AWS makes generative AI partner program available following global pilot

Amazon Web Services (AWS) unveiled a new partner program alongside significant updates to its existing initiatives, with a strong focus on artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI.

Generative AI took centre stage during the announcements at the AWS Public Sector Symposium, held at the National Convention Centre in Canberra.

Troy Anderson, senior manager of partner programs at AWS, introduced the generative AI targeted transformation module (TTM), now available globally.

This module offers a personalised, consultative engagement aimed at helping AWS partners accelerate their adoption of generative AI.

“Partners receive training and resources to expand your knowledge of AWS services and also work toward developing a unique use case that’s aligned to your own strengths, your growth strategy and the needs of your customers,” Anderson explained.

The TTM pilot, launched in Q1 this year, exceeded expectations, with 17 partners, that includes a handful of Australian partners, as well as those from US and APJ participating instead of the anticipated 10. “We’ve completed 50 workshops globally and continue to see rising demand,” he added.

PolarSeven, one of the partners involved in the pilot, highlighted the workshop’s value, which helped it refine its focus from generic use cases to solutions uniquely tailored to its business.

Anderson also noted that IT service provider NCS is working to enable 1,000 people to use AI-powered solutions, with plans to have 13,000 AI-enabled workers and 3,000 AI practitioners soon.

“They’re set to announce some exciting generative AI production wins in Australia,” Anderson said.

Migration Acceleration Program Enhancements

AWS also introduced updates to its Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for 2024, featuring three core improvements.

“We’re optimising for scale by accepting deals from $100,000 to $10 million,” Anderson said. “We’ve increased speed by simplifying fund requests and streamlining the approval process. Finally, we’re evolving the program to support new customers in the early stages of cloud adoption.”

These enhancements aim to make migration workloads a key avenue for partners to help customers embrace the cloud, among other strategies.

Expanding Managing Services

Anderson emphasised the potential of managed services to aid cloud adoption.

“Partners with a breadth of offerings and deep AWS engagement see a $6 multiplier for every $1 of AWS sold,” he noted. Partners can achieve a 30 per cent to 40 per cent gross profit margin through managed services.

AWS announced new benefits for partners aiming to build, market, and grow their managed service practice.

“Through managed service build workshops, partners can accelerate business planning and align better with AWS sellers,” Anderson said. “They also receive discounts and extended free trials to help with tooling costs, driving profitable growth and customer value.”

Out of the box

For its fourth program update, Anderson talked about solutions that would help simplify the partner experience in building and delivering outcome-focused solutions that are being sold to line-of-business buyers.

“We are really excited to share that the business outcomes accelerator (BOX) program is now generally available around the globe,” he said. “We often hear from partners like yourselves that you want the opportunity to partner with other partners to help build things for end customers that might be better than you could even do yourself.”

Anderson noted that BOX incentivises partners to develop “repeatable, use case-specific solutions by providing in-person partner matchmaking events”.

“The partners then get to work together throughout the lifecycle of developing that solution and gain access to financial incentives, sales enablement and other resources to accelerate the creation and delivery of solutions,” he said.

Lilia Guan travelled to the AWS Public Sector Summit as a guest of AWS.