Brian Bohan: How AWS Aligns with GSIs to Drive Customer Value

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner Officer at workspan, and we are here. It's the day of yesterday. We were hit at the Partner Summit, which is which is great, a lot smaller. Now. Today, we got 10,000 people here. So this is fantastic. We're here at the summit in New York, and I'm joined, excited to be joined by Brian Bohan. Brian is Director global, Director of consulting partners for you, run a center of excellence around consulting partners for for AWS. Brian, tell us a little bit so welcome. First of all, welcome. Excited to be here. Appreciate it. And so tell us a little bit about what you and your team are up to these days. What's days. What's what's hot? Yeah, other than Gen AI,

Brian Bohan  0:45  
I can't talk about Jenny. I, of course you can, yeah. So, you know, as we said, Chip said, I run a we call the consulting partners Center of Excellence. So as part of that, I get to see across a wide swath of consulting partners. And what I'm really excited about, what we can see here, and I do have to talk about genai is I've been here 11 years, and so I've seen cloud grow over that time, seen enterprise adopted, and we're really are at an inflection point. I know a lot of people are saying that, but we're seeing Gen AI really be a catalyst for innovation in a couple of different ways. So one, we're seeing increasingly line of business leaders lean in in new ways and thinking about how they can transform their businesses with this new technology, and then that is then necessarily generating conversations around security and guardrails and responsible AI. It's also putting a big focus on data, right? We've been talking about data for a long time, but now it's structured data unstructured data. We need to think about, how do we govern that data, secure that data, get it ready for this next challenge with Gen AI, and as we move from pilots and POCs into production, that is gonna be absolutely critical. And then what we're seeing across the consulting partner network, which is really exciting, is the amount of investment in tooling and capabilities that they're putting in place and building on top of our AWS services. So we provide, obviously, AWS bedrock, what has guardrails built in? And then we're seeing our partners take that and extend it with their domain and industry knowledge, and making it very specific for their clients in their regulatory environment, and then the domain requirements that they have to really fit to their businesses. So we love that level of investment from our partners.

Chip Rodgers  2:18  
So it is interesting that a lot of this, the Gen AI, you know, the the the interest and the energy and the and the the poll on Gen AI is coming from the line of business. Like, like, you said, it's a, it's, this is a, Hey, we got to figure this out and figure out how to use this. And, like, if we're, if we're not doing our competitors are so, like, it's a, it's a critical time right now, 100%

Brian Bohan  2:40  
I think the other thing is, you know, I think last year there was a little bit, hey, little bit, Hey, genai. Is this new thing? Let's go figure out where we can use genai. And now it's more about what are the big, hard, challenging problems that we need to solve that have been intractable to date because we haven't had this kind of technology or this access to data. Let's focus on solving those problems. And then what does that mean from a business process transformation, a people change point of view. Where does Gen AI fit? Where does, I hate to say it like traditional AI fit, and again, where does our data come into play there? And it's also driving a new approach to like what we'd consider in the past, migrations and modernization. So once we identify these are the things that need to change. Yeah, here's the data, here's the AI, but here are the applications we need to bring along with us. Which of those applications exist, and again, in legacy scenarios, whether it be mainframe, how do we modernize those? Again, frequently using Gen AI as a tooling to help us modernize those more quickly and bring those into the fold. So not only is it driving this conversation, it's pulling through the broader, larger migration and modernization play as well to fuel this business like transformation that we're seeing that's interesting.

Chip Rodgers  3:48  
Yeah, I heard that. I heard that echoed yesterday as well. It's like the reason transformation is critical is because you need to have the the infrastructure in place to be able to even take advantage of 100%

Brian Bohan  3:58  
right? And I think that's right. Thing is, obviously, this is obviously, this is all new that we're talking about, but it's not but it sits on top of a foundation that we built over the years. Right? I've been here 11 years, but AWS has been around longer, and we've been doing this with our partners. We've been developing the right data modernization practices with our partners. We've been building the right infrastructure modernization migration practices with our partners. And again, now that it's moved increasingly into the business. Our partners are more important than ever. They have deep relationships, by industry, by domain, with these leaders who are really influencing this next push of change. And they are super well positioned, and we with them to really be there and meet those customer needs.

