A Roundtable Conversation with AWS Partner Award Winners

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On The Road here in Las Vegas at AWS re:Invent 2024. The keynote was incredible. I mean, the amount of new product announcements, Dan, related to shockingly, surprise, AI, was amazing. And even talked about non-AI stuff. Can you believe it? non-AI, IT apps and infrastructure are going on?

Daniel Newman: We call it NAI because we still want to get AI into the category, but it’s actually things. But we really are putting all the parts together, right? I mean, when you talk about the storage build out or you talk about security, it doesn’t really, it’s not mutually exclusive. But I think what is important is, as we sort of hit this second phase, I think yesterday, one of our guests called it the second act of AI.

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Daniel Newman: We’re starting to get to that point where a little bit of the exuberance is wearing and some of the pragmatism is coming back and like, hey, we got to do something with all this stuff.

Patrick Moorhead: Exactly.

Daniel Newman: We need storage, we need networking, we need security, we need partners. We need all these things to happen. And over the three plus hours, that’s not a joke, it’s three plus hours of keynote, they covered a lot of ground.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s right. And you hit it. I mean, it does take a village to pull all this stuff together. AWS doesn’t do this in isolation alone, they have partners. And at every incredible tech conference, you have partner awards, and it is award season and AWS is giving out awards. And I want to welcome Julia to The Six Five.

Julia Chen: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, it’s great. We’re going to have fun. We’re going to talk to you in a little bit.

Julia Chen: Yep.

Patrick Moorhead: We’re going to bring in the award winners-

Julia Chen: Yes.

Patrick Moorhead: … after you to talk about their experiences. But thanks for coming on the show.

Julia Chen: Happy to be here.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, rolling out the carpet. It is the Grammys of Tech Awards here on The Six Five. We’re pretty excited to be part of this. But this could be a new thing for us.

Patrick Moorhead: It could.

Daniel Newman: I always appreciate when our vendor partners help us identify new opportunities.

Patrick Moorhead: It’s a TAM expander.

Daniel Newman: It is a TAM expander. Julia, just really briefly, describe your role here at AWS.

Julia Chen: So, I have the privilege of leading a group called Partner Core. And what that is, is my team is in charge of all the partner programs, all of our strategic collaboration agreements, initiatives, enablement, digital tools that help our partners build a great and thriving business with AWS.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s great. I mean, by the way, core says it all. And if you’re not in the core, you don’t want to be doing this. Anyways, move forward here. So, can you talk a little bit about the criteria for how the award winners from GSI, Tech, Marketplace and Consulting came together?

Julia Chen: Yeah, absolutely. So, we had over 1,200 nominees for these award categories. So, we published the award categories and we had all these nominations. We brought in the applications and we actually sent them to a third-party research company that scored all of the applications for us, and they picked the award winners. And so, that’s how we wound up with our top award winners was through that. And we looked at all different things, but mostly it’s about customer obsession and customer value delivery, so that was ultimately what we were looking for.

Daniel Newman: Well, I mean of the 1,200, did we apply?

JuliaChen: Yeah. What happened?

Daniel Newman: No, I don’t think we’re a part.

Patrick Moorhead: Next year.

Julia Chen: Where was your application?

Daniel Newman: Next year, because that way I want to kind of be like, “Hey everybody, the next award was winning by us. We win.”

Julia Chen: Yes.

Daniel Newman: So, talk a little bit about how you define the future of partnership, because we’re about to have some of these partners on.

Julia Chen: Yes.

Daniel Newman: Okay. You’ll exit stage left. We’re going to bring them out, put them the hot seat.

Julia Chen: Yep.

Daniel Newman: We’re going to ask them these questions. But how does this partner thing evolve? How do you kind of see and continue to grow and evolve this AWS partner ecosystem?

Julia Chen: Well, I mean, as you guys are talking about, cloud is evolving, right? So initially, it was just this thing, it was the thing in the air, it was storage and compute. It was there, yeah, and that’s what it was. But we keep adding more and more tools to it, right? So, you reference security, you reference Gen AI. There’s lots of different things that we keep adding to it. And what’s really important is that AWS ourselves can only reach so many customers. We really depend on this partner network to extend our reach and extend our relevance. And a lot of these partners are very trusted advisors to these customers that are out there.

