AWS re:Invent Marketplace Announcements - with Matt Yanchyshyn

Matt Yanchyshyn
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Matt Yanchyshyn: [00:00:00] So we launched something called Agent Mode, which is really cool, and that allows you or an agent, so either via the AWS website or through an MCP server through Marketplace to actually go through a guided workflow. For actual discoveries, you can upload your requirements like a PDF DOC with your technical requirements.

You can actually ask follow up questions and say, okay Hey, I actually want to know about X, Y, Z, and it shows you product comparisons. You can customize with natural language and then make an informed decision, and then the AI says Hey, we think you'd like these three products, and you can then ask it some follow ups.

And then drill down to what you really need. So we've used agents and natural language queries and AI to really simplify the discovery experience.

Chip Rodgers: Tell me about the MCP capability. So to me that sounds it's, you're opening up the gates for potential co build. Is that, am I reading that right with partners? Yeah.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, for sure.

Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of [00:01:00] Inside Partnering. Chip Rodgers here and I am so excited to be joined by Matt Yanchyshyn. Matt, welcome.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Thanks. It's always a pleasure speaking with you, Chip.

Chip Rodgers: Likewise. I think everybody knows Matt, but just in case you don't know Matt Matt is Vice President of of Marketplace and for AWS and. Matt, you and your team are just unbelievable. You're just like constantly

Matt Yanchyshyn: right.

Chip Rodgers: cranking out new things and and really making a huge difference for AWS.

So first of all, congrats on just the great work.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, I like to joke that it's launch season, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll know that there's a steady stream this time of year. But yeah, the team's working hard. I'm lucky to work with an amazing team and yeah, we've been fortunate to realize some pretty big velocity increases as see with the ai, and I think you're seeing that reflected in all the launches.

Chip Rodgers: That's terrific. That's really exciting. Matt, why don't we start by just talking, tell me a little bit about, give, gimme a quick update. We're, it's, we're basically, this is coming out [00:02:00] opening day of re:Invent and yeah, there's just a lot of excitement, a lot of energy around re:Invent. What's happening today?

Matt Yanchyshyn: A number of launches but I'll highlight some of the bigger ones. One thing that we're really excited about is making it easier for customers to find solutions that map more directly to their use case in the form of multi-product solutions. So that's solutions that on the AWS marketplace that combine one or more products from multiple vendors.

So there's typically a lead seller. Someone like a Presidio, for example, is one of our launch partners. Who then incorporates something like Zscaler for a zero trust solution. So you could have an MCP server, a SaaS solution, and then a services partner that's also a reseller like Presidio and have it all packaged up into a single multi-product solution.

So this is a big deal because we've only had like single atomic products so far in the marketplace. So multi-product solution is one of our big sort of highlight launches this week.

Chip Rodgers: That's really cool. And I understand that you have around 40 of, partners that have [00:03:00] already have been pre beta testing this on the early side. What, tell me what the experience has been.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, it's been amazing. We, we've been toying with the idea of building, packages of solutions, multiple products together for a while. We see a lot of organic growth in this area. If you look at top sellers like MongoDB, for example, that sell both services, professional services and software in the marketplace.

They, we've seen a lot of organic combinations where customers will purchase professional services and software in quick succession. We've also seen the professional services category just grow a lot partners like Mission Cloud now part of CDW have seen a lot of success. So it was only natural that we took this step.

I think customers are asking us for an easier way to discover single solutions that simplified solutions that solve their use case. And the buyer profile's changing, as you've no doubt, seen a lot of line of business buyers and people looking for, higher level solutions that to their business problems ultimately that, that combine one or more first party and third party products into a single listing.

Chip Rodgers: So that's great. I think that's really, and I, I [00:04:00] think you're alluding to, you're touching on something that's really pretty cool as well, which is the whole services, component. And I think services partners are really leaning in already and just, are looking.

So you have some of the announcement includes some pricing specifically for for services partners. Tell us about that.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, the services partners is part of the multi-product solution, but you're right, we have a pricing custom pricing launch as well called Express Private Offers. And this is another super exciting launch that just think, imagine you're a customer and. You're, you're a big customer, you're negotiating with an enterprise software or services company and you want custom pricing, 'cause there's almost all sellers have some type of a rate card.

