Abhisheikh Lahoti: Scaling Partner-First Growth in Cloud Marketplaces

Chip   0:00  

Hey, everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span, and we're here day one at reinvent in Las Vegas. And wow, the crowds are crazy. This is the main entrance right here, and it's like a steady flow of people back and forth.

Lahoti  0:17  

I describe reinvent as chaos in order, we somehow try and find order with more than 50,000 people. I don't know what the count is this year, but, like every year, this is my third reinvent, and it's exciting to be part of this. You

Chip   0:32  

know, it's like, I think reinvent takes over Las Vegas completely, right? It's everything from the Mandalay Bay all the way up to Venetian and encore and Palazzo and everything. So

Lahoti  0:41  

everywhere you go, be it in the morning, people in the casino, they have a laptop on the side. Hopefully we're getting some work in other presentations ready, right? But you're right. I mean, everywhere you go, there is people talking about AWS, and the conversation is about AWS, and that's what you want it to be.

Chip   1:00  

Fantastic, absolutely. So I'm excited to be joined by Abhishek lahoti. Everyone, all of your friends call you lahoti, right? So that's what

Lahoti  1:12  

I go by. Lahoti is, if you, if you say Abhishek in my friend circle, nobody will recognize me. So nobody is what I go by.

Chip   1:19  

So that's great. And lahoti is director of partner engineering for for AWS, and you cut you have a lot under your purview, so you're building everything from everything in partner center to everything that's partner facing in marketplace. And tell us, tell us a little bit about that, about your role, and what you guys are up to.

Lahoti  1:42  

Yeah, this is something which I've been obsessing over the last six years. I've been at Amazon for 10 years and with AWS for six my job at AWS has always been about partners, and I obsess over like, making them successful. My role, I lead engineering for both the partner central service and the marketplace seller experiences. So the moment a partner registers to customers, discovering them on a marketplace like the entire end to end journey I try and innovate on. And, yeah, I mean, it's been, it's been six years, it still feels like I'm still scratching the surface. A lot of stuff to be done yet.

Chip   2:19  

Yeah, well, and a lot has been done as well. So it's amazing, you know, I think, over the last couple weeks, with reinvent coming up, Matt has been on a sort of daily update of, well, there's this announcement and there's that announcement. You know,

Lahoti  2:34  

Matt is we secretly joked and Matt is our go to market person, like a LinkedIn post means, hey, have you launched something? And in the last few weeks, there's just been a constant stream of launches. And I'm super excited of the team and proud of the team who've done like wonders for our partners. There's a lot more like you'll hear a lot more announcements in the partner keynote tomorrow, but I think over the last few weeks, we've like launched in the lead up, a lot of simplification features for our partners, like you started using Gen AI ourselves. Like if you heard of foundational tech reviews, we're able to do that in seconds. Now, instead of minutes, we've launched a comparison of partner products for buyers so that they can help in their evaluation journey. CO sell, I like the shirt you're wearing. Like co sell. Like CO sell to crush it. CO sell to crush it. So we've launched our APIs for selling recently, and we already have 10 odd launch partners who have launched along with us on that day. So there's a lot of features on CO sell. Now you can have a Slack collaboration between a partner, a field person on Slack about the opportunity get opportunity updates. So yeah. I mean, we know that 65% of partners who post sell with us get larger deals, are able to accelerate their journeys with customers, and a lot of our feature sets are are geared towards those and moving that motion towards marketplace. Even before these two weeks, you must have heard of lot of announcements around the marketplace, seller experiences being available in different geographies. Now, we are able to provide local disbursements for bank accounts which are local, and also ability to transact in private offers, in non USD currencies, in a few currencies, right? So a lot happening, but a lot more you'll hear in the next week. Yeah,

Chip   4:32  

for sure, absolutely. So you guys have been busy,

Lahoti  4:35  

yeah? I mean, we still feel that there's a lot more to do. It feels like reinvent is usually the time when we feel, yes, there's a milestone to kind of push ourselves to showcase some of the live good features to our partners. But like I said, I always feel it's still day one and a lot more to do for partners.

Chip   4:54  

Yeah, that's for sure. So you were talking about the the APIs that were just launched. And we were excited to be a launch partner on that effort and and, you know, from our perspective, they, they're terrific. It's really, it does. It's a, it's a big step up from the previous s3 implementation, and it just makes everything much, you know, cleaner and quicker for updates to come through? No, I

Lahoti  5:21  

think that's a mental model shift we've had. We felt like we want to start providing more primitives to our partners, like solid APIs, which our partners can use and innovate on, because our partner ecosystem is like from startups to enterprises, and they want to use them in various different ways, and providing primitives is probably the best way to do that. Like selling APIs is just a starting point. And overall direction is start providing more APIs so that they can work of their own CRMs and their own tools, and avoid all this duplication of effort and reduce the cost of the partnership overall. So it's all for partner. Profitability is what I say. That's

Chip   5:59  

fantastic. So Lahore, what are your plans this week? I know you have a couple of sessions, I believe, and what else is happening this week? Yeah,

Lahoti  6:09  

I think it's partner conversations for me throughout I think my calendar is filled with partner Conversations. I'm speaking at a couple of engagements. We're going to talk about how we are expanding what we call as a partner matching engine we are that is used by our AWS field staff to get partners into customer accounts, and how do we do that at scale? Now, while that's not a partner facing capability, that's a feature which will really help get them new referrals from AWS, and that's what I'm really excited about. Talking to a lot of partners about that this week. We're also going to like outside of those partner conversations. Have you been at

Unknown Speaker  6:50  

the booths? Not yet starting up. We

Lahoti  6:53  

have a marketplace booth. We have a partner partner booth. So if anybody's watching this, feel free to kind of go there and actually look at all the new features and launches we've done, and there's a team waiting to hear from you in terms of what we can do next.

Chip   7:08  

That's fantastic. Well, how do you thank you so much for taking a little bit of time and sharing some of the exciting things that are happening at AWS for partners and have a great Have a great week. Wish to the best of the week. Yeah,

Lahoti  7:22  

you too, and work span has been great partners in terms of pushing the coastal message ahead, and your force multipliers are like, like, I see it, and a lot more to do together.

Chip   7:32  

That's fantastic. Lahori, thank you, and thank you all for joining, and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

‍