New AWS re:Invent Announcements: AWS Partner Keynote with Dr Ruba Borno

We’re more than halfway through AWS re:Invent 2023 and have had a remarkable amount of new services and features launched every day this week. If you haven’t been keeping up with the keynotes at re:Invent and want the highlights of each, I’d encourage you to read our team’s blog posts covering each keynote of the week: 

• Monday Night Live with Peter DeSantis
• Tuesday’s keynote from Adam Selipsky 
• Wednesday’s keynote from Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian

To wrap up Wednesday’s announcements, we had a keynote delivered by Dr. Ruba Borno, ​​Vice President of AWS Worldwide Channels and Alliances. This keynote was primarily focused on the relationship between AWS and AWS Partners and how they can deliver value to their shared customers. Throughout the keynote, we not only had new announcements, but tons of great use cases and stories from partnerships between AWS, AWS Partners, and customers. 

The theme of the keynote was to help customers make the impossible seem possible by working with the right AWS Partner.

Let’s get into some of the new launches in the AWS Partner Space.

AWS Customer Engagement Incentive

There are so many new opportunities and prospects that have yet to move to AWS. This tool is designed to better address those opportunities. The AWS Customer Engagement Incentive will help AWS Partners engage companies that are new to AWS or in the early stage of adoption. 

Not only does it offset the cost and funds of every part of the sale cycle, it provides a simple global framework that Partners can use to focus on the initial customer workload, better drive the growth and spend of new AWS customers, and scale over time. 

It’s worth mentioning that this incentive is not a new announcement for re:Invent, however, it was launched earlier this year, which is new enough to still get a spot on my blog post. Since it was introduced, Partners have launched 87% of eligible opportunities in the pipeline.

The Generative AI Center of Excellence for AWS Partners

The pace of innovation in the generative AI space has been dizzying. It can be difficult to keep up with the rapid development of these tools. On top of that, you have a huge demand from customers who want to transform their businesses by implementing generative AI into their own technology stacks. 

AWS hopes The Generative AI Center of Excellence for AWS Partners will make it easier for Partners to keep up with the generative AI space to better serve customer needs. It provides both technical and non-technical enablement content and training, example customer use cases, forums for knowledge sharing, and best practices. 

With the center of excellence, AWS Partners can: 

• Familiarize themselves with a wide range of generative AI offerings
• Connect with leaders across the Amazon Partner Network on specialized generative AI applications
• Build applications that go beyond optimization and understand considerations like fairness, privacy, and safety
• Leverage data-driven insights and tools to accelerate customers’ generative AI journeys

Accenture and AWS Expanded Partnership

Accenture has consistently been an early adopter to the latest AWS technology. For example, when Amazon CodeWhisperer launched, Accenture adopted the technology and saw a 30% boost in performance in their development efforts. 

Accenture has announced that they will continue integrating AWS AI services into Accenture’s automation platforms. To scale this, Accenture has committed to training 50,000 development engineers on AWS AI services, such as Amazon Q and Amazon CodeWhisperer. 

Accenture is just one of the many companies that will contribute to content in The AWS Generative AI center for Excellence for AWS Partners, among other leaders in the space such as Anthropic, NVIDIA, and more. 

Additionally, Accenture also has its own Center for Advanced AI, which also offers accelerators, best practices, and hands-on training to better help their clients maximize the value of Amazon Q and other AWS AI services.

C3 Generative AI: AWS Marketplace Edition

C3 AI announced the availability of C3 Generative AI on the AWS Marketplace. This is a no-code, self-service environment that provides a fully functional generative AI application. Users can use this application to get better insight into their data, and start asking questions about their data in just minutes of setup time. 

In fact, not only is it functional, it also takes care of some of those pesky problems that large language models often experience. C3 AI claims that there are no hallucinations, no cyber security risks, and no IP liability problems. 

If you’re interested in potentially using this tool, you can use the QR code located in the photo above to join the private preview.

ServiceNow and AWS Expanded Partnership

ServiceNow and AWS have been brainstorming about how to bring AWS’ reach, data, and scalability and combine it with ServiceNow’s intelligent platform for digital transformation. 

In January 2024, ServiceNow and its full suite of solutions will be available as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering in the AWS Marketplace. 

Additionally, AWS and ServiceNow are teaming up to launch industry-specific AI tooling to list in the AWS Marketplace. For example, the two companies are currently working on a supply chain solution by integrating AWS Supply Chain with ServiceNow to better streamline supply chain management.

