JJ: How can teams and partners do more together to help grow the mutual opportunity in education? Ken Harley, Head of UK&I Education, AWS: “What I’m really trying to drive within my team is a partner-first strategy where we engage together and build trust early. I’m challenging every one of my account managers to take our partners into first customer meetings rather than six meetings down the road where it’s often too late. “We’re trying to change our internal perception of partners. Too often we expect partners to bring us opportunities. I think we should be looking at it the other way around. We should be putting in the opportunities to our partners. “A little example of this is when we had a customer who had a challenge with their call centre leading up to student clearing, which is a critical system for them. Because we engaged straight away with a partner we delivered a successful solution to that university in six weeks we would not have done that without the partner.” JJ: What skills gap exists for our Digital Native Business (DNB) customers and how can I maybe want to characterise our customers? Chloe Warren, Senior DNB Account Manager, AWS: “DNB customers are good at building products, bringing them to market quickly and capturing market share. Where we are seeing these customers reach out for partner support is in three main areas. “Firstly, international expansion. If a DNB customer is headquartered in the UK, built their product, and proven it works, they want support expanding it globally, and they’re asking for support around scaling, regulation
changes and customer behaviour changes. “Secondly, doing things smarter. Because they believe in pace and speed bringing products to market they might not use the most efficient way to architect to build processes so they really appreciate that fresh set of eyes that a third party provides. “The final point is, with all the changes in the macroeconomic climate at the moment, KPIs are super, super important. We are used to growth at any cost, whereas now we’re seeing EBITDA profitability, everyone’s doubling down. That efficiency and help from a partner perspective to support our customers in this tricky climate, which we’re all feeling, is hugely appreciated at the moment.” JJ: As we see the SaaSification of the market, what opportunity in the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) space? Paddy Fitzpatrick, UK&I ISV Lead, AWS: “What we’re seeing is a strong demand in the market for SaaS. As people have moved from building to buying software, they want to buy software as a service, and pricing based on how much they can consume. “So the first thing we do now is help ISVs or software companies get SaaS ready, showing them how to build an application that can rapidly scale on modern architecture. Then secondly, around the business as well. “When you move to a SaaS model, there are challenges around making sure the salesforce is able to sell SaaS or Cloud to customers who’ve never been on Cloud before. Then there are things like licence and pricing models to think about, rethinking multiple elements of the business. So we’re helping people on the business side and the technical side of it.”
Ken Harley Head of UK&I Education
Chloe Warren Senior DNB Account Manager
Paddy Fitzpatrick UK&I ISV Lead
aws.amazon.com
Photo: John Newson, Head of Public Sector Partners, UK&I at Amazon Web Services
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