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Hello everyone, this is your host Sandhya Michu from the Indian Express Group. I am indeed delighted to host the CRN India exclusive interview with Corrie Briscoe, head of partner success, Asia Pacific, and Japan at AWS. The new regional channel leader, Corrie believes that the AWS competency program can help partners showcase their specialization and accelerate their global growth. AWS partners can use AWS competencies to demonstrate their AWS technical expertise towards customer success in specialized areas across industries with use cases and workloads.
Singapore born Briscoe has over two decades of experience working with partners to build successful long-term businesses in the technology industry. So, let’s find out from Corrie why it is important for partners to specialize to achieve global growth?
I welcome you again Corrie and open this discussion by asking you my first question about how the last 18 odd months have been with respect to partners.
CRN: What are the key challenges that partners helped overcome for customers during the pandemic with respect to APJ and India?
Corrie Briscoe: Firstly, thank you for having me here today, always a great honour to speak about our partners and APN and what they’re doing for our customers. We are in an unprecedented time where the pace of change and innovation in our customers has never been greater. We’ve always had a strong conviction that cloud would be the biggest technological shift that any of us would see in our lifetimes, and it has the capability to transform companies in a way that we’ve never seen before. I think that’s really playing out with what we’re seeing with the pandemic, where companies have not only had to change the way they use IT, but also had to innovate how they’re engaging with their customers and employees amidst virtual and remote working, which is changing the whole dynamic of how organizations are looking at cloud for innovation.
I think one of our fastest growing services Amazon Connect, which is a cloud-based contact center has transformed the way a number of customers are thinking about engaging their clients in a more meaningful way. We see partners really starting to lean in and think differently around what are those outcomes that they could drive through our mutual customers.
I consistently hear from our AWS partner network around the challenges that companies face with cloud growth and getting skills. In a lot of cases, organizations have sourced skills from other countries, and centralized centers of excellence have become a standard delivery model. In these times, partners found that they had to recruit people from their local countries which meant that partners had to consider three factors
- How to develop skills within the customer base
- How to develop skills within the organization
- How to adapt to the cloud opportunity
A number of our partners are thinking creatively, like our global partners, Deloitte and DXC, who have both launched Cloud Guilds in the last 12 months.
Basically, this is an opportunity for partners to develop cloud fluency across the whole organization across various levels – from the CEO to the receptionist. This meant another 15,000 skills and capabilities that we’ve added to just this region in Asia Pacific and Japan, through these two Guilds. We’re also working with our partners to understand how to build out skill sets in a more fun and energetic way such as game days. We’ve taken the time to test platforms, innovated and iterated them to understand how we can enable people to really develop those skills and then put them into practice as fast as possible. These are just a couple of transitions that we see our APN has had to deal with in a different environment.
CRN: All right. Corrie, you mentioned how customers around the world demand for cloud services across different industries. And so, what can partners do to help meet industry specific customer needs and stand out among the global competition. Are there any specific partners that have done exceptionally well and could you give some reference to those partners from any region. That would be useful here.
Corrie Briscoe: Yeah, more than happy to and there are many in the India APN that we’re extremely proud of. I think what’s good about the cloud opportunity and its growth, is the fact that it’s provided even more opportunity for our partners. However, with that growth has also come competition. We have one of the fastest growing APN memberships outside of the US in India which is something we’re extremely proud of. One of the factors that our partners are focusing on now, is differentiation which could be an expertise in the industry or vertical or expertise from specific workloads or use cases. I think the partners that are proving to be most successful are those that are finding their point of differentiation.
The other factor that is unique about AWS is the way we think about differentiation and competencies. At the heart of everything AWS does is customer obsession, and we base all our decision making on it. We innovate based on customer obsession, what customers are telling us, and we create our partner programs based on customer needs. Working backwards with this customer insight, we identify unique needs. A good example of that, in India APN, has been Freshworks. It is an Indian ISV, that has built a customer engagement platform on AWS by leveraging AWS services. They have been able to cater to the travel and hospitality segment by leveraging their competency to analyse how to promote to that customer segment and by ensuring that their application is highly localized to that customer need. We have thousands of other examples across multiple types of industries. We have noticed partners specializing in aspects like data and analytics as customer engagement and insights become far more important in the way that we are engaging with our customers.
CRN India: Yeah, right and you have given a couple of examples from India so thank you for sharing those names with us. Corrie my question to you is, how do you know that these competencies that you are building is making a big difference for a partner? How can they highlight their technical expertise to global customers? Do partners who are investing in the competencies which AWS created have an edge over partners who do not have such competencies?
Corrie Briscoe: The benefits for our partners around earning a competency falls into three major areas.
- The first is the recognition in our APN Solutions Finder, a portal customers use to find partners with unique skills that meet their current need or requirement.
- It’s also the first port of call for competency partners when the field team uncovers a customer pain point or opportunity. There is an assurance when we work with a competency partner, that they have the skills to deliver, have proven customer success and have also invested in audited IP that’s unique to that competency
- Lastly, when it comes to earning trust, we always want to feel confident that we are engaging with our partners and customers with the right level of skills and capabilities.
These are some of the benefits that competency drives for our partners. We also have a team called the partner success team that works closely with the competency partners to align them to our customer opportunities. Connecting the customer demand with the partner capacity and all our go to market and investments that we make in our APN stem from those that have invested in competency. Hence, we have a strong alignment between partners that have invested in that competency and delivered customer success, and our investments and go to market motion as well.
