Mona Chadha: How Partners Turn AI Innovation into Real-World Outcomes

Mona Chadha
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[00:00:00] Mona Chadha: I think this re:Invent is the perfect point where we have all the technical capabilities.

[00:00:07] We have the AI, AWS AI services, the Marketplace services. We also have the AI competency that we have on the APN side. So it has more components in there around consulting, around, security. So there's all these different components that, that are built in, and I think this

[00:00:24] re:Invent is particularly exciting because it takes AI to another level where you can now deliver value, deliver an ROI.

[00:00:32] Chip Rodgers: Anything like advice that you would have for, 'cause you've seen so many partners. What are some of the partners that are really co-selling well. What are they doing?

[00:00:42] Mona Chadha: I think, one of the key things that they're doing

[00:00:43]

[00:00:47] Chip Rodgers: Hey everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Inside Partnering, and we are here at re:Invent. Yeah.

[00:00:54] Mona Chadha: Woo. It's here We are at 25. This is my 13th re:Invent 13. [00:01:00] That's

[00:01:01] Chip Rodgers: crazy. That's crazy. That's crazy. I thought I was doing well with, I think I've got five. Five, so yeah.

[00:01:06] Mona Chadha: Going on. Yeah, it's great. Yeah.

[00:01:08] Chip Rodgers: It's just, it's great to be here. The energy. Yes. 65,000 people, something like that. However the

[00:01:15] Mona Chadha: Whatever final numbers are, or what's coming, but probably around that. And it's, I think it's, we don't want it to get that big, but yeah. 65,000 I feels right.

[00:01:25] Chip Rodgers: I know. It's it's, there are a lot of people. When it's crunch time. Oh yeah. A lot of people around, so there's

[00:01:31] Mona Chadha: a lot of people. They've done a really good job of navigating, we're spread across multiple hotel venues and we have different sort of areas where you can there's like a AI a workshop area over here.

[00:01:43] And so yeah, we're spread out everywhere in the area and everywhere. Yeah, we're, it's

[00:01:47] Chip Rodgers: amazing.

[00:01:48] Mona Chadha: You get a lot of steps in, so that's good.

[00:01:51] Chip Rodgers: Get all your steps in. Get all your steps in. So here we are chatting away. First of all. Very excited to have Mona Chadha join us. And [00:02:00] Mona is for the, anybody that doesn't know Mona is well known within AWS 13 years at AWS, like you said.

[00:02:07] So you are a Director of Worldwide Infrastructure ISV partners. And it's a big job. There's a lot that falls under infrastructure. Yeah. And I think a little bit of background for you, Microsoft Novell, Texas Instruments and know you've. A lot of sort of big, well Across the

[00:02:23] Mona Chadha: board it worked with multiple ISVs as well.

[00:02:26] And I will say this, that after all that experience, I will say that AWS helps seals it all in, it gels everything together, I would say.

[00:02:36] Chip Rodgers: That's awesome. And it's stuck. Yeah. 13 years. That's yeah's phenomenal. Yeah. You've got your red badge now, right? I do.

[00:02:43] Mona Chadha: I do. This is not my badge, it's my re:Invent badge, but I do have a red badge, yes.

[00:02:48] Chip Rodgers: So Mona, why don't we start just tell us a little bit about your role and what your team is up to these days.

[00:02:54] Mona Chadha: Yeah, sounds good. My team manages and works with some of our largest ISVs [00:03:00] from security data management, ai everyone does ai. So you can't really call that a category necessarily 'cause everyone does it.

[00:03:07] But across, ISVs like CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Okta, Zscaler and then on the data management side with Databricks, Snowflake Qlik or a few others, MongoDB. And so all these partners are really ones that are helping us drive, I would say, our AI journey and really helping it make it real, moving it to production for our end customers.

[00:03:30] So that's really what we're working on, is really helping our end customers realize the, the real value of AI and working very closely with our ISVs, like the ones that I mentioned, to get them, to have them integrate with all of our AI services, the newer ones that are coming out, as well as with leveraging AWS Marketplace to really help with our co-selling.

[00:03:54] It's great to build out all these amazing sort of technologies and capabilities and innovations around AI, [00:04:00] but then you gotta bring 'em to market. And so that's the beauty about what our team does is. We really deliver that co-sell experience. So we help our partners navigate what that looks like, helping them build out relevant solutions for our end customers and deliver those through the Marketplace, and then work with our sales teams to then help deliver those to our end customers together.

[00:04:21] So that's what my team does.

[00:04:24] Chip Rodgers: That's a lot. That's such an important role. You, there's so many avenues I want to go down, but but really, I think co-selling is so important for partners to be able to engage with the field and really get connected and, but you, but like you said, I think it starts with building a solution that's really valuable in, it might be within a customer.