New AWS Partner Competencies

The AWS Competency Partner Program is a way for customers to validate that AWS Partners have the appropriate skills and technical expertise to to help customers in a specific area. AWS has released three new areas of AWS Competency specialization, including:  

• The AWS Resilience Competency Partners, which helps customers improve the availability and resilience of their workloads. 
• The Cyber Insurance Competency Partners, so that customers can find policies from insurers. AWS customers get a quote for the cyber insurance coverage they need within 2 business days.
• The Built-in Competency Partner Solutions, that provides an infrastructure as code solution to install, configure, and integrate Partner software with foundational AWS services.

AWS Marketplace SaaS Quick Launch

SaaS Quick Launch is a new feature in the AWS Marketplace which makes it easy for customers to quickly configure, deploy, and launch SaaS products on AWS. It does this by using CloudFormation templates that are defined by the software vendor and validated by both the software vendor and AWS to ensure the software adheres to the latest security standards. 

In the AWS Marketplace, you can find the SaaS products that use this feature by looking for the “Quick Launch” tag in the product description. Once you click on Quick Launch for the product of your choice, you’ll be able to easily deploy the software. This feature is generally available, so keep an eye out for the Quick Launch tag in the AWS Marketplace.

AWS Marketplace APIs for Sellers

By using AWS Marketplace APIs for Sellers, you can now enable AWS Marketplace access through your current applications. Using your existing applications, you can build AWS Marketplace products, offer, resale authorization, and agreements workflows directly into your own systems. This leads to a greater efficiency for the Partner, and can also encourage customers to make Marketplace purchases through your domain. This feature is generally available and ready to use now.

Pricing Adjustments to AWS Marketplace

AWS is lowering pricing for the AWS Marketplace effective January 2024. The new pricing model will be a flat fee structure of 3 percent. In some cases, it may be even lower. 

Here are the updates to the pricing model: 

• For private offers under a million, it’s now a 3% fee. 
• For deals between $1 million and $10 million, it’s now a 2% fee. 
• For private offers greater than $10 million, it’s now a 1.5% fee. 
• For renewal fees for private software and data, it’s now a 1.5% fee.

AWS and Salesforce Partnership Expansion

AWS and Salesforce have announced an expansion to their partnership so that customers can better benefit from the combined value of both products. 

As part of the announcement, the companies released the following information: 

• Salesforce will begin offering their products on the AWS Marketplace, including products such as Data Cloud, Service Cloud, Heroku, Tableau, Mulesoft, and many more. This is available now with expanded product support planned for 2024. 
• AWS and Salesforce are making Data Cloud a SaaS offering. This enables customers to use AWS services to process and analyze data stored in Data Cloud.

AWS Partner Central Enhancements

Recently, a new AWS Partner Central experience was launched. The new enhancements personalize the experience for the AWS Partner and the roles in their business. This includes automated prescriptive guidance with tasks and next best actions customized for the Partner. 

For AWS Partners enrolled in the software path, AWS is also providing an integrating experience between AWS Partner Central and AWS Marketplace. This means that AWS Partners can create AWS Marketplace listings from AWS Partner Central. By linking your AWS Partner Central and AWS Marketplace accounts and users, it also enables you to see AWS Marketplace analytics in your Partner Analytics Dashboard. 

Finally, they’ve introduced a new co-sell experience through APN Customer Engagements (ACE) that is customized towards the AWS Partner and their co-sell needs. This enables Partners to better maintain pipeline hygiene, by prioritizing opportunities where AWS sales support is needed, providing insight on net new engagements, and stardizing the information gathered in the Partner referral and AWS referral experience. 

Further, Partner ACE pipeline is now integrated with AWS Marketplace Private Offers, providing real time sales insights and the ability to unlock new growth opportunities more easily.

AWS Partner CRM Connector Now Supports AWS Marketplace

The AWS Partner CRM Connector now supports AWS Marketplace, better enabling Partners to manage and publish Marketplace private offers and resale authorizations. The CRM Connector also supports AWS Partner Central ACE Pipeline Manager capabilities, including an enhanced feature to view a summary of AWS Marketplace private offers.

The AWS Partner CRM Connector is available at no-cost on the Salesforce AppExchange.

AWS Sustainability Goals

Finally, we ended the keynote with a talk on sustainability. It’s no secret that AWS is committed to sustainability, with plans to be net zero carbon by 2040, water positive by 2030, and 100% renewable energy-powered by 2025. 

Sustainability goals are not just top of mind for AWS, they’re becoming increasingly important to customers as well. In fact, 1 in 3 customers say that sustainability is a key priority for their business. To meet this customer need, AWS Partners have created over 1,000 sustainability solutions hosted in the AWS Solutions Library and AWS Marketplace. 

Finally, AWS has encouraged AWS Partners to join The Climate Pledge. Over 450 Companies have joined, and the number is expected to grow.

That brings us to the end of this keynote. The AWS Partner space has been innovating at a significant pace this year. Hopefully, these improvements make the lives of AWS Partners much easier. Enjoy the rest of the week!