 16, brought to you by AWS and its ecosystem partners. Now here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to AWS re-invent 2016. You're watching theCUBE, we're the worldwide leader in enterprise tech coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, happy to be joined by Jeff Frick for this segment and really excited to welcome to the program a first time guest, Dorothy Copeland, who's the general manager of global partner ecosystems with AWS. Dorothy, thanks for joining us. So we even saw, your Twitter handle is DC in Seattle. So DC is your initials, but also it's like, wait, is that Washington DC? But you're in the state of Washington, Seattle, so we're getting on with that. With the head in the clouds as well. Head in the ground, Pete there. We love, first of all, congratulations. The ecosystem at this show is phenomenal. Not just 32,000 people, so many booths, and you get the technology partners, the go-to-market partners. What's the vibe, there's got to be so much that you and your team were doing, getting ready for us. Give us a little bit of an insight. Yeah, thank you. Well, it's very exciting. Our ecosystem grew faster this year in the last 12 months than any other time. We grew by over 10,000 partners around the world. And over 60% are now headquartered outside the US. So we're really proud of the international representation that our ecosystem has. The other thing that's interesting is that our partners themselves are growing really quickly. So you may have seen in our partner summit keynote that their partners are now almost doubling their AWS generated revenue. So over 90%, year over year. And Dorothy, there's the marketplace. You've got lots of different programs. How do you kind of bucketize all the people that you work with and help make sure that you can just kind of scale and growth is just core to Amazon. So how does that work? Sure, absolutely. And I always say that we're building programs at the speed of cloud because our partner ecosystem is growing so quickly we've needed to develop programs at a very, very fast pace. And so we work with partners, software partners like Splunk or Infor or SAP as well as partners that like global SIs like Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant, TCS just became a premier partner. So our ecosystem is very broad. And the idea behind it is that we want to make sure that we have partners that are helping customers deploy AWS in many different ways. And so we encourage our partners to have customization and to build really robust solutions and services on us. So Amazon is innovating so fast that I'm curious what kind of guidance you give to your partners. So we talked to Accenture last year when they launched their program and I think the message is pretty clear there. There's lots of opportunity. I wonder the technology partners, Splunk and Infor companies that are growing, and they're doing acquisition. How do you, you know, it's probably not swim lanes but what guidance do you give them so that they can grow, they can make money and they know that it's safe to be, you know, a good Amazon partner? We always tell them to make sure that they're providing their software in the way that customers want to consume it. So bring your own license, SaaS as well as marketplace, AWS marketplace. And so we want to make sure our advice to partners is always provided in many different ways. So we did a study with, we commissioned Forester to do a study earlier this year with our SaaS partners and they found that the majority of partners that have moved their software to SaaS are doing that based on customer demand. The customers are getting a lot of benefit from consuming software via SaaS. And they're also gaining really healthy margins. So over 70% margins from SaaS offerings. You see this also on the AWS marketplace. We now support SaaS in the marketplace which has been a really exciting announcement. We actually announced it last week and many partners are leaning into that making their software available via marketplace via their own means through their own sales teams, through channels. So we're really like amazon.com. We're really all about helping partners to make sure that they're able to capture customers in whatever way that customers want to consume their offering. It's funny, we've had Maureen Launagren on a couple times talking about trying to develop training courses as fast as the engineers are kicking them out for new products so that she can enable the ecosystem to take advantage of all these things you guys offer. Because the pace of innovation only seems to be accelerating, not slowing down at all. Definitely, and we work really closely with Maureen's team as well our partners hold tens of thousands of certifications now. So we have many different training programs that we provide specifically for partners. So the other interesting thing with the pace of innovation is we launched this week what we call our services delivery program which validates partners that have expertise in specific AWS services such as DynamoDB or Kinesis or even in Q1 we'll have an Alexa services delivery partner program available. And so what we have been finding is that as customers are looking for ways to adopt AWS services and all the great services that you've seen us talk about that are new this week, they need partners to help them deploy it and manage it. And so for example, the Aurora Postgres that we announced yesterday, we already have a core group of services delivery partners that we validated as being strong in that area. So that's something that you'll see us take a big focus on is helping partners get very specialized either in workloads and verticals through our competency program or in specific AWS services because that's really what customers need. So as you look forward, huge robust ecosystem here. I mean, 32,000 people speaks for itself. What are your kind of priorities next? Is it geographies that are maybe underserved? Are there verticals that are potentially underserved? What's kind of your strategies as you continue to build out the ecosystem? We see partners really in all sectors. So whether it's in the SMB or partners helping partners, there's a big ecosystem of consulting partners, helping technology partners deploy SaaS on AWS. Obviously you spoke with our head of public sector and we see a lot of growth there as well. And then internationally, as I mentioned, well over half of our partners are outside the US. And so we see that being a big area of growth as we go forward. Mike from Accenture paid you a good compliment. He said, we're no longer a systems integrator. We're now a, not system integrator, but salute services. There we go, services integrator. So now it's no longer integrating systems, but all the services that you guys offer. Absolutely. Dorothy, what makes a good Amazon partner? I have to imagine that you guys, Jeff said growing the partner ecosystem, that it's mostly them coming in as opposed to you having to reach out. What do you guys look for? What