 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re-invent 2020. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is theCUBE virtual special coverage of the public sector a day. Rebecca Weatherly, director of Worldwide Public Sector System Integrated Partners for AWS. Great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE virtual. Thanks, John. I'm glad to be here. So just the news we've been covering all through re-invent and prior is just the growth in public sector, the acceleration with the pandemic. You know, it's just the acceleration has been massive. So I want to just get your take. It's been hard, but also it's been an opportunity for partners, you leading the integrators. They're on the front lines. I got to ask you, what is AWS doing to support their partners as the business models are forced really upon them to move faster? Yeah, sure. Thank you. Let me start with saying that companies are really building a business and partnering with us because of global needs, such as the pandemic. But we also have many partners that are coming to us because of our customer demand outside of COVID because we're a leader in cloud innovation. And because we've got a global field engagement and go-to-market strategy. You know, AWS is a customer-driven company and our partners are also our customers. We have a full suite of programs for our partners and whether they be a consulting partner or a technology partner. We have tens of thousands of partners all across the globe with more than 35,000 new partners since January, 2016. And in our public sector space, we have over 1,500 partners with solutions and experience delivering on a combination of government, education, and nonprofit customer missions all around the world. Consulting partners are really professional services firms that help customers of all types and sizes, design, architect, build, migrate and manage workloads and applications on AWS. They accelerate the journey to the cloud for our customers. And they often are implementing technology solutions as you refer to around COVID that our technology partners are actually developing. So consulting partners are SIs that I work with, strategic consultant partners, managed service providers and also resellers. And they are providing really great value to our customers by providing strategic advisory services, implementation and migration services, staff org. They also have great specialty depth and machine learning or AI, IoT, data lakes and analytics. And even in things like communication tools using technologies like we're doing today on Zoom and taking those to our customers. Our technology partners on the other hand, they deliver hardware connectivity services and software solutions that are hosted or integrated with AWS cloud. And they deliver components to broad customer solutions often via our consulting partners. We have a great way of delivering technology through our AWS marketplace and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I will say that our tech partners are helping our customers decrease their deployment times, provide cost optimization and infrastructure for DevOps and production workloads. They're also lowering their cost on code development by using our broad portfolio of services. And oftentimes for our public sector customers, they are helping shorten the path to achieving regulatory requirements for our public sector needs. That's awesome. You guys have a lot to do there to support your partners. Also the main concern is, how do I maintain that profitability in the fast pace and then making sure that their customers can also transition and ride the digital transformation wave. So I have to ask you, what programs are you guys offering to help these partners succeed? Because certainly it's beyond just the profitability. It's this new business model of cloud scale. So what programs specifically are you guys offering? Yeah, we have a lot of different programs at AWS. The first stop is really the AWS partner network, which I'll refer to as the APN. This is really our global partner program for technology and consulting businesses to leverage Amazon web services to build solutions and services for customers. The APN is the first place where companies can build, market and sell their offerings and provide valuable business, technical and opportunities for marketing with their customers. Our programs provide promotional support. We provide visibility throughout our website. We give partners opportunities to engage with customers for events, social media and we provide access to funding and go to market opportunities. I touched on briefly our AWS marketplace and this is really a great program offering to our customers, both consulting partners and technology partners. The AWS marketplace simplifies procurement and entitlement of provisioning software across 50 different categories and we have more than 8,000 transactional listings that marketplace connects customers with more than 1,000 different ISVs or independent software vendors to help meet their business needs. And we have more than 300,000 customers using software from the AWS marketplace. The marketplace is also available on 24 different regions. So when a customer chooses to use the marketplace they have the opportunity to procure their software from our consulting partners and leverage the software and the technology from our tech partners. Other really cool programs we have are our partner transformation program, our SaaS factory program and also our migration acceleration program. Awesome, great programs. What else do you guys besides programs are you guys doing to help partners succeed because I know there's a lot of touches there's some new things going on. What else do you guys do? Yeah, I think we have a lot of great resources available to our partners. Most of our partners have partner development managers that are working with them on a daily basis, access to our business development and sales teams, solutions, architects and other subject matter experts really getting deep into the technology and having access to those folks to help our partners design, build, architect and validate approaches with customers. Also our professional services teams, right? They are deep subject matter experts that our partners have the ability to tap into. And then of course, because of the way we go to market and public sector access and engagement with our capture bid and proposal teams are super important. We also have to consider access for our partners to be trained and become certified. That's a real requirement that our customers need to help them achieve their goals. We offer digital and classroom training for our partners to be able to learn at their own pace or via an AWS instructor. And AWS training and certification helps our partners build confidence, confidence and credibility with their customers. We also have AWS competencies and our competency program is designed to identify, validate and promote APN partners that have demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success. One of the most critical competencies for us in these days is around our migration. Migration competencies allows our partners to accelerate their customers cloud adoption journey by providing strategy, personnel, tools, education and tech support to their customers. One of those customers and partners is Intervision. They're a consulting firm that provides strategic advisory services to organizations to help them run, grow and transform their business needs with the cloud via modern IT services. Their experts have a deep history and technology solutions and they have a deep bench of certified engineers and data scientists to excel, delivering managed services and migration services to both public sector and commercial customers. And with the California Department of Technology which is a state agency that provides authority and responsibility over all aspects of technology for California state governments, they selected Intervision to work with them due to their expertise and their proprietary offering called Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance. And that offering provided that CDT the ability, pardon me, to take advantage of their cloud migration operations and optimization specialty. So our partners are really getting great opportunities to build their business and to accelerate their work with us through a variety of programs. And by really digging deep and leveraging all of the programs that are available to them. It's nice with the mix of programs plus the field support, plus the care there and nurture that, grow that. As you know in these markets where you have partnerships and channels and relationships, you need to be profitable and profitability is about happy customers and margin. Making money. You got to make money and stay in business. So this is a big opportunity as the new economics of cloud come into the channel. This is really a big conversation moving fast, scaling up new kinds of services. The integrators are really having a good time here and these are new practices. How can someone learn more? What's out there? How does someone get engaged with you guys? What information can they, is there a site? Is there a program? How does someone get the resources? How would they do? Yeah, well, I will tell you the first stop is really our website and that may sound trivial but that is the best place to get started for us. You're going to find there by visiting aws.amazon.com. You can register to become an AWS partner very easily. Right there you're going to get step by step instructions and learning paths as well as tutorials on how to get your business up and running and how to become a partner. And the journey largely looks like this, right? One, get on board, get familiar, establish your relationship and join the Amazon Partner Network. Go through some very basic training and get familiar with their services. Second, develop those technical and sales skills. Develop a business model where AWS lends the greatest value to your partner business. And as you move through the tiers of maturity, we will co-invest in your business to help you scale. And then three, really go to market, establish the pathways to your customers, build out your differentiated approach, look at the competencies we offer and decide which ones are going to be the most relevant to you. We want you to leverage the funding mechanisms we have and we want you also to think about how we co-market together. There are so many roads to success and AWS offers lots of different partner programs and opportunities to develop your unique road map, John. You know, that's great enablement. That is super valuable, having the co-funding, the co-marketing and the tools and the programs all there to enable services to be successful. Rebecca, thanks for sharing. My pleasure. That program, great to have you on. Rebecca Wetherley, director of the worldwide public sector, system integrated partners, a big growing part of the public sector when we need it the most, which is now and it's growing. So check them out. Thanks for watching. This is the CUBE coverage, CUBE virtual for AWS re-invent public sector, special coverage. Thanks for watching.