Chip Rodgers  4:34  
Yeah, and, you know, I think the the SI so you, you mentioned you have a 35 sort of global size that you're that are sort of in your domain and and the SIS are always, they are, you know, as you, as you said, they're very closely connected to the to the customers. They have the relationships at high executive levels. They understand the industries and they understand the use cases. So what better better place to. Be then, you know, to help solve some of these problems,

Brian Bohan  5:02  
absolutely. And when we think about our partners, I really want to think about it broadly as well. And so within the 35 it's not an exhaustive list, but it is representative. We have advisory partners that are certainly working with the C suite and the board of directors. We have the large global consultancies and systems integrators that are doing the same, but then also bring the capability to really implement and execute at scale, frequently, by industry, by horizontal domain. We have some really, what we call day one partners, sort of born in the cloud, really innovative, really nimble. They're serving the lower enterprise, upper SMB segment. And there too, we're seeing this transformation. In fact, in some ways, SMB is really pushing out even faster than the enterprise and willing to take a few more calculated risks differentiate. So those partners are super important, and then even in the longer tail. So we're working very closely in the portfolio with our distributors and our channel partners, our resellers. How do we get to that much broader swath of small, medium sized businesses who are used to buying solutions versus having to build them themselves. And we think distribution and channel is really the way to go get that. And this is, of course, all underpinned by AWS Marketplace. And I talked about the platforms and the solutions our partners are bringing to bear. They can bring those and put those onto marketplace. They can do consulting, private offers and create these bundles that now these downstream customers can consume with our partners and through marketplace. We think that's a powerful scale agent. Again, bring all this innovation, but it's not just at the top, it's it's for all the different customers through these different channels that we have. Yeah, it's

Chip Rodgers  6:35  
interesting. And with, you know, cppo, you know, having, having, you know now that the ability to have those sort of multi party transactions to come together and actually automate it and make it go through marketplace so you can streamline the transaction, take advantage of pre committed spend and things like that.

Brian Bohan  6:58  
So absolutely and we're really committed to really meeting the customers where they are, and giving them the buying experience that they're used to. So if they're working again with, you know, with channel partners that they've been buying software from for years, we want to enable that experience, right? If are these channel partners, they've been those trusted advisors. They've been doing the software portfolio optimization for their clients. Now we give them another way, a powerful way, to do that with marketplace. And then, as you mentioned, if we do have agreements with our end customers, they're able to take advantage like and help, you know, meet those commitments by by buying through marketplace as well. So it's really a fantastic out of like, growth engine for our partners, and it delivers a lot of value for the customers as well.

Chip Rodgers  7:40  
That's fantastic. So Brian, what's, what's on tap for you, the next, the rest of the rest of the day today?

Brian Bohan  7:46  
So, you know, a lot, a lot more meetings like so, you know, it's always a whirlwind these summits. And here it's in New York City in July, so it's 95 degrees outside, so it feels good to be in the air conditioning, but it's a it's just so good to see all the different people here. And what I love about this is I get to meet so many partners in a concentrated two day span, and you can really start seeing the patterns and the trends and what's working and what people are getting excited about. So just more customer meetings, more partner meetings through the rest of the day.

Chip Rodgers  8:13  
That's fantastic. Well, Brian, thank you for taking a few minutes and sharing what's going on with huge things going on with with consulting partners, with AWS and Gen AI security and all the above. So yeah,

Brian Bohan  8:26  
Mike, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. Always love talking about it. So, yep,

Chip Rodgers  8:30  
fantastic. Okay, well, thank you as well for joining, and we'll see you probably later today. So Thanks, Brian. Thank you.

‍