Jessica Rudy: Building Scalable GTM Motions Across the Ecosystem

Episode Overview

What a great way to kickoff AWS re:Invent this week!

I had the privilege of speaking with Jessica Rudy, AWS Partner Experience Lead, for a video interview on the bustling expo floor.

We dove into the exciting transformations happening for Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners and what it means to scale effectively with AWS. Here are some key takeaways:

🔑 Highlights from the Interview:

🔵 𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗺𝗹𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗴𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Jessica emphasized the critical importance of linking AWS Marketplace and Partner Central accounts. This integration provides partners with a unified 360-degree view of their business, enabling smarter decisions and better collaboration. Bonus: AWS has simplified the linking process to make it faster and easier than ever!

🔵 𝗚𝗲𝗻𝗔𝗜-𝗣𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗱 𝗧𝗼𝗼𝗹𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀: AWS recently launched a Partner Assistant within Partner Central, leveraging generative AI to provide instant answers to common questions about incentives, qualifications, and more. Plus, foundational technical reviews (FTRs) are now automated with GenAI, streamlining the approval process for partners.

🔵 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗧𝗵𝗿𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽𝘀: Jessica highlighted how AWS partners act as a force multiplier, leveraging their deep industry expertise to deliver meaningful solutions. AWS’s focus remains on enabling partners to grow with ease through robust programs, incentives, and streamlined CRM integration.

🔵 𝗘𝘅𝗰𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘀 𝗮𝘁 𝗿𝗲:𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁: From new features improving the partner experience to innovations like automated FTRs, AWS is continually evolving to empower its partner network and their customers.

It’s always inspiring to see AWS’s commitment to creating a frictionless partner experience and helping businesses thrive.

Thank you, Jessica, for sharing your insights and for all you do to support AWS partners.

Are you at AWS re:Invent this week? Drop by the AWS Partner Booth to learn more—and don’t forget to link your accounts and grab a pin!

Recorded:
December 2, 2024

Podcast
Guest

Jessica Rudy

AWS Partner Business Development
AWS

AWS Partner Business Development

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Episode Transcript

Chip   0:00  
Hey everyone, Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span, and it's day one.

Chip   0:05  
We are here. It's not even, is it quite day I think is day one today or day one tomorrow?

Jessica Rudy  0:10  
There is a pretty exciting reception tonight at the expo hall that I'd encourage everybody to pop into. So, yeah, I'd call this day one. Day one. Yeah, big, huge, always day one. Chip.

Chip   0:21  
Oh my gosh. How could I forget that? Matt, Matt Garman kicks off with a big keynote tomorrow morning, and got Ruba is going to be speaking on Wednesday, and got a lot of lot of great content this week, absolutely.

Jessica Rudy  0:35  
And don't forget about Julia Chen and Matt yanshu Shin also have a pretty exciting on Thursday. On Thursday, yes,

Chip   0:41  
I'll be there. Good stuff.

Jessica Rudy  0:44  
I'll be there if they let me in.

Chip   0:47  
So I am so excited to be joined by Jessica Rudy. Jessica is AWS partner experience lead in for AWS and gosh, Jessica, you've been with AWS now for a little over four years, I believe. And

Jessica Rudy  1:03  
yes, just a bit over four years.

Chip   1:04  
So let's start off by just tell us a little bit about what you've said. Really important role with partners, you know, getting partners up to speed and making sure that they have a good experience, getting them enabled and that they're adopting tech, you know, technology that that AWS, everybody tell, tell us a little bit about what that, what that role, is all about, absolutely.

Jessica Rudy  1:27  
Well, you summed it up pretty well, actually. So I'm in an organization called partner core, and within that organization, I'm on the delivery team. And what delivery really focuses on are all of the scale mechanisms that help our partners scale and grow with AWS. And so a lot of what we've been focusing on is a partner experience transformation, and through that, we're really trying to be more transparent with partners about what AWS goals are, where we're putting our strategic investments. We're also trying to make it easier for partners to do business with us. And a third major aspect of that transformation is more integration of the AWS partner Central and the AWS Marketplace experience. So to that end, if you don't mind me taking a moment to encourage all partners to link their accounts. So marketplace and partner Central account linking has a few benefits that you can realize immediately. It makes for a seamless integration between your two platforms, and it also allows you to take all of your marketplace data and see it within the partner central insights tab, so you get that nice 360 view of your business. But the best part is that just recently, our engineering team totally transformed the linking experience. They've taken several steps out of the process and automated IAM roles and made it really easy for people to do this linkage. So even if you don't have a presence on marketplace yet, but you are an AWS partner with a partner Central account, I really encourage you to go through the process. It'll take you through step by step. If you take a look in partner Central, that's

Chip   3:00  
really that's amazing and exciting. I think it's been a transformation. I think if you look sort of at the history of partner Central and marketplace, they really were sort of two separate things. And now over the last couple of years, they've really been coming together. And this is just the, maybe the next iteration of that.