They apply discounts depending on who you are. There's criteria. So now instead of having to pick up the phone or email and certain negotiate, we have this thing called Express Private Offers in Marketplace. Where the seller's in control, they set, hey, what parameters, like what type of customer, what deal size, what contract length would qualify for a discount on my rate card?

And we actually then [00:05:00] qualify that customer, or they are who they say they are, do they meet those criteria? And then issue the private offer with that custom pricing on the seller's behalf to the customer. So we've automated like customize negotiation, which is a big deal. And so I think for.

Especially for those like medium to smaller size deals, which means different things to different customers it'll be it'll really be a big deal to increase the volume of business that they can do through the marketplace and ultimately increase the customer experience. 'cause they can subscribe to whatever they're trying to subscribe to with custom pricing more quickly so that, that's the second of several other launches as well that we're really excited about to ultimately make procurement faster and help customers get to value faster.

Chip Rodgers: So that's all right. So that's Express Private Offers. Private offers have been really huge for partners, right? I think that's just, that's really, it just exploded the what's possible on marketplace. So now what you're saying is that a partner can predefine certain parameters

based on the buyer. And then it's like an automatic, private [00:06:00] offer.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. Automatic pricing, automatic private offer. Exactly. Again, the partner controls and what we help with is facilitating the qualification of the customer that they meet, those criteria, and of course, issuing the offer through marketplace like, like we've done well for years.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. That's really cool.

Matt Yanchyshyn: And then, yeah, the third big one, just before I, I forget, is there are many launches, but the third one that I think is a big hit with customers and partners is this whole idea of making

deployments easier. And you've seen, we've talked about this in the past. You we're making discovery easier and we can talk about Agent Mode that we launched. We're, but we're making the multi-product solution, like what you discover easier, but also like after you subscribe, there's some Gartner research that says that up to 25% of SaaS applications aren't regularly used by employees after they're purchased.

And I think that's really interesting and it, it doesn't just end at subscription, so we're focused on the deployment part as well. So that's what we launched with CrowdStrike this week. We launched with Databricks a year ago at re:Invent last year, the ability to have a guided setup experience.

So after you subscribe, there's all these things you need to [00:07:00] do. And we can take the clicks when you set up CrowdStrike down from up to 60, down to just a few. So the setup time down, can be days or weeks if you ever finish it down to just seconds. In this case, if you're using CrowdStrike's Next Generation Sim, you wanna hook it up with CloudWatch Metrics and Security Hub and all these AWS services.

So that is effectively automated. So automating and make it easier for customers to like, again, get to value faster through what we call Quick Launch Plus in the AWS marketplace is another really important part of of what we launched this week.

Chip Rodgers: That sounds enticing. I think anytime, that's good for both the customer and the partner. The partner wants to get get the customer up and running faster and get them implemented. And the customer does as well, right? They want to get the value.

They've made the decision, right? They've allocated the money, they made the purchase. Like now they want to get going.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Exactly. And then maybe, I don't know, saving the best for last or saving the AI for last. Like it wouldn't be a re:Invent if we didn't talk a lot about AI and agents and we've been using a [00:08:00] lot ourselves as we've talked about on, but there's the deployment, there's finding what you need with multi-product solutions, but like how do you get there?

And I think, Marketplace started as a self-service marketplace where customers showed up and subscribed and like you said, rightly. We've done a lot of great private offer business with SaaS over the years, but we're doubling down on AI for product-led growth features and for agentic discovery.

And so we launched something called Agent Mode, which is really cool, and that allows you or an agent, so either via the AWS website or through an MCP server through Marketplace to actually go through a guided workflow. Instead of for deployment, like I just described, for actual discoveries, you can upload your requirements like a PDF DOC with your technical requirements.

You can actually ask follow up questions and say, okay Hey, I actually want to know about X, Y, Z, and it shows you product comparisons. You can customize with natural language and then make an informed decision, and then the AI says Hey, we think you'd like these three products, and you can then ask it some follow ups.