CRN India: So how can a partner really go about achieving these competencies? Is there a framework or a process which a partner has to go through? Can you elaborate more on that?
Corrie Briscoe:
There are three major requirements that we look at.
- The first is that the partner must have AWS skills and certifications in the specific competency area
- The second is that they must have demonstrated customer success, to use as references into other customers for that partner
- Lastly, they have to be audited and their IP needs to leverage a majority of the AWS best practices
These are three areas that every competency requires, regardless of the type of competency – whether it’s our newly launched Managed Security Service Provider competency or the travel and hospitality competency from an industry perspective.
CRN India: There is a widespread channel ecosystem now, so how does AWS provide various competencies cutting across partners. Is there a seamless platform where any partner, irrespective of size can acquire these competencies? I’m especially asking from the point of view of smaller partners.
Corrie Briscoe: Partners of all sizes can participate as a part of the competency program. What we look for is deep technical expertise in that given area, proven customer success and either industry or domain specific IP. We have partners that have an employee size of ten that have built competencies in specific workloads right up to some of our global partners like Tech Mahindra or Wipro in the Indian marketplace.
CRN India: You mentioned Wipro and Tech Mahindra and so my question to you is how competencies like Managed Security Services are helping drive digital transformation for global customers with AWS?
Corrie Briscoe: Yes, security is a topic that is becoming increasingly important. Security has always been a number one priority at AWS and our platform has been architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment today. However, our customers are looking for partners that have deep specialization and skills in both protecting and monitoring AWS on their behalf, and this is where the Managed Security Service Provider competency is born. As you said, I’m extremely proud to see that two Indian born partners have been a part of the launch program as we announced this competency.
Both Wipro and Tech Mahindra have deep security expertise. Wipro has been working with customers to solve their biggest cybersecurity problems for 25 years and the Managed Security Service Provider competency was a natural progression to recognize that expertise and the IP that they have built within their security practice. Tech Mahindra has over 1000 certified AWS professionals that are security specialists and have invested in building Centres of Excellence and their own security IP framework. This framework, called zero trust, has enabled many of their customers to move to and manage the cloud in a seamless and secure way. Many of their clients are global and because the competency program is also global, the customer feels a sense of confidence whenever they see that badge.
CRN India: Overall, how many number of competencies program are there for partners? You mentioned that it is open to all sorts of partners, so is there any transition or a migration for any partner who is just starting off with these competencies. Where is the overall roadmap and what are the core objectives from this competency program?
Corrie Briscoe: Currently, we have 30 competencies in our program, and we continually add to that based on what our customers need. We are quite agile in the fact that we spot patterns and consistencies in customer demand and build out those competencies to connect our customers with our APN. The 30 competencies range from industry competencies right down to workload use cases as well as specific technology specializations.
One of the first questions partners have, is to understand where to get started. My advice is to work out what you’re good at, where have you driven your customer success and then really look at the competency that aligns to that capability and success. That’s the best path to get started within the AWS competency framework.
CRN India: Each region has specific industries that are currently strong. Looking at the APJ region, for which you are the channel leader, what are the potential industries you see booming? How can partners look for more opportunities within this region while building their competency with AWS?
Corrie Briscoe: This is an interesting question because the opportunities are endless. When you look at the segments that AWS addresses, it ranges from infrastructure, hardware, and software to applications and data centre services. When you marry that with the investments we’ve made across the world – that’s trillions of dollars of opportunity. Any APN partner and industry that you can think of, is benefiting from AWS cloud and the services that our partners deliver daily.
Financial services is an area with a lot of transformation, where banks and financial institutions are transforming payments. To offer you an example, we see partners like Paytm, India’s largest digital payments and financial services platform, starting to offer new digital services on the AWS platform to solve how banks and institutions engage with their merchants and receive and transact payments. We also see opportunities, as I mentioned earlier, in the contact centre space. Amazon Connect is one of our fastest growing AWS services and helps customers relook at how they can enable a mobile workforce. No longer is there a need for an onsite team. Talent can be sourced from a broad range of places now, regardless of where they are working from. I believe the opportunities are endless for our partners, improved by the fact that cloud is enabled on a global basis and our infrastructure allows partners to cross borders, making the opportunity even greater.
Sandhya Michu: Corrie my last question is specific to the new regional role you have taken over. How do you prioritize working with technology providers across APJ to build long term sustainable business in partnership with AWS? What are the key aspects which you drive and are looking to drive with partners?
Corrie Briscoe: Personally, I believe I took over the best job at Amazon last year and the reason is the vibrant and diverse partner network in the industry. With our partners, we get to solve real world customer problems, and the impact that has on customers makes it exciting. Since I drive customer success with and through partners, my focus is to prioritize those partners that I know have the capabilities to deliver what our customers need. This goes back to customer obsession as our priority, where we analyse how we can drive the best outcomes possible for our customers. We prioritize based on competencies, investment, and customer success that our partners have driven.
Thank you so much Corrie for this very interesting and insightful conversation. I look forward to meeting you and I think there’s a lot more to explore on what you do with the partners. As you rightly said, there is a huge scope and opportunity for partners to look beyond what they are doing right now. I look forward to more conversations with you. Thank you so much for teaming up with us today.
