Matt Yanchyshyn: Building Seamless Buying Experiences with AWS

Chip Rodgers   0:00  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work, span and we are here at the AWS Marketplace sellers conference in Seattle, actually, Bellevue. And wow, what a great event here. Yeah,

Matt Yanchyshyn  0:13  
it's a great event. I was saying to you before. This is my favorite conference of the year. And I do a lot of conferences, because the people here honestly know more about my features than I do. It's really deep in AWS Marketplace.

Chip Rodgers   0:22  
It's amazing. It's just such great content. And really a lot of people coming together there, I don't know, maybe a couple 100 people here, or something like that. It's really, it's it's fantastic. Okay, so we are here, and I'm really excited to be talking with Matt yanchin. And Matt is now vice president of AWS Marketplace, basically the engine, the product and engineering organization for for marketplace, which is first of all, a big job, and you've been doing some amazing things. Matt,

Matt Yanchyshyn  0:55  
thanks. Yeah, it's been, I've been with AWS for 12 years now, and I've been in this role for about, for about two years. And, yeah, it's exciting. It's a really fast growing part of AWS overall. And, you know, partners is such a important part of the AWS strategy at this moment and growing that it's nice to be at the center of all that.

Chip Rodgers   1:11  
It really is, it's it is exciting. And there's so many, in fact, we can, let's talk a little bit about about some of those new kinds of things. I think it's really fascinating that AWS is taking an approach of really bringing, bringing marketplace to where partners are right and customers are to make it very easy and approachable. So tell us a little bit about how that's happening. What's What does that mean to AWS? Yeah,

Matt Yanchyshyn  1:41  
so I mean, first of all, starting with the AWS Marketplace itself and the website, we're improving things like discovery and improved SEO. We just launched new product detail pages and new homepage revamp so for the existing marketplace, making it a place where more customers come, attracting more customers and where it's easier to find what they need. A lot of focus on the customer experience for for the marketplace site itself. But you're right. We're also now moving beyond the boundaries of the actual AWS Marketplace site. And so we've been building these console integrations for several years, kind of quietly, and I believe there are about 19 of them now. But now marketplace is increasingly everywhere within AWS, for years, we've had the EC two integrations, for example, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Susa or canonical, or even the RDS integrations, obviously with Microsoft and with Oracle and IBM recently with DB two. But what we started doing is these marketplace powered integrations, like with our Kubernetes service Eks, so you have third party partner add ons in the Kubernetes console that customers can discover and buy and use and actually deploy directly into their Kubernetes cluster without ever leaving the Eks console. And that's, yeah, what meeting customers where they are means, because if you're a Kubernetes cluster administrator and you're in the Eks console, you're a highly intentioned buyer, you're gonna, when you're looking for a partner, add on for monitoring your Kubernetes cluster within the Eks console, there's a high chance you're gonna use it right? And so that for partners means that that is like a super highly qualified lead. So it's good for everyone. It's good for customers because they find where they need, where they are actually working. It's good for partners because those are higher qualified leads that convert a lot more. And good for AWS, obviously, because it means that those Kubernetes clusters become even more useful for customers with additional partner add ons. So that strategy we're replicating across a number of different AWS services, and now the last step is taking it one step further outside of the walls of AWS. So we've been steadily launching a number of APIs that both help our partners operate more efficiently, but also allow you to build custom customer experiences on top of the marketplace APIs. And so, for example, the DC Summit, we launched caraccloud With Carahsoft that they built in partnership with a company called phoenix.ai and that is a outside of AWS custom storefront targeting us public sector customers built on our APIs. Those are marketplace listings in that in that experience, and that's a big deal. That's incredible. Yeah, I mean, those customers are, they're going to carousels cloud to look what they want. They may or may not go to marketplace, but they can still use marketplace in either place.

Chip Rodgers   4:15  
That's phenomenal. And, you know, I think it's, you know, just that, that ability to for customers to be able to transact on the marketplace is it just streamlines everything, right? It just makes it so much easier contracting and pricing and, you know, all the procurement process and everything like everything's worked

Matt Yanchyshyn  4:36  
out. Yeah. I mean, for me, I think what customers tell me a lot is it's all about speed. First of all, you have a whole generation of people who are now often CIOs of big companies, who grew up in kind of the App Store generation. They want access immediately to new technologies. And so translating that need for immediacy, if you're building an application these days, and you want Gen AI, for example, technologies, you want to quickly evaluate a bunch of Gen AI technologies. And you don't have time to kind of, you know, pick up the phone, call your seller, call your reseller, do that 100 times you want to go to a catalog where you can easily trial those things using SaaS free trials, for example, and then buy them and put them to use immediately, to sort of move faster, to innovate. So marketplace really helps with that side of kind of speed and innovation. And yeah, you said it even on the Enterprise contract side, getting those contracts done, speeding up the legal part, like all those pieces we can make faster with the marketplace motion. So speed of procurement is ultimately, like, one of the top goals in marketplace.

