 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. It's virtual this year. We're usually in person this year. We have to do remote interviews because of the pandemic, but it's been a great run, a lot of great content happening here in this next three weeks of re-invent. We've got two great guests here. It's part of our coverage of the APN partner experience. I'm your host, John Furrier. Barbara Kessler, Global APN Programs Leader. Ryan Broadwell, Global Director of ISVs for AWS. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for joining me. Hey, thanks for having us. It's great to be here. You know, we heard on the- Yeah, thanks for having us, John. Thanks for coming on. Sorry we're not in person, but tons of content. I mean, there's a lot of the VODs, the main stages, but the news hitting this morning around, Doug's comments around strong focus of ISVs is just a continuation. We heard that last year, okay? But this year, more focus, investments there, new announcements. Take us through what we just heard and what it means. Yeah, John, I'll jump in first and then let Barbara add some additional color and commentary, but I think it is a continuation for us as we look at continuing to build momentum with our ISVs. They're mission critical for us and we hear that loud and clear from our customers. As you think about building off what Doug was talking about, I think it's first important for us to start with. We look to help our partners build and build well-designed solutions on AWS, supporting their innovation and transformation and working together to deliver scalable, reliable, secure solutions for our customers. To facilitate this, we offer programs such as AWS Sass Factory that provide enablement to our ISVs to build new products, migrate single-tenant environments or optimize existing Sass solutions on AWS. And we do this through mechanisms like webinars, boot camps, workshops, and even one-on-one engagements. As you talked about, we just heard from Doug announced AWS Sass Boost, which is a ready-to-use open-source implementation of Sass tooling and best practices to accelerate ISVs Sass path. Through Sass Factory, which we've worked on with many ISVs in the last few years and you're well aware of, we have lots of learnings and we've helped a lot of partners make that journey towards Sass. Partners like BMC, Cloud Zero, NASDAQ, Cohesity, or F5, transform their delivery and business models to Sass. We've had a lot of demand for this type of engagement and we knew it was important that we come up with a scalable way to help partners accelerate their transformation. Sass Boost provides a prescriptive experience to transform applications through an intuitive tool with many core services needed to develop and operate on the AWS Cloud. In addition to that, we look to the WellArchitect framework which has proven to set the architectural best practices for designing and operating systems in the Cloud to help ISVs build their solutions on AWS. We just launched two additional lenses in WellArchitected tool to enable ISVs to conduct these reviews from within the AWS console. One Sass environment and one aligned with foundational technical reviews which helps partners prepare for the technical validation in AWS partner programs. You know, the Sass Boost, I love that. I was joking on Twitter. It sounds like an energy drink. Give me some of that Sass Boost. Don't drink too many of them. You're getting too strung out. But this is what people want, Barbara. This is about the partner network. You guys are providing more stuff, more successful programs and capabilities. This is what the demand is for. Help me get there faster. Path to Sass. Can you explain what this means for partners? I mean, what's in it for them? Can you share your thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. And Ryan talked about some of the things that we do to help partners build their ISV and software or Sass products. But in addition to that, we provide a number of programs and resources to help partners also grow their business through marketing and sales focused programs. It's an area that we are focused on investing deeply with our partner community. For example, we offer APN marketing central through which partners can find and launch free customizable marketing campaigns or even find a marketing agency to work with that has experienced messaging AWS. That also offers APN marketing activity. We recognize that not all partners, especially if they're in their startup stages have those investments and skill sets yet around marketing. So Marketing Academy offers self-service content to teach partners who don't have that capability at house tonight, how to drive awareness campaigns and build demand for their offerings. We also offer a broad set of funding benefits to help partners starting from the build stage that Ryan talked about through sandbox credits to support their development. Although it's in marketing with market development bonds and through selling with what we call our partner opportunity acceleration program, which is how we fund POCs to support our partners and winning new customers. We also heard Doug announced in the keynote that we are launching the ISV Accelerate program. This is our new co-selling program for ISVs that offers compensation incentives for AWS account managers, access to coastal specialists and reduced marketplace listing fees to help our partners continue to grow