Chris Casey: How AWS Is Scaling Industry-Specific Co-Sell

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Christmas. Okay, we are winding down the day, end of the day. What time is it? Four or 555? O'clock, 5 million drinks. We're we're between anyway. We're next, next, heading to dinner and and all that stuff. So it's been a great event. We're here at the in the Expo. Actually, it's the work span booth behind us. So, Chris, really great to have you here. I'm excited to be joined by Chris Casey. Chris is general manager of industry. Gosh, I'm industry tech, industry technology, you know, I had it, and I was like, is that right? Anyway, industry Technology Partnerships for AWS, and we're actually going to be talking tomorrow as well, and opening up the the enterprise Summit. Enterprise co sell, yeah, enterprise co sell. So, so welcome Chris,

Chris Casey  0:52  
yeah, thanks for having me chip. It's great to be here, and this has been an awesome conference for partnership leaders, and it's great to be working with work span two on the Enterprise summit tomorrow.

Chip Rodgers  1:02  
Yeah, yeah. So it'll be fun. So tell me so you have a really sort of unique, you know, position at within any within any company, I guess. But at AWS, you're managing sort of non traditional partners that are really focused on some very specific and interesting and creative and unique. I guess, value propositions and use cases tell us a little bit about about what they are and and why they're you know why that's important? AWS,

Chris Casey  1:33  
yeah, sure, yeah. So my team looks after partners that have technology and intellectual property that's pretty specialized to one or more industries. So AWS segments, we've got 10 different strategic industries that's everything from financial services to healthcare to media and entertainment to telco. And what we've realized, and what customers have told us, is for them to move some of their mission critical but very industry specific workloads to the cloud, whether that be video and content production in media and entertainment or policy administration and insurance, they need to have the solutions that they've used historically, in many cases, for decades, operating and running natively on the AWS Cloud for them to move those use cases and workloads to The Cloud, to realize all of the efficiencies and benefits the cloud bring them technically. So what my team's responsibility is to really work with those partners in each of those industries, and we're really working with companies like Nokia and Ericsson and Amdocs in telco, or guidewire and insurance as an example, or Amagi and Epic Games in media and entertainment and gaming, who are really the recognizable industry brands, but working with those partners to build and optimize their solutions on AWS and then ultimately help customers on board to those solutions on the AWS cloud, to answer your question as to why it's important to AWS. You know, we certainly see that some of these use cases are the next frontier of enterprise adoption of the cloud, and so it's really important for us to take a long term point of view with some of these partners, because ultimately, customers are going to make decisions on which technology they want to onboard to the cloud for many years and possibly decades to come.

Chip Rodgers  3:20  
So really interesting. I love the, you know, they're just such interesting use cases. Like, they're all very, sort of very different. But you can see, I mean, some of them are just massive data, you know, requirements, you know, video, you know, insurance, I mean, you know, so is that part of the sort of the thinking is sort of looking at those industries where there are those kinds of, really, you know, huge requirements.

Chris Casey  3:44  
Yeah, I think whether you look at size of data or number of users, or scope and complexity of the use case in terms of global replication, those are all some of the things that have to go in our calculation of which partners we're prioritizing. You know there are, you'd be surprised about the amount of customers that have petabytes and exabytes of data sitting on AWS. And if the software applications that they're looking to analyze that data in or consume that data with is not also running on AWS, then that creates a friction point for them in terms of being able to realize the benefits of moving to the cloud and being able to turn off some of their on prem data center sort of capital expenditure. So for us, yeah, certainly some of the data intensive workloads or storage intensive workloads are certainly things that customers tell us are a real priority that they need. Then the end solutions that partners offer running on the AWS Cloud for us to be able to unlock those workloads, and for us, you know, AWS is and like Amazon is, a customer obsessed organization, but we're also partner obsessed. You know, the availability of partners building and running and efficiently co selling with AWS is critical. Critical to our success, and it's critical for our sales teams to be able to deliver customers complete solutions, rather than individual products that are only solving part of the problem. Yeah.

Chip Rodgers  5:11  
So I'm really curious about sort of the process of, you know, kind of looking at, okay, what are some industries that we want to go after, what are some partners that we want to work with, and then, how do we sort of build the, do the CO development process to, you know, to bring them to market? Could you, you know, talk a little bit about that, and is it, is it something that you and your team do? Is it something that the there's a strategy team that does or how does that? How does that sort of all come together to make those decisions?

Chris Casey  5:45  
Yeah, we work very closely with the AWS sales and business development teams around the world. And you know, out of the 10 industries, we've got about 57 unique themes across those industries, and about 175 unique use cases within those themes. So that's really driven by what customers have told our business development and our field sales teams, who are working very closely and have deep subject matter expert in those industries. From there, we're working backwards from honestly, customers are very vocal to us on which partners are the solutions they've used in the past or the ones that they want to use, and then really trying to map those partners to which of the use cases and themes where AWS maybe have some of the primitive building blocks through some of our foundational native AWS services. But it's the power of those native services plus partner solutions that really unlock the value for customers. So we work backwards all the way from that obviously in different geographies, you know, the partners that are that there might be different partners that fulfill those use cases and themes in a specific geography, take media and entertainment, and there's different languages and some of those types of things. So we do tailor that to the different geographies, but that's sort of the process that we go through pretty regularly across the organization to just make sure we're working backwards from the same strategic priorities and

Chip Rodgers  7:06  
themes. Yeah, makes sense. So, you know, starting with you me, hearing from hearing from the field organization and the industries, but then really going back to customers, like, what are customers looking for, and who are the partners that they're that they're working for, that would make sense to bring aboard. Yeah, we'reSChris Casey  7:21  
lucky enough to have, you know, we've got more than 100,000 partners, but we've got some very vocal customers that are very clear on what they need, which is great, and we certainly welcome that. And we welcome them pushing us as much as, as much as they can for us to make sure that we're where we have the partner solutions that are available right now that they need, but we're also investing into the future to build the next generation of customer experiences for their end customer, so that we can unlock even further innovation for them. And certainly, the AWS Marketplace is an avenue where some of these partners are now being furnished much more to customers. Historically, the marketplace didn't have a lot of industry partners available to customers to use it to procure those solutions. And you're starting to see that trend shift, which is really exciting for

Chip Rodgers  8:10  
us. Yeah, I mean, that's what it's all about, is bringing together, right, the marketplace and wholesale, you know, bringing solutions into, into the market. So that's, that's, that's really cool that it's happening.

Chris Casey  8:23  
Yeah, it is. You know, we've certainly seen customers really embrace marketplace as a as a vehicle for them to procure these third party solutions. And, you know, we hope to see that growth continue over the years to come, but it's been, it's been great since the 10 years the marketplace has existed, and we're excited for the decade to come.

Chip Rodgers  8:40  
Yeah, fantastic. Chris. Thank you so much for for joining and spending a little bit of time and explaining the kinds of things that AWS are doing. We're, you want to hear more. We'll, we'll be sharing the stage tomorrow morning at 9am on the for the enterprise Summit. And so, Chris, thank you. Thanks. Really appreciate it. Yeah, great, yeah, likewise. Cheers. Thank you all for joining, and we'll see you, I guess I think with this is actually our last, my last interview here. So yeah, so see you at the next, next event and catalyst next year. Thanks everyone. Thanks. You.

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