Chip Rodgers   5:30  
That's that's phenomenal. And I think we're also, you know, work span works very closely with AWS and and a lot of our customers, AWS partners, just love the the ability to embed the the marketplace capabilities right into their into their buying process.

Matt Yanchyshyn  5:48  
Yeah. I mean, workspace is actually really important. Sorry. Work span is a I was talking about the AWS service. Work span is a really important part of our strategy, in the sense that I really see you guys. And you know, I'm not just saying this because we're chatting as an extension of our engineering, because we can't scale it alone. And when I came into this role, one thing I've done with several service teams before is partnered with partners to help other partners. And if you follow me for a second, what that means is, if you're a partner and you need to get your marketplace listing done, or you want to integrate with some of the more advanced features, like SaaS free trials or some of the APIs I was talking about, you know, they need help, and we're growing so fast that I can't scale fast enough to help them all. And quite frankly, they need kind of a white glove support. I'm focused on building the marketplace software. I need partners like work span to not only get them listed, but to do those integrations, but also get help from CO selling, you know, Ace integration, and get their CRM wired up and all that stuff. And that takes work, that takes specialist expertise. And so by having workspan as a partner, it really helps me onboard partners and make those partners happier faster. So it's really this symbiotic relationship, and this strategy of sort of embracing integrators like you has really kind of worked, I think, for customers and for partners and for us together. This kind of three way relationship has been really helpful. It's

Chip Rodgers   7:01  
fantastic. Yeah, really. And appreciate the partnership, Matt, yeah. So what's next? Reinvent is coming up. And I know there's going to be some things you can't even talk about right now that you'll be announcing, but what's kind of, what's on the horizon, and I know there's just a lot of excitement about reinvent, yeah, yeah.

Matt Yanchyshyn  7:19  
I mean, listen, I'm a pretty transparent guy, and a lot of the things that we're launching are related to the themes that I've already discussed here, when I think of what's next, and even looking beyond, reinvent the two areas where I think we have done a lot and we're certainly going to announce a lot before the end of the year, but where we have a lot more to do are international expansion. We really want to make it easier for both our buyers and our sellers to do business outside of the US and many, many more countries, many more currencies, many more languages, local bank account, local tax treatment, local invoicing. Doing business if you're a US seller or if you're a non US seller, trying to do business in countries that's out of your own is complicated. I mean, you know, every country has its own tax regulations, every state, often within those countries have their own regulations, their specific invoicing requirements. For example, for public sector, you might have local language requirements, like in Canada, and that is undifferentiated heavy lifting for partners to navigate all that. So I see that as an opportunity to help partners and then in turn, reach our joint customers better all over the world. So international expansion, huge focus. So expect a lot there, both this year and next. And the second thing I'll highlight, really, is on reducing procurement friction. We've come a long way with things like private marketplace and purchase order support, but I won't be satisfied. I was saying this earlier today. You remember 10 years ago when CISOs from big banks finally got on stage and said, I am more secure in the cloud. And that was like a watershed moment for AWS. And I won't be happy until a chief procurement officer from one of the like the largest companies in the whole world stands on stage beside me and says, by using marketplace, I can, you know, procure faster for my entire IT solutions portfolio, not just, you know, a niche part of the cloud, like, you know, IT solutions end to end, and that it works as the new normal with their existing procurement systems and processes. And that is the high watermark. And we're racing to get there as soon as possible. But it seems

Chip Rodgers   9:14  
like we're getting there too. I mean, it's like there are companies that are that really are embracing it, you know, make,

Matt Yanchyshyn  9:20  
make no mistake, absolutely, you know, especially this year, because with horizontal business applications coming on in a big way to to the marketplace, like I stood on stage with with Salesforce last year, service now as well, we have SAP has listings on the marketplace. Now we have a lot of the world's largest software companies, and a lot of them are horizontal business application companies like infor Adobe, and they bring with them huge customers, and different personas, different types of buyers, too. So yeah, when I look across the buyers, the customers, the marketplace, you know, a huge number of the world's largest companies are already buying our marketplace. But I mean, these are big companies, and it's a big opportunity. And we have a lot of opportunity to serve more of their procurement needs across their full portfolio. Amazing.

Chip Rodgers   10:05  
Well, Matt, thank you for taking a few minutes. And we have a whole big agenda for the rest of the rest of the day, and it's been great catching up. And you know, we'll, we'll, we'll chat later today and see what see you all at reinvent

Matt Yanchyshyn  10:18  
thanks so much. Thanks for being a great partner, and I appreciate it. Chip, thanks

Chip Rodgers   10:22  
Matt, thank you for joining, and we'll see you next time. Thanks everybody. You.

‍