their business with us. You know, successful selling is amazing. You want to make money, right? I mean, come on, you're bringing a lot to the table. Co-selling, I think that's a huge point. Nice call out there. Ryan, can you give some examples of partners that have been successful with these resources? Hey, John, thank you. Yeah, it'd be great to kind of walk through one good example in a little bit of detail. You know, and what we've seen with SciSense is a great example of a partner that's leveraged these resources and the work that they've done with Lumahelp. So Lumahelp serves millions of patients, provides a cloud-hosted patient engagement platform that connects patients and providers. You know, when word about COVID started, you know, spreading Lumahelp sold a big increase in questions and concerns from patients and the providers. You know, Lumahelp saw an opportunity to create new products to help patients and providers during the pandemic. You know, to decide what to build and how to build it, the company wanted to analyze sentimental, or sentimental, excuse me, Sentinel and data real-time. Using SciSense, Amazon Redshift and Amazon Web Services, data migration services, Lumahelp built a platform that delivered analytics and insights it needed, democratizing access to the data for all users. As a result, Lumahelp uncovered insights such as facts that SMS was a preferred method of communication and that many patients had similar questions. Just three weeks after their hypothesis, Lumahelp released new products based on its insights, a turnkey, EHR-enabled healthcare solution, zero contact check-in and COVID-19 broadcast messaging system. So a lot of good successes. The question that I would ask you guys, this is probably what's on everyone's mind is, I'm a partner, I'm growing, obviously I'm in the partner network because I'm being successful. I don't have a lot of time. I need to figure out all the stuff that you have. You have so much going on that's good for me. I don't know what to do. Can you help me figure out what resources and programs to leverage? I can imagine this is a question that I would have, like, I want to make money, co-sell. I want to get into this program. What's the best path? I mean, what do I do? Can you share how you help your partners get on the right road, have the right resources? What are the right programs? Because it makes it more consumable. This is probably a big challenge. Can you share your thoughts? Yeah, happy to explore that. So we certainly find a lot of opportunity to innovate with our partners and customers and as a result, we do offer a broad range of programs, resources, material to meet the diverse needs of those partners and customers. One focus of these programs and enablement model that we offer partners is to help our partners build their products and build their business with us. And the other focus is to create program structures that help customers find the right partner and the right solution at the right time. We recognize it's a lot. We want to make sure that our partners are easily able to find what's most relevant to them and to deliver this more effectively for ISD partners specifically, don't just announce the launch of ISD partner path. As with everything we do at AWS, this new program structure works backwards from our customers and our partners to deliver on the needs of both of those audiences. When a customer identifies a need for a solution, they search for that solution based on their business needs and the outcomes that they're looking to deliver rather than searching based on a partner profile. So ISD partner path pivots the focus that we have today on partner level tier badging to instead focus on solution level validation badging that helps us better align to what our customers are looking for and how they look for software products. The new model responds to that partner customer feedback that we've heard. It removes APN tier requirements for ISDs and introduces the ability to engage across all of the products, services, and solutions that a partner offers. And it pivots the partner badge attainment. So today our partners are too badging based on a tier and moving forward, they'll attain that badging to go to market with solutions that are validated and have gone through a technical assessment to either integrate effectively or run effectively on AWS. So fewer requirements to access APN programs from differentiation to funding and co-selling partners can engage more quickly in a more meaningful way and in a more clear path to develop their solution offering and go to market with AWS. Ryan, anything you want to add on terms of structural support in terms of account management and does everyone get in a rep? Does, you know, is there certain levels of attention? When does that come into play? Yeah, I think Barbara has made a great point in that we have a lot of great programmatic resources, but there's also no substitution for engagement with a person. You know, and we have partner development resources available to engage with our partners and help them develop their individualized plans that help them understand how they maximize the opportunity with their customer set and expand their customer sets. You know, this starts as soon as a partner registers with the AWS partner network. You know, they're contacted by a partner development team member within the first business day. This is a commitment we find, you