So, we heavily rely on our partners. We love our partners very much. They build all kinds of cool stuff. Technology solutions, service solutions, advisory solutions for the customers, and the future of this is just this continual build of how do you apply the Gen AI to a supply chain? How do you apply the Gen AI to the hospital? How do you get security everywhere? That’s what our partners are doing. So, as I think about the future of partnership, we’re always working with our partners to get them the latest and the greatest, and they’re always building really, really cool things on top of AWS, and bringing all that to our customers out there.

Patrick Moorhead: So Dan, looks like we’ve got the inside scoop of how this comes together and how maybe we can put our application in next year. And we know Julia, but I don’t know. We’ll see.

Julia Chen: And knowing me doesn’t help, right? Yeah, you got to send in that application.

Daniel Newman: Well, I mean, we can help drive some new criteria.

Julia Chen: Yes.

Daniel Newman: But Julia, we look forward to sitting down with all these guests and pulling this all together.

Julia Chen: Yes.

Daniel Newman: Congratulations on another great year.

Julia Chen: Thank you so much.

Daniel Newman: And we look forward to watching how Partner Core evolves. So Pat, with that, let’s bring on the first award winner.

Patrick Moorhead: Let’s do it. And first up is our consulting award winner. We have JB with Deloitte. JB, welcome to the show.

JB McGinnis: Thank you for having me.

Patrick Moorhead: You got it, man. So, in as few words, you only get three words, no, I’m just kidding. It has to rhyme with an animal. Not really. No, seriously. Can you talk a little bit about your relationship, your partnership with AWS?

JB McGinnis: Sure. Absolutely. Happy to. So, just for a little bit of background, I’ve been part of this AWS extended community since it started, right? And I’ve been with Deloitte for the past several years.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s incredible.

JB McGinnis: And so, leading the relationship and the go-to-market motion together with Amazon is a pretty special job. It’s a really good feeling when your job doesn’t feel like work.

Patrick Moorhead: Sure.

JB McGinnis: And so, our cultures are really aligned the way that we think about keeping the success of our client at the forefront of the motion as we sort of kind of create creative constructs together. We’re just culturally aligned. Our goals are aligned. The way that Amazon creates their growth initiatives, we map our behavior to those growth initiatives as well. And so, we’ve seen a ton of success.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s great.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. So, in your own words, kind of, how do you describe the road ahead? We’ve seen this massive change, a big inflection, AI’s change. It was cloud, now the AI era. Kind of, what’s the road ahead with AWS look like?

JB McGinnis: So, all of us saw the keynote today, right? So, the pulse of innovation that comes out of Amazon, we really think of ourselves as the general contractors for that innovation so that we can take that into our client’s world. We’re going to stay focused on really creating and establishing that creative collaborative engineering culture together with Amazon. So, we help on kind of the front end of the products and get to understand them. And we’ve got a full 360 relationship with Amazon, so we buy from, we sell to, and we sell with, right? And so, I think really remaining the general contractors for that innovation and bringing it, making it real in our client’s world, that’s what’s on our roadmap.

Patrick Moorhead: I love that. General contractor. That’s pretty cool. It’s a great way to look at it. And I have, it’s been a long time since I saw that many announcements in one contiguous space covering so many different areas. It’s really wild.

JB McGinnis: I agree.

Patrick Moorhead: So, can you talk a little bit about the award? I know Dan was joking about getting a little bit more business out of it, but tell me about the award. What does it represent? Does it help you get business? It certainly would seem to me that your potential clients looking at, if they want to do something with with AWS, they would start with you.

JB McGinnis: Sure. We’re very grateful for these awards. We’re going to remain extremely humble as well, right? And stay very focused on the success of our clients. We won a number of awards. We’re super proud of the North America Partner of the Year award, but we’re going to use it to our advantage and serve our clients in the right way, and remain humble along the way.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s great. I love that.

Daniel Newman: Well, JB, thank you so much for sitting down with us. Congratulations again on the award.