And then drill down to what you really need. So we've used agents [00:09:00] and natural language queries and AI to really simplify the discovery experience with Marketplace Agent Mode so you can get to that multi-product solution so you can get to that product that you then automatically deploy. So it all comes together.

I've worked backwards today starting with multi-product solutions to deployments, to to, to discovery, but in reality that AI powered agent powered discovery with Agent Mode through to the products you want, multi-product or single product through the deployments. That's all new this week and it's really in a lot of ways reinventing the marketplace procurement experience with AI.

Chip Rodgers: I love that. I think Agent Mode sounds sounds. Amazing. I think the just you talked about a few things the the dynamic comparison tables. I think that's pretty cool that you can you say, Hey, these and uploading documents, right? You, so you have some, maybe you put together requirements document or something that you're, that you think that your company needs, like you define what the requirements are.

You upload that and then the AI is going out and saying, oh, here are three, four, options, and you get a table [00:10:00] with comparison criteria. It's like magic

Matt Yanchyshyn: It is like magic. Exactly. That's one of, one of the themes this week. But we're I, yeah, I think that's, it is like, there's a theme here, right? Is that things that you used to have to do by email or picking up the phone or, just human manual activities that honestly just increase the time before you could get to the value, like actually using the product that's what we're automating.

So whether that's in the discovery process or putting together multiple products or going ahead and deploying and setting up that product it's amazing what agents can do now with AI it's come so long, it's, in the last couple years and, through partners like Anthropic and our own Amazon Nova models, we're able to make these experiences possible, which is very cool.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Tell me about the MCP capability. So to me that sounds it's, you're opening up the gates for potential co build. Is that, am I reading that right with partners? Yeah.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, for sure. Listen, we have great partners like Tackle and WorkSpan and Suger and so many others in this space who build upon our APIs and our MCP servers on the partner services side, but also [00:11:00] marketplace. But even the buyers and buyers who have procurement tooling. We have marketplace APIs and we have for years now.

Things are moving to an agentic world and being able to offer features like Marketplace Agent Mode with MCP servers allows you, for example, to use your AI powered tool of choice to do discovery on the marketplace. And this kind of is consistent, if you remember, Buy With AWS last year and other features like we wanna meet customers where they are.

And increasingly those customers are using AI agentic tools. Like Kiro CLI and all these tools that are popular and providing our APIs and our capabilities via MCP allows you to easily plug things like Agent Mode into your AI workflows and AI tools.

Chip Rodgers: So interesting. Speaking of sort of integration with other areas. The other part of the announcement is talking about deploying the Marketplace capabilities. By, with AWS you're talking about there are 15 service [00:12:00] consoles that are also getting, connected into marketplace.

Tell me more about that. Yeah.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, we want to meet customers where they are and we have, if you are a Kubernetes administrator, for example, you're gonna be in the EKS console. The Elastic Kubernetes Service console, AWS. And so we have third party add-ons that are powered by marketplace there that you can discover and procure.

If you are a procurement professional and you're in your agentic procurement third party tool, you can now connect to Agent Mode and Marketplace with that MCP server. So these are different personas. I mentioned line of business buyers that are looking for multi-product solutions earlier like that's a different person with a different set of skills and a different set of tools.

And so it's really important for us to integrate Marketplace listings into those tools so that the right people can see them at the right time. There's a lot of people, as involved in the discovery and the procurement and ultimately the setup and the maintenance process. Often, especially at large companies, these are different people, different personas.

So part of our strategy is to [00:13:00] think through all those different touch points and all those different associated people and yeah, like I said, meet them where they are. And so that's what we're doing with APIs, with Buy With AWS, Agent Mode servers and these collections of features.

Chip Rodgers: That's awesome. That's exciting.

Matt Yanchyshyn: It is, it's a lot and it is exciting, 'cause listen, it's moving fast, right? It's and so we're running hard to to keep up and remain the cloud marketplace of choice for our customers.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. So you're deploying a lot of capabilities for. For customers obviously, but then also for partners as well. What's, what is the big picture, a ton of great announcements this week. What's the, what is the ultimately where is AWS marketplace going?