[00:04:44] Mona Chadha: Yeah.

[00:04:44] Chip Rodgers: Always starts with the customer. Yeah. Anything like advice that you would have for, 'cause you've seen so many partners. What are some of the partners that are really co-selling well. What are they doing?

[00:04:56] Mona Chadha: I think, one of the key things that they're doing is one I would say is [00:05:00] that they're innovating with us and it's, not just it's, they're integrating, they're they're the first ones to actually come up with, Hey, let's integrate.

[00:05:09] Let's, for this is our, the outcome that we want, like this customer wants to achieve. Here's how we should be integrating with Bedrock Agent Core. And so we're seeing that across the board with partners who are really forward thinking and get into that AI mindset early on. I would say that's like a best practice that we have

[00:05:26] and what I've seen a lot with the partners that we engage with is that they have that mindset and then if they don't have that mindset or they're not quite there, we help them get there. And I think, delivering what we have across the different components of our AI stack across the compute.

[00:05:42] Having those integrations with Trainium Inferentia Graviton with being able to integrate with Bedrock, Amazon Bedrock with Bedrock Agent Core. Now, as we move into the agentic world, and then, if our ISVs don't want to build their own agents, we have agents and we have that ability to do that through some of the, AI [00:06:00] solutions that we have around Kiro as an example.

[00:06:03] I think being able to, one, integrate with the ex capabilities that we have and the integration helps you innovate faster. I think the other area is really working with us on a plan, so figuring out how do you embed AWS into sort of your thinking and your mindset of how you sell and how you market to your customers.

[00:06:25] Yeah, and I think partners that do that really well really understand that, their end customer base and what those, what that end customer base wants. And being able to then, as we think, as they think about go to market, they embed the messaging that they have with AWS with all those integrations into that.

[00:06:43] The other thing is that a lot of the the ISVs that we work with, the ones particularly that I work with are some of our best AWS customers.

[00:06:51] Chip Rodgers: All right.

[00:06:51] Mona Chadha: Why? Because they are, they recognize that AWS is the best place for them to innovate, is the best place for them [00:07:00] to create their agentic work streams.

[00:07:01] And it really is the best place for the best partner to really help them scale and scale across different regions. Think about some of the announcements that we, you know, that, we've been making around growing in specific areas like your European Sovereign Cloud. So having that protection

[00:07:16] there for anyone that needs that sort of peace of mind. And then also in specific regions in, A and z that we also launched. So I think we have a lot of scale, depth and breadth. But I would say those are the key things that kind of make a good partner, right?

[00:07:31] Those are good ingredients. They're a good customer. They integrate, they have a mindset of AI and how they wanna leverage it, and then they integrate AWS as a part of it, and they co-sell really well with us. Yeah. And they think about, what is important for the end customer, and they bring that to the table and they share information with us.

[00:07:49] I think that's a big thing where oftentimes you might be in a co-sell engagement and lots of times you're not sharing information. That's the best thing is that I think when our partners work with us, we always [00:08:00] have new tidbits of information to share with one another. Yeah,

[00:08:04] Chip Rodgers: I think that's so important.

[00:08:05] And because you know what's valuable about co-selling is you're extending your sales team right to, and the AWS sales team may have influence and connections or understand things that, and look and vice versa, right? Yeah. So you're both going together to, I think one of the things you said is really interesting.

[00:08:27] You talk about messaging and I think sometimes maybe what partners don't understand is that the message to the AWS field might be slightly different.

[00:08:37] Mona Chadha: Yeah. No, I think that is important. I think having, it's not just about your products and solutions, think about the customer is not just your product.

[00:08:45] The customer spans across multiple products. And so AWS being a key area where they're probably built on AWS. So being able to speak that language, and I think, to be honest, most of our especially mostly, [00:09:00] customers here that are also partners, they have cloud messaging and they've gotten really good at that, but now you take it to the next level with ai and so they actually, have real good command of our AWS services.

[00:09:13] That are now, that are being offered as well. So we find that those partners actually do really well in co-selling with us.

[00:09:20] Chip Rodgers: Which goes back to being a customer, right? If they're a customer, then they know it in their bones throughout the organization.

[00:09:27] Mona Chadha: That's right. That's right.

[00:09:28] That's right.

[00:09:30] Chip Rodgers: I think the other thing is getting the sales team like their the ISV sales team, like getting the connect. It's not just marketing or the partner team.

[00:09:38] Mona Chadha: Is it?