JB McGinnis: Thank you.

Daniel Newman: Have a great rest of your AWS re:Invent.

JB McGinnis: Thank you. Enjoy Vegas.

Daniel Newman: Thanks. And next up, we have our two award winners for the AWS Global Marketplace. We have Tom and Bill from Wiz and Okta. Tom and Bill, congratulations on the award.

Bill Hustad: Thank you.

Patrick Moorhead: Welcome to the show. Hey, we could start off maybe Tom with you, we can talk about the partnership with AWS, just in general.

Tom Henderson: Well, it’s super close to Wiz. I mean, we started as a Marketplace first, ISV. We have a dream to be the fastest to a billion dollar through the Marketplace ISV of all time. So, it’s ambitious, but we have a lot of high hopes. And this year, we added partners to that traditional GSIs and RSIs to that.

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Tom Henderson: Adding a lot more mix to it.

Patrick Moorhead: No, I love the aspiration there. Bill, how about you, talk about the relationship?

Bill Hustad: Yeah, a little different. Actually, Okta is a 16-year-old company. We’re a little slow to get on Marketplace. I think we really cemented our relationship with Marketplace after a long partnership in 2021. But in earnest, just in the past two years, we’ve been executing very heavily through Marketplace with our partners. And for us, similarly, I think that our trajectory over the past two years really proved to the company what a big go-to-market lever this is, not just for how we transact through customers, but also what it means for all our partners to transact through Marketplace.

Patrick Moorhead: And obviously doing something right. Within two, three years, you’re up here and you have an award.

Bill Hustad: Yeah, pretty amazing. I mean, yeah, you look at it and it’s felt pretty quick as well. But overall, you got to thank the team. We really leaned in with some big goals and aspirations of what we wanted to do through Marketplace. I’ve got to thank our AWS partners as well on that side because they really helped us navigate. And as we think to the future, there’s a lot of positive things in front of us as well. We just signed our first SCA, so lots of good things happening for us.

Daniel Newman: So Bill, how do you sort of describe the road ahead then in your partnership with AWS?

Bill Hustad: Yeah. So, coming off of that, just signing the SCA, it kind of outlines where we think the big opportunity is. And it’s a couple of different areas. The first is how we go to market together. So, we have a lot of co-sell incentives in market with our sellers and the AWS sellers. We see that as really, really important, especially globally, and looking at Marketplace to be a good foundation for places that we can’t execute. But secondly, also when we think about what we’re doing together as a broader partnership with AWS is what we’re doing from a product to product perspective. So, looking at AI, and Okta being the world’s identity company and looking at where that’s growing, you need to have a secure experience for your users, for the systems. And so, also looking about how we go to market together from a product to product perspective is really important for us. And then lastly is continuing to multiply in all the things we’ve done well together so far. And I feel, and I know the AWS team feels the same way, both at Okta and at AWS, is we’re just starting.

Daniel Newman: And Tom, what about you? What does the journey with AWS look like going forward?

Tom Henderson: Well, it’s been good, but we have a lot of work to do. We’d like to go public, and then what’s the state of that in the next few years? And we’re going to make the Marketplace as the foundation. But we also have to go build a channel ecosystem on the fly. We’re only a four-year-old company. So, recruiting the top GSIs, RSIs, and trying to do the tri-party together. We’re really getting the off-balance sheet resources, whether it’s AWS or it’s a large GSI selling, delivering for us. So, Marketplace is huge. It’s paramount, but also really leveraging the co-sell and not waiting until the end of a sales cycle for all of our sales people. Moving it into the middle of our sales process and really instituting that internally. So, a lot going on and we have a lot of work to do.

Patrick Moorhead: So, as a follow-up, Tom, could you tell us a little bit about the award, and maybe even moving forward, what could it mean to your business? I mean, is it this attraction loop for if you want to do something AWS in your area, go talk to Wiz?

