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WATCH: AWS Channel Chief Terry Wise On The Top Mistake Partners Make

AWS Channel Chief Terry Wise spoke to CRNtv at re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas.

Here’s a look at the top questions from our conversation:

What are the common mistakes that partners make in their cloud strategy?

Not taking training and enablement seriously enough. They’re not getting enough folks trained at a very deep level. Customers are now demanding that our partners have a strong stable of professionally certified architects. It’s almost table stakes, where two or three years ago it was associate level architects. So, we are looking for deeper skilled resources from the partners they are engaging with in their most strategic projects. And, it’s really difficult to be a professional architect in more than one platform. So, one of the mistakes we do see is partners hedging their bets across multiple different opportunities. They tend to be less deep than what our customers are looking for. So, that would be one and the second mistake I would say partners make is they are not listening to customers. They build a product or offering and they are going to go sell that to a customer without actually listening to what the customer business need is.

How is AWS making it easier for partners to innovate?

From a partner perspective, one of the biggest investments we’re making is in that prescriptive guidance, whether it’s around making it easier to test and validate IoT devices so customers and partners can find those easily, whether it’s very prescriptive guidance for ISVs who want to deploy SaaS applications on AWS. There’s a whole bunch of architectural best practices that we’re packaging and delivering around containerization and different container use cases, whether it’s native services or be it partners like VMware, Cisco or Red Hat. There’s all kinds of things that we are doing to make it a lot easier for customers and partners to innovate faster with prescriptive guidance.

What does AWS see as the biggest trend in the cloud market?

Data is really the foundation of innovation. If customers and partners want to innovate themselves on behalf of their customers, they have to capture, extract, move, refine and analyze data at a greater scale, much more easily. And, they have to do it cost effectively.