AWS’ European partner lead says partners are helping customers “rethink and reinvent their business to be ready for this new reality”. Amazon Web Services (AWS) says there are “big opportunities” for partners to help their customers modernise their IT for a new post-COVID era.
Speaking with IT Europa, Tony Van Den Berge, managing director of AWS’ partner organisation in EMEA, said while organisations saw “a lot of hardship” in 2020, it has also been a catalyst for digital transformation.
“One of the things that we, as AWS, started with cloud computing 14 years ago, is we wanted to provide flexibility and agility to just scale up if you need it. You saw that when COVID hit,” he said.
However, Van Den Berge said that while AWS partners were assisting organisations respond to the crisis, they were also laying the groundwork to enable new ways of working and going to market. “We saw lots of partners that were rushing out to help customers, to deal with the short term needs around workplaces and cloud capacity, but in the midst of that they are helping them to rethink and reinvent their business to be ready for this new reality,” he said.
“You need that the agility and the flexibility to deal with these unprecedented shocks to the system, which COVID was.”
New types of partner
The Amazon Partner Network (APN) features ISV Technology Partners, and Consulting Partners, comprising system integrators (SIs) like Accenture and Capgemini as well as managed service providers (MSPs). However, Van Den Berge says AWS is now signing more strategic collaboration agreements with traditional channel players such as Computacenter and Crayon.
“We do have existing relationships with a lot of the traditional system houses, but we’ve started doubling down and we’re signing long term agreements with mutual commitments with these different types of companies,” he said. Also extending its reach, AWS last week announced a new strategic collaboration agreement with Tech Data in Europe, which will see the pair jointly as offer an enhanced range of AWS cloud services to SMBs across the region.
The cloud giant also made several partner-centric announcements at AWS re:Invent 2020 earlier this month, including granting entry for partners to offer professional services alongside software solutions in AWS Marketplace for the first time.