Tom Henderson: Well, AWS is, I mean, the biggest telemetry engine in the world. And so, leveraging AWS for co-sell is, I mean, we haven’t even untapped that even though we’ve been doing it religiously. So, leveraging this award, which we’re super grateful for, and getting access to the sales teams and the delivery teams and the SAs in the field-

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Tom Henderson: … to get audiences and just get the word out is super important right now.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. So, Bill, you talked about, I mean basically, this is a three-year relationship and here you are. What does getting the award mean to your business? Again, attractor loop, bring more people in who are looking for what you do?

Bill Hustad: Yeah, the market gets it already. The market understands what it means to execute through cloud. I think for us and the award individually as Okta, it’s all about what it does internally to create momentum. And you think about the short time, there’s bets we had to make. We had to convince people, we had to train people what it meant to execute through Marketplace. We had to work with partners and let them know that this is a very positive thing for everybody. So, winning the award from that perspective really helps us amplify. So, it’s going to create more momentum to really build our relationship off. But I do have to mention too, that we also won another award. So, we did win another award that was the Nonprofit award. And that award was really, again, reflecting our partnership with AWS and the Crisis Text call center, and the work that we both do together to support those efforts, which is a 24/7 call center supporting mental health and awareness.

Daniel Newman: Congratulations.

Bill Hustad: Yeah.

Daniel Newman: Well, Tom and Bill, I want to thank you both for spending a little time here with us on The Six Five here at AWS re:Invent.

Bill Hustad: Thank you guys.

Tom Henderson: Appreciate it.

Daniel Newman: Next up, we have the Global Technology Partner of the year, and joining us today is James from Palo Alto Networks. James, welcome to the show.

James Beasley: Thank you, guys.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, congratulations.

James Beasley: Thank you.

Patrick Moorhead: Award’s a pretty big deal here. Can you talk a little bit about your partnership with AWS?

James Beasley: Yeah, we have a long story to partnership with AWS actually. We’ve been doing this for, well, since the inception of the company. We started out as an AMI and just listed in the Marketplace, and we’ve gone all the way to the situation we’re in now where all our platforms are on AWS.

Daniel Newman: That’s amazing. So, what does the future look like? We’ve seen a past that it was storage and it was cloud and it was the expansion and of course AI, security. What does it look like going forward?

James Beasley: Well, so the partnership will be really important going forward. I think AWS has a leadership position in AI. What does it look like? To be honest, I don’t know. If I knew, I would probably be trading stocks right now and not talking to you guys. But the partnership, I think, it looks like the partnership is getting stronger. It looks like us leveraging AI and joining AWS in the journey towards an AI future.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, and what you guys do is just so important in the world of AI. We’re analysts, so we both cover companies, cover your company. So, what does this award mean, let’s say for business, current customers, future customers, is this like a business magnet getting this award?

James Beasley: It is a little bit. I believe in this sort of technology virtuous cycle, right? AWS creates the platform for the technology. We come in with the security. We make the customers more secure, more confident in what they’re developing in AWS, so they build more. When you’re afraid, and AI is a great example right now. Nobody knows what security really looks like for AI. We’re trying it out. I think we’re fairly successful. We’re doing precision AI in partnership with AWS. The customers are not going to really fully deploy it until they know they’re secure in it.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s right.

James Beasley: Whether in prompt injections or what’s going on, we want to actually access real customer data and real customer experiences and generate experiences, use AI to enhance those experiences. But if you’re afraid to use AI because of security concerns, it’s going to slow down progress. So, we’re here to speed up progress.

Daniel Newman: Well, James, it sounds like a really exciting time, really exciting moment for Palo Alto and for AWS. I want to thank you so much for joining us here on The Six Five, and congratulations on the award.

James Beasley: Thank you. Thanks a lot.

Daniel Newman: And our final award goes to the global consulting partner of the year, and we have Chris from Accenture. Chris, welcome to the show. Congratulations on the award.

Chris Wegmann: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, what a great honor. Big deal here. Can you tell us a little bit about the partnership you have with AWS?

Chris Wegmann: Yeah. It goes back almost 14 years, almost since day one of AWS. Accenture was one of the first users of S3. So, we leverage S3 quite heavily inside of our organization and our CIO or internal IT organization back in the day. And we saw the value, we saw where cloud was going. So, we started an early partnership with AWS that turned into the Accenture AWS business group back in 2015. So, we’re nine years into that partnership, and we’ve reinvented ourselves multiple times. And I think this award shows kind of the recent reinvention of the partnership.