[00:09:39] Yeah, I think it's definitely it's, yeah, it's not just the you need the marketing, you need the sales teams, you need the partner organization, you need everyone to work together.

[00:09:47] It takes a village. It takes a bunch of different stakeholders to make it happen and move together. And like that orchestration is sometimes, you think daunting, but you know what? We found that to work really well. And especially getting all [00:10:00] those stakeholders to the table and bringing them along.

[00:10:02] It's also product team. I think they're a key component of how how you're gonna innovate.

[00:10:08] Chip Rodgers: Great. Great point. Something else you said earlier that maybe we could double click on a little bit. You mentioned that you're really trying to get partners to the point and customers to the point where they're in production.

[00:10:21] Yes. And I think there was, the MIT study that came out the beginning of the year made a big splash, oh, 95%, but. Yeah, a lot of those were just pilots. Yeah. So I think that's really interesting that's a big push.

[00:10:35] Mona Chadha: It is a big push because those pilots have to manifest in an ROI and the only way you get that ROI is if you get that scale in that production.

[00:10:44] So, you know, there's, not, I think there's always an appetite to experiment, but to experiment now with the, your eyes on what the end result's gonna look like. And being able to predict some of that. And I think that's what we're able to predict now with AI is [00:11:00] be is that predictability is there, right?

[00:11:02] So you're able to do that better with AI and with the tools and capabilities that are coming out. And I think, what's exciting is also, some of the solutions that are listed in the Marketplace now with the AI, agents and tools in AWS Marketplace. Those are really compelling.

[00:11:16] And now you can measure it. You can actually measure what that ROI is. Yeah,

[00:11:20] Chip Rodgers: I love that. Yeah, there was some really exciting announcements this morning. The I think mul multi-product solution that's solutions really interesting for partners.

[00:11:28] Mona Chadha: Yeah. That's the other thing is that, yeah, we launched so now you know, what we heard of is like in marketplace you could buy point solutions.

[00:11:37] You could buy like, not point solution, but a point product. But now the ability to have multiple product. In a private offer that is super compelling now because now you're able to build out an actual solution versus, having individual components. And then think about how that snowballs into now I'm a channel partner or an SI and now I can [00:12:00] deliver AWS I can deliver services.

[00:12:03] So now I've created a new revenue stream. And now am I able to help those customers inno innovate quickly, faster. And now I have the ability to put a solution bundle together that also incorporates, if I'm a channel partner, I now can price on different dimensions. I can price on time and delivery.

[00:12:20] I can, price on outcomes as opposed to just, one price for just one thing, right? Or just reselling a ISV solution. So again, AI is really opening more doors, more opportunities for everyone. Yeah.

[00:12:34] Chip Rodgers: And then Express Private Offers, that is so cool too.

[00:12:37] Mona Chadha: Super cool. Yeah. Being able to just, proactively deliver a very prescriptive solution with a price to a end customer.

[00:12:49] And you have that, that there's data behind that price, based on the behavior and the, that, the ISV is seen or the partner is seen with the end customer. So all of that together is you're actually, [00:13:00] it's actually smarter ways of procuring and it's really helpful for the buyer because now they're getting something they can be confident in the pricing that they're getting, they can be confident in the solution that they're getting.

[00:13:11] And it's all tied together through the Marketplace,

[00:13:14] Chip Rodgers: and it can be transacted in the marketplace. So it's valuable for the field and draw down all those.

[00:13:22] Mona Chadha: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like I said, I think this re:Invent is the perfect point where we have all the technical capabilities.

[00:13:31] We have the AI, AWS AI services, the marketplace services. We also have the augmented, the generative, the AI competency that we have on the APN side. So it has more components in there around consulting, around, all these different areas and so security. So there's all these different components that, that are built in, and I think this

[00:13:52] re:Invent is particularly exciting because it takes AI to another level where you can now deliver value, deliver an ROI.

[00:13:59] Chip Rodgers: Yeah. In [00:14:00] production.

[00:14:00] Mona Chadha: In production. In production. Yeah.

[00:14:03] Chip Rodgers: Well, Mona, this has been fantastic. It's really, thank you for taking some time and chatting with us and just it's so exciting to be here at re:Invent.

[00:14:10] You're 13th.

[00:14:11] Mona Chadha: 13th. Yes. Lucky 13th. Yeah.

[00:14:14] Chip Rodgers: Lucky 13th.

[00:14:15] Mona Chadha: Yeah.

[00:14:16] Chip Rodgers: That's fantastic. Mona, thank you and thank you all for joining as well. And we will see you all next time. Remember to like, share and subscribe. Thanks everybody. Thanks, Mona.

[00:14:27] Mona Chadha: Thank you. Thank you.

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