know, incredibly important to the partner. And even when we have, you know, five or more new partners registering every single day. You know, we look to go beyond that and it's not just about onboarding to your point, John. You know, our partner development team, you know, works backwards from the customer and the partner to help develop. What is that joint plan? You know, and how do we focus on what's strategic to the partner and what becomes strategic to our customers? You know, with that plan, our team works to activate that broadly across the team in support of achieving our joint goals. You know, and then naturally all partnerships, you know, we want joint accountability. We want mechanisms to measure success. You know, I talked to a lot of channel partners over the years in my career and the cloud has really highlights the speed and the agility feature, but it all comes down to the same thing. I want to get my solution in front of the customer. I want to make money. I want to make it easy to use, make it easy to consume. I want to leverage the cloud. This is kind of the, this is the process. This is always happens. This is what they want. And you guys are bringing a lot to the table and that's important. And I think, you know, co-selling and having to kind of support making it consumable and easy, super great. So I have to ask you with that, what's your advice for people who are jumping in? Because you're seeing more onboarding of ISVs than ever before. And we've been commenting on theCUBE for multiple years. We've been seeing the uptick in software SaaS ISVs. And remember, Amazon is not in the SaaS business 100% and Gartner just collapsed the platform as a service in the IS categories that highlights the fact that your entire ISV landscape is wide open and growing. So there's new ISVs coming in. What advice would you give them to get started, experience and- Yeah, I can take that. Yeah, I can take that one. Thank you. And I actually want to build on something Ryan said. We actually have more than 50 new partners joining the AW partner network every single day. And so having the right structure for those partners to easily navigate and the right resources for them is something that's very top of mind for us. I think I can just still down about two primary pieces of advice from my perspective for a new partner who's trying to figure out how to work with us and get involved. First and foremost, build a relationship with your partner manager. Help them know and understand your business, the customers that you focus on, the solutions you provide. That partner manager is your advocate and could be your mentor in working with AWS. Make sure they know what you're good at. Partners are able to build the best traction with our shared customers and our AWS sales team. But it's very clear what they're good at and how their solution solves specific customer problems. Specialization through programs such as competency, which validate solutions based on industry use case or workload is really key to helping communicate that specific value. And second, I would say avail yourself of the resources available to you. We offer a number of self-serve resources such as the new ISV navigate track that is launching in conjunction with ISV partner path that provides individuals that sort of step-by-step guidance to move through that engagement with us and connect them to all the resources that they need. Marketing central, which we discussed earlier to drive marketing campaigns that can be very self-serve and driven by the partner central which offers a wealth of content, white papers, et cetera. That's our portal through which partners engage. And you can also access things like training and certification discounts to build your cloud skills to support your business. And I think both of those are really important things to keep in mind for partners who are, we're just kind of getting started with us as well as partners who've been working with us for a while now. Ryan, what do you want to add to that? Because again, there's more ISVs coming. And again, Amazon has been very disruptive in its enablement of partners. Not everyone fits into a nice clean bucket. I mean, what looks like a category might be old and being disrupted to a new categories being built. All these new categories and new solutions. It's hard to put people in the buckets. So you have a tough job. How do you give advice to your partners? It is tough, right? And the rate of transformation continues and the rate of innovation continues to, you know, quicken. My advice is lean in with us. You know, we continue to invest our efforts in developing this vibrant community of partners. So lean in, you know, we'll continue to, you know, iterate around and optimize our joint plans and activities. And we've looked to be able to continue to drive success for our customers and our partners. Well, you guys do a great job. I want to say I've watched the APN grow and change and evolve. Market demand is there and you got the factory, you got the boost, you got the lenses, you got the partner network, the people. It's a people equation with software. So congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much. Appreciate the time. Thank you. Okay, great, great event here. Reinvent 2020 virtual. This is theCUBE virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host, wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE. Thanks for watching.