciting that you can see here is we're finding that partners that work with distributors are growing at over 80% year over year with us and seeing much faster rates of growth.

And I would say particularly as they're first getting started with AWS a little bit on the value chain that distributors provide. What you see on this side is basically those different services that distributors are providing to their downstream partners.

It starts with really go to market support. So they'll provide sales and presales support as well as marketing for their partners, they'll also help their partners leverage programs like many of that we're talking about today where they're literally curate for you, the types of programs that may be a fit for you at different times.

Then in addition, they provide operational support, things such as billing and backend office items that you may not wanna have expertise on as a business. And then finally, they'll offer technical resources to go in and scope those different opportunities.

Alright. And now Andres, I'll pass it back to you.

Andres: Thank you. Here is the remaining transcript formatted for better readability:

Andres: Thank you.

Well, this is the final topic of today regarding partner programs. This is a very exciting new incentive called the AWS Customer Engagement Incentive or CEI. And it's designed to make you win net new and early stage AWS customers.

CEI supports partners to win accounts in the early stages of AWS cloud adoption and to accelerate their growth on AWS. This incentive will lower the cost of sale and increase profitability for greenfield customer adoption.

We'll see how this works. So, CEI offers incentives including cash or credit payments for a scoping opportunities up to $1000 winning opportunities up to $5000 and up to 7% additional discount during a 24 month period.

So if you get a part, if you, if you get an opportunity with a customer that is greenfield, you could be eligible for those three incentives with this program.

CEI requires you to be enrolled in the Hardware Services or Distribution paths at Validated stage and have launched at least one eligible opportunity during the last year to be able to use this program.

To get started with CEI your customer has to be greenfield. You can check that in Partner Central. Later on, we're going to talk a little bit more about Partner Central. And from there, you can submit all the opportunities for this greenfield customers in a that it's our APN Customer Engagement tool that it's also located in Partner Central.

Ok. So now we will wrap up this presentation with some words about the Partner Central. So we have mentioned accessing the Partner Central portal a fair bit during this presentation. So we wanted to give you some insights as to what to expect when accessing the different parts of the experience.

So here you have some registration prompts that focus on user inputs and opt ins for content. Also in Partner Central under the Home tab is the Task View which allows you to track different partner activities and work against your requirements and goals.

We continue to prioritize simplification. So you're going to hear a lot more about the new Partner Center experience uh in 2024.

So you can access on this slide, very important resources, scan this QR codes to learn more about our programs. In addition to this, we have Partner Journey Maps. These are very good resources that give you partner programs recommended according to your path and to what you want to or the different businesses that you want to grow with AWS.

So you can reach out to your partner teams or get this Partner Journey Maps also from Partner Central.

So with that, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to present you have here our LinkedIn profile. So please connect with us and any questions that you might have, we're going to be around and have a very good rest of reinventing. Thank you very much.

Thank you.