Gautham Pandiyan: From Zero to CX Leader on AWS Marketplace

Chip Rodgers  0:00  
Hey everyone, welcome back to AWS reinvent we are here again. And gosh, there's so much going on. There's so many people here. It's jammed, huh? So Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and excited to have you join us again. And I'm here with Gautam. Pandya, Gautam, welcome. Well, thank you. Great to be here. Gautam is VP of partner ecosystem growth acceleration at Qualtrics. And Gotham, you've been with Qualtrics for about a little over four years, I think, and kind of from the beginning, gone through a lot of changes with purchase, by acquisition by SAP, and then spin off again, and a lot of a lot of things, but So welcome, welcome,

Gatham Pandiyan  0:48  
well, thank you. It's great to be here, and it been was here a couple of years ago. It's great to be back. This is always a fun conference, and tons of learning, networking, meeting great folks like yourselves, and getting to catch up.

Chip Rodgers  1:00  
Yeah, yeah. So I love to talk to you about, you know, you have a lot of heritage with with AWS. I mean, let's talk about your, your overall role, which is across all kinds of partners at Qualtrics, and, you know, sort of initiating and and stimulating growth for across all partners, but we're here at AWS and and cloud partnerships are really critical to, you know, to be ready for cloud sales and working with cloud providers. So talk a little bit about your, you know, the beginnings of your work with AWS. And why are you here today?

Gatham Pandiyan  1:39  
Happy to so I've been at Qualtrics about four and a half years, and our ecosystem has been around about five and a half years. So a relatively young ecosystem, but a 23 year old business, right? It's been around a while, and our AWS partnership started up about two and a half years ago, and so I was involved from day one of kicking it off, and it's been fun to see it grow and blossom and achieve quite a lot of success and scale over the last couple of years. So today, and there's a lot of learnings in that right, there's definitely a lot of genius on the sides of partner companies like AWS in setting up the right incentive structures and motions and systems and process to drive all this to scale the vast ecosystem they operate and so happy to share today, and specific learnings that have come up from the last two and a half years of driving this. I do think the hyperscalers are some of the most sophisticated scaling machines in the world. These ecosystems are broad, right? AWS has, what, 100,000 partners, so it's a lot of partners. And how do you drive rigor, revenue, repeatability, scale, and do all that in a way that is feasible to manage, right is. And so on the other side of it as a part ISV partner, you know, we've we ended 2022 in a position where we achieve a lot of success with our marketplace. Cloud. Marketplace is obviously a big part of the hyperscaler motion. And so we were named a top five seller in the business applications category. Congratulations. Thank you. Number one, the customer engagement subcategories. So it's a lot of momentum there, and we have some other initiatives around Amazon products, like Amazon connect and others that are underway too. So so it's been a fun journey. We've learned a lot, and we're just still scratching the surface on day one, as they say,

Chip Rodgers  3:20  
Well, congratulations on for two and a half years of, you know, starting it out, that's, that's incredible success. So so well done. And I love how you said, you know, one of the first things that you have to do is, as a, you know, if you're going to go to market and and sell with cloud providers, is have a marketplace listening and make sure that it's, you know, well structured and current, right? You always got to keep it current, because that's sort of your face to the to the market. And so talk a little bit about that, that process, and how, what that was like.

Gatham Pandiyan  3:55  
Yeah, it took a lot of work up front. I mean, suddenly, not as two and a half years ago, it wasn't as simple or as as it is seems to be today, right? So I'm sure that's come a long way to the thanks to the team at AWS working on it. So it did take a lot of work upfront to get it started and rolling. A large part of that is also internal to your depending on the size and scale of your business, to how does it affect your process? How you kind of orchestrate the flow of your deals, and how do you have a sales people lead with it, understand it. How do your customers understand it? Your buyers may not be the exact buyers who understand all the mechanics of marketplace. So there's a lot to be said around then. So a fair amount of change, education, training, all that, but it is critical, and it's becoming increasingly so. The studies I've seen Forrester, Bucha, no others this, the numbers just keep going up. Right? 10s of billions of dollars being spent and growing. The cloud providers are requiring more of it too, right? To get some of the incentives. As an ISV partner, you're more and more required to do transactions through the marketplace. So so there's a lot there. That's definitely where the gravity well is. So once you organize your internal business, though, then obviously crawl, walk and run. How do you like test all the things that work and where it can work? Where are the few wins that you can get to get on the board and start to spin the cycle further? We're certainly not in a running phase yet. That's our aspiration. But there's many other examples in the market, companies that are transacting nine figures of revenue, 10 figures of revenue, and so there's plenty of models to follow there. Some of this also depends on who your buyers are, how closely aligned they are understanding a little bit of like the noise that's coming at the AWS field, because there's a lot of partners out there, right? There's a lot of native services. So how do you stand out? You know, what's unique about your value proposition?

Chip Rodgers  5:46  
That's a critical thing. I think, you know, with working with it's like, how do you get the attention from the field, right? How are you positioned your unique value and why is it going to help them? You know? Why do they want to bring you into a deal

Gatham Pandiyan  5:59  
totally? And there's many facets to it, and it's such a vast ocean, it's easy to get lost and spread yourself across a lot of it. So how do you focus in a couple of key areas, key offerings, rack up the wins and win story and credibility to expand from there, right?

Chip Rodgers  6:15  
I assume you sort of figured out who you mapped to the CX folks at AWS and like, figured out, like they would be interested.

Gatham Pandiyan  6:23  
We did some of that, right? We did some of that. The Marketplace motion is somewhat more broad and horizontal for us, but yeah, some of the work we're doing with contact center and CX is a little more focused in that area. There's also different types of alignment, whereas some of the cloud providers are largely calling on it buyers, right? CIOs and others. So there's but today's announcement, AWS announced Salesforce products are now in marketplace, so momentum is shifting, and maybe there'll be more more wind in the back of some of the CX size business.

Chip Rodgers  6:56  
Well, good. Well, Gotham, thank you for sharing some some thoughts, and you know, we're here at AWS, so love to really appreciate you sharing your thoughts about your journey with AWS. And wow. I mean, two and a half years and number one in the CX area. And just, you know, just incredible, incredible growth.

Gatham Pandiyan  7:14  
Well, thank you. It's a pleasure to be here and chat with you all, and you know all the best with your AWS and hyperscaler Cloud journeys,

Chip Rodgers  7:21  
fantastic. Gautam, thank you. Thank you all for joining and we'll see you on the show floor. Thanks everybody that was.

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