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah obviously we're. We're not going, we're in the midst of the AI and agentic revolution. You're seeing that reflected in all of the AI powered and agent powered capabilities that we have. We want to continue to mint new Billionaire Club partners. Presidio, who I mentioned earlier, is a billion dollar partner alongside Salesforce and Databricks and [00:14:00] Snowflake and, a raft of other partners. Okta

Chip Rodgers: was just I talked to,

Matt Yanchyshyn: it's a great example. So we wanna continue to be the best place the best way to market, the best channel for these partners to grow their business and to successfully make their customers happy. So that's core. We're gonna continue doubling down on that. I think an area that I haven't mentioned that I'm really excited about, that where we continue to grow very rapidly is outside of the US in our international expansion.

Both in the sense that those large ISVs and many others can reach an international customer base in local currency with local bank, but also the international ISVs. Like I always love the example of DataMasque, for example. You have this New Zealand ISV with a very friendly CEO by the way, who can you know?

Chip Rodgers: I got to chat with him the other day. Yeah. That's amazing. What an amazing story.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, so he can land big logos, in a DP and others in the United States through the marketplace that, would be harder to close and land without a channel like the Marketplace. So I think that international angle, like yes, we want to continue to grow our core partners through the Marketplace and make [00:15:00] customers happy with these features and discovery features.

But also like truly being a global solution for partners to both reach non-US audiences, but also non-US partners to come in and ultimately grow their business so that, growth and on the back of customer success, it remains our core mission. And just how we do that is changing, especially with AI and.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. Yeah. Kartik has been busy.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, he, Karthik leads our international team. He's a busy guy and he love he's been flying around, which is great 'cause that means I don't have to fly around quite as much.

Chip Rodgers: Yeah. I know you guys just launched India and I don't know if you can talk about any others right now, but I'm sure you have a lot of other countries coming up

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, India obviously a big important launch that just launched. We're already seeing actually a lot of success, a lot of private offers coming through India already. Earlier this year we put the bow on Japan. We had launched Japan previously, but we supported things like Japan consumption tax, and other features that

unlock the channel partner business, which is so important in in Japan in addition to local tax compliance. South Korea [00:16:00] also opened up earlier this year. That was a big win. So a lot of focus on APJ in addition to, Europe and Great Britain and other places where we have currency support and local entities.

I think what we're realizing is that if you're truly gonna be a 3P marketplace like we are, having the ability to have local entities with local invoicing, local tax treatment, local currency, local language. Is so important and helps these customers scale so much more. So you're gonna expect, you can expect to see a lot more in that space.

But already in the launches we've had this year considerably you know, increased our global reach for both buyers and sellers. And the fact that we have end-to-end private offers and most of the world's major currencies from a those that are used most for software procurement is great.

And I'm really proud of the team and Karthik and team for delivering those features and we're seeing it reflected in the growth of the business.

Chip Rodgers: It's interesting because normally, when you think, oh, internationalization, globalization, localization, whatever, you think of language and currency, but it's so much more than that. It's, just.

Matt Yanchyshyn: I like to joke that, no one told me when I was an engineering lead for marketplace that I'd become a tax expert. But [00:17:00] it's true. Tax is important. Having being tax compliant as a seller but also having tax treatment that helps you as a buyer meet your needs, and how that changes per country is really interesting.

So I think one of the

Chip Rodgers: And local entities as well. Like local banks and all that? Yeah.

Matt Yanchyshyn: local banks, local billing, local currency, a lot of locals, and I think it's a, it's becoming a key value prop. For our partners is they can go to market globally and use all these, I'll call them features of the marketplace. And we do that heavy lifting.

So Matt can be the tax experts. You don't have to.

Chip Rodgers: Matt, this has been fantastic. Really appreciate you taking some time with us and congrats on all the exciting news this week. And let's go. Have a great re:Invent.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Yeah, it's always a pleasure, Chip. Thanks so much.

Chip Rodgers: Yep. Thanks Matt and thank you all for joining another episode of Inside Partnering and we will see you next time and don't forget to share and subscribe on substack. Thanks everybody. Thanks Matt.

Matt Yanchyshyn: Bye.

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