Jessica Rudy  3:18  
I'm glad that that's what you've observed, too, I think there was always some organic alignment between the two. And anybody who's been working with ISB partners for years would say that they were always working in both partner Central and marketplace. So there's very much a concerted effort, both from an organizational perspective and from a tooling perspective, to bring these two worlds even closer together and integrate that experience more.

Chip   3:40  
Well, that's fantastic. And thus the button with our best friend, Matt.

Jessica Rudy  3:46  
Why? Yes. So as a partner, if you want to take a stop by the partner booth inside the expo hall, I'm at 316 we actually have these fun little pins. So if you've linked your account, I will happily hand one over. If you haven't linked your account, I'll trade you a pin for an email address so I can follow up with you and make sure you know how to take the right steps.

Chip   4:04  
That's fantastic. So, Jessica, there have been so many you know, Matt has been posting like more than once a day, almost over the last week, about new this is a new capability and another new capability. Tell me about what's, what are some of the new things that are, that are coming, you know, coming out this week at reinvent and and what's the what? What does that mean for partners?

Jessica Rudy  4:28  
Sure, well, I want to actually look a little bit into the past, because we've got some cool announcements, and I'll wait for you to hear those in the keynote. But just in the past few weeks, we've launched a number of things that can really help partners optimize their time and make things work a little bit more efficiently. One of those things is our new partner assistant. So within partner Central, there's a Gen AI powered assistant that can get you really immediate answers to the questions you have. You can ask it anything like, how do I get map incentives? Or, how do I qualify? For ISB accelerate, and it'll give you all of the resources that are related to that as well. It's great. Summary, yeah, so of course, that feature does require you to first link your accounts, so that dependent, got

Chip   5:11  
a link first. That's dependent. There's a, there's a there's a pattern here. Can

Jessica Rudy  5:15  
you? Can you imagine? Yeah, that is a foundational step to a lot of the capabilities we want to launch. One other thing I do want to highlight is the FTR process. So foundational technical reviews, which most partners will know, is kind of a first step on the software journey. Those have now been automated also through Gen AI, so partners with a successful review will actually see that approval come through within minutes of submission. And if there are remediations, if there are gaps, no problem, we still have you covered after about two weeks. Within two weeks, excuse me, a Solution Architect will reach out to you, work on your remediations, and then you can get up and running listing co selling whatever you want to do with your solution.

Chip   5:53  
That's fantastic. Well, I love that. You know, one of the things that you said earlier as you were describing your role. That's really critical is the ability for partners to scale and to scale, for AWS to scale, the number of partners talk about that. Why is that so important? I know it is, and I know you know it is, but I want to, I'd love to hear, well,

Jessica Rudy  6:15  
partners are a force multiplier for AWS, and that has always been the case. They are in with their customers, deep with industry expertise, deep within the latest technologies, using our services to deliver outcomes, deliver solutions for the business problems that our partner, that our customers have, and so we constantly want to do whatever we can to make sure you as partners have easy access to the programs support incentives that help you drive that business and make sure that you're telling us about your business as easily as possible through things like ACRM integration, for example, so that we really know who to connect you with and where we can best support you and partner.

Chip   6:57  
That's fantastic. Jessica, thank you so much for taking a few minutes and sharing, sharing the incredible things that are going on at AWS for partners, and making sure that partners have a great partner experience. Well,

Jessica Rudy  7:10  
thank you so much for the time, and thank you for everything you do to enable our partners too. I've heard wonderful stories from your customers about how their AWS engagements have scaled radically after integrating their CRM, they're seeing more attention from our sellers, more attention from our program team. So it's all good for everybody. That's fantastic.

Chip   7:28  
That is what it's all about. I mean, that's it. Talk about scale, right? So we just had Deloitte just went live and, you know, just talk about scale, right? I mean, they're huge business with AWS, so So thank you for that. It's good to hear that, and thank you for taking some time, Jessica.

Jessica Rudy  7:46  
My pleasure. Have a great reinvent

Chip   7:49  
and same to you. Thanks for joining us. And if you're not here, you should be. It's crazy. There's a lot going on. So we'll see you later this week. Thanks everybody. You.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Chip Rodgers headshot

Chip Rodgers

Host, Inside Partnering

🚀 CMO | Chief Partner Officer | B2B SaaS Growth & GTM Leader | Ecosystem Strategy | Demand Gen | Podcast Host 🎙