Davinia Simon (AWS)
Last year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) threw open the doors to its far-reaching marketplace for local partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) to sell their products and services to a global audience. This year, the company is working to take local players to the world.
In fact, helping local partners to go global is one of the key “themes” of this year for AWS' head of channel and alliances in Australia and New Zealand, Davinia Simon, who highlights this particular role of AWS in the local market as being ‘critical’ to its overall vision as a company.
“I think deeply about how our AWS Partner Network (APN) can deliver the kind of impact that will put them on a global stage,” Simon told ARN. “I think that’s a critical part of the vision: how do we help our partners go global with AWS?”
In fact, AWS has actually been working to help partners and ISVs in A/NZ go global for a while. In April last year, the cloud giant's move to open its marketplace to ISVs in A/NZ gave those local organisations instant access to a market of 260,000 global end-users.
Australian ISVs including Cloudwave, Dubber, Farrago AI, Raygun, Aportio, Javln, Operata and Versent's Stax subsidiary were among the first regional partners to make their software available on the marketplace.
In New Zealand, ISVs such as Raygun and Aportio featured on the marketplace from the 3 April launch date, while local AWS specialist Consegna joined as a consulting partner.
While some companies in Australia and New Zealand had already been able to list their services on AWS Marketplace, this was previously only possible if they had entities in the US, the EU or the UK.
The local launch marked the first time that A/NZ ISVs and consulting partners not registered in other regions had access to the AWS Marketplace and AWS Data Exchange.
Moreover, in early December last year, AWS further expanded local access to its marketplace, letting AWS customers find and purchase professional services through a curated catalogue of software, data and services that run on AWS.
New Zealand AWS partner Consegna once again got in early, becoming a foundation provider of quoting and contracting services in the AWS Marketplace.
In Australia, AWS cloud consulting partner Versent was named as a launch partner for the new professional services expansion of the AWS Marketplace.
Combined, these expansions to the AWS Marketplace gave A/NZ partners unprecedented access to AWS’ global audience, an opening to the global market that Simon hopes to leverage further this year.
Among four key themes comprising Simon’s primary areas of focus this year is the desire to help local partners go global. For context, the other themes she wants to push in 2021 are data and analytics, the small- to medium-sized business (SMB) segment and industry collaboration, of which she hopes to see more.
“The four key themes will form a large part of the way that we’ll focus [in 2021], and so we’ll focus on data and analytics, and particularly look at how that can affect the kind of customer experience that our [partners] can offer,” Simon said. “[And we’ll] look at SMB and how we help with our AWS partners to transform SMBs across Australia and New Zealand.
“We’ll look at more industry collaboration; how we can bring that joint expertise to bear, in order to help organisations accelerate their cloud migration journeys,” she added. “And then finally, helping our partners go global, that will continue to be important for us, because it really does have an impact.”
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