Daniel Newman: Right. I followed Accenture pretty closely. The company’s done some pretty remarkable things in terms of hitting some generative AI numbers, being able to come out and really talk about the business, how it’s shaping. I imagine that’s got to be part of the future. But kind of, how are you describing the road ahead between this partnership between Accenture and AWS?

Chris Wegmann: Yeah, I think one of the things we’ve really seen is the resurgence of modernization, right? And that modernization obviously uses generative AI as part of it. With all the new tooling around Q and things like that, we’ve seen that be reinvented to kind of kickstart, re-kickstart the modernization. But we see generative AI going into those applications, right? So, whether it’s data or whether it’s applications themselves, they need to be modernized with, to support the generative AI, the AI area. So, I think we’re going to continue to see a big focus on that in the partnership, whether that’s mainframe modernization, whether that’s just even infrastructure modernization. I think we put a lot of focus in cloud around automation, right? That’s the core of cloud. Now, I think the core of cloud is going to be generative AI, right? So, all that connected. So, I think I see the partnership continuing to focus there. Obviously, industry is a big focus for Accenture and for AWS. One of our hallmarks is being very deep in industries, working very closely with our clients, bringing that industry expertise. Bringing that together with AWS is definitely a place we’re headed more towards.

Patrick Moorhead: So, what does winning an award like this mean in terms of potential business, current customers, maybe getting bigger, maybe attracting new customers in?

Chris Wegmann: Yeah. Definitely, the awards definitely show the tightness of the partnership. Everyone can go say, “Hey, I’ve got a partnership with AWS. I’ve got a lot of trained and certified people.” But the process that AWS goes through to put these awards together, to do the nominations, to look at the data and actually make the awards, it means something to our customers. Our customers, we got several comments last night at our event we had last night, and the awards were sitting there. They asked us really, “Well, what are these for? What did you have to go through?” And the rigor that they put into it definitely resonated with our customers. So, yeah, I mean, we definitely think it drives more opportunities for us with our customers, and continues to show our investment that we’re making with AWS.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s great to hear.

Daniel Newman: Chris, I want to thank you so much for joining us here on The Six Five. Congratulations on the award and have a tremendous remainder of your re:Invent. Thanks for joining.

Chris Wegmann: Thanks for having me.

Daniel Newman: Well, Pat, there you have it. We had the chance to sit down with five different award winners. Clearly, these companies are incredibly committed to their relationship with AWS. But you can also tell, you get a sense, there’s a lot of gratitude and a clear sense with each of them that their business acceleration can be directly attributed to this partnership.

Patrick Moorhead: No, I know, and I didn’t expect that at the end. You get an award and you’re happy to get the award, but for it to be a business driver definitely should be an aspiration for everybody in the future. It was interesting. Some partners had been with AWS since the inception, like 14, 15 years. But there were also companies that just became a part of the network maybe three years ago. And I found that interesting. And each one of them, I don’t think this is just because you expect somebody in sales and marketing and channel management to do this, but they really seem to have this kind of kinship with their customers and problem-solving and figure stuff out. And that really is a hallmark of AWS I’ve found in researching them for, gosh, 14 years.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, no doubt. Between what they’ve built from a Marketplace standpoint, and then of course the way partners are able to grow and flourish as part of the AWS ecosystem, it’s really impressive. And as we sort of listened to all of them, like I said, strong gratitude, a lot of attribution of the success to the partnership, and clearly a long-term commitment. I think if you wanted to apply the word symbiotic-

Patrick Moorhead: Right.

Daniel Newman: … it seems that these partnerships were really symbiotic.

Patrick Moorhead: For sure.

Daniel Newman: Well, thank you everyone so much for joining us here for The Six Five, On The Road at AWS re:Invent. This was the global, actually, not just global. This was the partner awards show. We really appreciate having the chance to sit down with all of you. Subscribe, be part of our community. Join us for all of our content here at AWS re:Invent. The Six Five has been here all week. We got to say goodbye for now. See you all later.