“Our partner ecosystem system has been a fundamental plank of AWS strategy since day one and it remains so,” Selipsky says. “If you put aside all the worry and the fear-mongering, if you look at the actual partners who have been significantly hurt by things AWS has done, I think you’re hard-pressed to find almost any literally in the history of AWS.”
Selipsky: And you’ll see us continuing to stress that customers want us to continue to build out these horizontal use cases, as well as industry-vertical, purpose-built solutions and we’ll continue to really accelerate our efforts in those areas.
Selipsky: There’s just an exploding need for digital skills and for cloud skills, in particular. Particularly with the pandemic, there’s been so much disruption to jobs and such underemployment and unemployment problems. We’ve committed to train 29 million people by the year 2025 with cloud skills. We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. And we’re doing that in a variety of ways where we have this program called AWS Restart, which is an intensive, full-time 12-week program, with a focus particularly on unemployed and underemployed people.
Selipsky: Our fundamental strategy around our partners is unchanged. Our partner ecosystem system has been a fundamental plank of AWS strategy since day one and it remains so. The only thing that’s changed is really, we continue to pour more and more resources into enabling the partner ecosystem. From a technical perspective, it’s with things like the AWS partner network APN as well as with people who work directly with our vast network of SI partners, ISV and technology partners, and reseller and distributor partners.
All the way back when we launched in 2006, I got this question. Every year. “Well, are you going to compete with your ecosystem? Are you going to destroy partners in your ecosystem?” And the answer has always been and remains, there are many, many thousands of explosive opportunities for partners in our ecosystem.
As AWS capabilities have grown, the number of partner opportunities similarly has grown exponentially. And if you put aside all the worry and the fear-mongering, if you look at the actual partners who have been significantly hurt by things AWS has done, I think you’re hard-pressed to find almost any literally in the history of AWS.
Selipsky: There are 100,000 successful partners. We continue to try to enable them for a simple reason, which is that’s what our customers want. Our customers want a really strong integrated platform from AWS and want us to work together with partners of their choice, not our choice. We continue to partner with all the global systems integrators. We continue to help every ISV on the planet, build a [integrated] offering and offer that on AWS. And we enable that technically.
And then we go to market with the biggest and most important of them. The way we view it is, we are collectively, with those partners, serving a joint end customer, and the customer doesn’t want to see any divisions between us and that’s got to look seamless. The reason it’s called an ecosystem and why it’s such a perfect metaphor, is an ecosystem is dynamic. It’s not static and any ecosystem, any species, has to evolve or it actually will cease to exist. But all of our partners … continue to build new capabilities for customers.