makes a good partner? And what doesn't make a good partner? So we're really seeing a trend of partner, on the consulting partner side, partners who get certified. So having really deep AWS knowledge is important. And also deciding what you'll be good in. So whether it's becoming an expert in big data or managed services, migration, we just launched our financial services competency on Tuesday. As you could see with our announcement with Capital One, there's a real need for partners in the financial services sector. IoT is also a new area for us. So we always encourage our consulting partners to choose specific areas to be really good in, because as cloud becomes the new normal, customers need partners that have expertise in specific areas. And then on the technology partner side, we recommend that they, as I mentioned earlier, that they make sure that they make their software available in the way that customers want to consume it, as well as consistently listen to their customers and innovate up the stack. Yeah, we touched briefly on some of the training pieces. I'm curious is, how do you help people, look at the broad trends? I mean, Amazon itself is hiring so many people. How do we make sure that we've got enough people that have the right skill set, both in-house for you, as well as for that broad ecosystem that you've got? Well, we've really committed to making sure that we're training our partners. So we have online training that we provide to all partners for free, so 10 hours of business and technical training. And then we give partners a discount in our three-day technical training classes that our training team provides. We also provide a lot of subsidies to partners as they grow within APN. We'll give them additional training vouchers to help them get more and more of their team trained. Dorothy, you guys had a nice partner, Van. I heard Andy Gasey was there. James Hamilton was there. I saw some of it get thrown into social media and we've had access to some of those. Give us some of the highlights. What is exciting your partners? What are they asking that maybe we should be expecting to see down the road? Yeah, well, they're asking for us to help promote them to customers, both in the help create awareness for them. So one of the launches that we did at the partner summit was our partner solution finder, which is focused on highlighting to customers which partners are really strong in managed services, competencies, service delivery. And so it's something that we're taking a real focus on is really promoting partners that have key solutions and expertise to our customers. So we also have provided tens of thousands of customer opportunities to our partners just in the past year alone. And those are two our partners that have the competencies and specialties. What I think of some of the challenges that, especially I think like the integrator side of working with, it was always like, oh, how does a salesperson understand everything that's out there? And we talked about training. Do you guys use things like marketing development funds for this? Or do you do things a little bit different since it's a new model of how customers do? We actually do provide our partners with marketing development funds. We also provide them with funding and AWS credits for things like customer proof of concepts, as well as for our software partners free trials that they want to do for customers. So that's something that we do help our customers as they go in and create net new customer, or we help our partners create net new customer wins. The last thing I'm kind of curious about is the line between being an AWS customer and being a native partner seems to be blurring a lot. I mean, disclosure, we've got a software product, it runs on AWS. Fantastic. You know, so. Would you like to become an AWS partner? So, yeah, how do you, you know, how do those dynamics come into play because it is kind of a little bit different than some of the traditional, you know, way that we thought about. Well, we view all of our partners as customers as well. So, because all of our partners are using AWS in one way or another. So that's, we start there. Companies that want to partner with us are those that want to promote their offering because it's based on AWS. And so, a lot of times with our software partners, which we call technology partners, it's important to their customers that they're on AWS and that they're promoting it. So, as an example, one of our newer partners, C3 IoT, which provides a predictive analytics. Solution, exactly right behind us. As well as an IoT solution, they've been using AWS as their, they built their solution from the ground up on AWS, but they became an AWS partner only earlier this year because they found that telling their enterprise prospects that their solution was on AWS helped them win the deal. And so, they're in well over 20 enterprises and over 70 million end points today. So, we see a lot of success in terms of partners being able to really promote the fact that they're an AWS partner and that they're built on AWS. Yeah, that Jeff's portion of the keynote today was very interesting for Twilio talking about, no, he was a company that built on AWS but is now partnering back with AWS and delivering solutions back through, I assume, independently as well as integrated in other solutions as part of the AWS stack. So, it's really cool kind of ecosystem. And they're a mobile competency partner. And so, we feature them, we feature Twilio along with all of our other mobile competency partners on our mobile solutions webpage. So, a customer coming in to look at what kind of mobile offerings AWS has, they will also see our mobile competency partners. And so, Twilio and other competency partners have found that to be really useful because customers then come to them for services. Twilio has been an advanced AWS partner for quite some time now. All right, so Dorothy, I want to give you the final word. Next year, when we have theCUBE, re-invent 2017, what do you foresee for your partner ecosystem? What'll change other than we'll probably have 50,000 people here at the event? Probably, yeah, probably even busier than the desert somewhere. I'm really excited by all the innovation that our partners are doing. I love hearing about their innovative solutions that didn't exist just a few years ago. And seeing them help enterprises create net new offerings that they're monetizing, those are the things that excite me the most. You'll see more competencies, you'll see more of our services being highlighted through our service delivery program. I think we'll have a lot of really interesting customer case stories where partners were really important in terms of helping those customers come to the cloud. All right, Dorothy Copeland, been a pleasure having you on. Welcome you into the CUBE alumni group here. And congratulations on all the progress of the global partner ecosystem. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from AWS re-invent 2016. You're watching theCUBE.