Sid Nabar: Driving Business Outcomes with Partner-Led Solutions

Chip   0:01  
Hey everyone. Chip Rodgers, Chief partner officer at work. Span and Wow, It's day four. Sid, what do you think it's been a crazy week, huh?

Sid Nabar  0:10  
It has. It started Monday morning, 8am for us with some round tables, but it's been an exciting four days. Couldn't ask for more. Absolutely,

Chip   0:18  
it's by Tuesday afternoon, because we also arrived on Sunday night. Tuesday afternoon. I'm like, it can't be just Tuesday. It

Sid Nabar  0:29  
already feels like the Monday sessions were like last week. It doesn't feel like three days, because, as you know, the days are full of meetings, the nights are full of meetings. So makes for some long days. But really, this is the week that the team lives for. And it's really exciting to see all of your work come to culmination, partners using your work giving you great, rich feedback, people traveling from around the world. I've met partners from APAC EMEA. So really exciting to be here. That's

Chip   0:57  
fantastic. So I'm excited to be joined by Sid. Nabar. Sid is head of product, Head of Product building all the product for for AWS partner, partner Central and in the marketplace on the seller side. So Sid, welcome.

Sid Nabar  1:17  
Thank you. Thank you.

Chip   1:19  
Yeah, yeah. So Sid, your role. I mean, let's start with with that, what you and your team have been up to, gosh, you know, Matt, why has been the last couple of weeks, like every, multiple times a day? Well, by the way, we got this coming out. We got this coming out. So you certainly have been very busy. Tell us about it. Yeah,

Sid Nabar  1:39  
my team and I joke that our task is to make Matt not keep pace with us on LinkedIn, launch so many features that he needs a Gen AI bot one day. But yeah, so my team owns everything we do for the partners. So on partner Central, we own our ACE co sell engine. We own the funding portal, all of the tasks, analytics, stuff like that. On the marketplace side, we own everything we provide to sellers to be able to sell on AWS Marketplace, which includes international expansion, making offers, listing products and so on. When you look back at this year, it's been phenomenal. There's a few story arcs that I'd like to point to, and we'll get into it when we talk about priorities as well. But in the first key one is you'll see marketplace going everywhere. And what we mean by that is we don't necessarily want customers or sellers having to come to our UI portal or our console to get the benefits of marketplace, like easy procurement, higher deal size, faster deals, stuff like that. They can stay where they are and where they prefer to stay, and we'll meet them there, right? And so this is in terms of having APIs so that they can be in their own website, like distributors or channel partners are now using buy with AWS that we announced yesterday, and customers can buy with AWS right from that website, but also in terms of our global footprint, we continue improving the experience for customers and sellers outside the US. So I think that's the big focus. Yeah,

Chip   3:19  
with currency translations and language and

Sid Nabar  3:24  
yeah, yeah, we have the one of our most exciting features this year in September, was the ability to have both local bank accounts and local currencies in multiple countries, and it really frees up sellers from Australia, Japan, Europe and so on, to transact in the local currency, give the buyers an experience that feels first class in their country, right? Rather than having to do everything in US dollars, get the money in a US bank account through hyper wallet, then transfer the money back. Now they can give a truly local experience. So that was a big one, yeah,

Chip   3:59  
that's amazing. That's a lot of work putting that together, I can imagine. And I love the the, you know, the concept of, you know, putting marketplace where, where people are, right, find, finding them where they are, which is also has been our, you know, sort of mantra, as well as, you know, getting for work span. We're are we're trying to, you know, take AWS process, build it right into our customer, your partner's process as well. And the APIs have been phenomenal for doing that.

Sid Nabar  4:33  
Yeah, no. 100% and we really appreciate partners like work span and others who are really helping us scale the goodness that our teams build, and so we don't have to think about, how do we optimize the UI or optimize the workflow for every single partner? Right? Partners like yourself help us customize that experience for our largest partners, who have very specific needs because they have built their own scale. Doing their own workflows over years of business. So

Chip   5:03  
tell me about, I think one of the things that's been really, you know, an interesting sort of transformation, I guess, over the last year, year and a half, has been this idea of, you know, I think partner center and marketplace really sort of started up. There was two different organizations, it was, and now it's really put together, and everything's it's a single sort of thing. Tell me. Tell me a little bit about that.

Sid Nabar  5:28  
I'm glad you asked. Like that is when I think about the main story arcs for the one or two, three year horizon. One of them was marketplace everywhere that I talked about. The second one really is partner Central and marketplace connecting much better together and becoming more cohesive as a journey for both partners and customers. So if you flashback maybe couple of years ago, partner central felt like a way that you interact with Amazon, you do funding benefits, you do co sell, but then when it comes time to sell, you were sort of on your own. You could choose any channel. Go direct if you wanted to do you could do marketplace, but there was no efficiency in it for you. Similarly, for marketplace sellers, there was no way you sort of manage any incentives that we have for you, or you sort of show how much business you're doing a marketplace, connect with other partners and things like that. And so bringing these two together really help us provide sort of a complete experience for our partners, right? We think of it as like a lead to code to cash journey, and you see more and more of that. So just this month, or, I guess last month now, in November, the team launched the ability to connect Marketplace offers to opportunities in as in partner Central. So now the now partners can get a holistic view of, oh, I had this opportunity with this customer. I closed it with this offer. Now let me see how that translated the time horizon and so on. You'll continue to see more and more of that linking. We have now shipped sort of a improved experience to link your accounts. I know Jessica talked to you about that as well. That's a very big push from our side to encourage partners to link their partner, Central account to their AWS. And you'll see more and more features leverage that link, so you can see the benefit across the ecosystem.

Chip   7:22  
And, of course, there was the the fun button with, with Matt, with the link I'm linked.

Sid Nabar  7:29  
Yep, that one is going viral.

Chip   7:32  
So, so what's next? What's I mean, I'm sure you know, first of all, it's just like, Okay, let's take a breather because, because there's so much, you know, anticipation and build up to reinvent. But what do you see for 2025 Yeah,

Sid Nabar  7:47  
so I think even if you look at rubas keynote yesterday, right, like you see that we continue to respond to customer feedback. The multi partner opportunity was a big deal for us. Took a lot of effort from teams and from partners like yourself to bring that to life. So now partners have this ability to collaborate on opportunities across multiple partners. So an ISV a channel partner and si can all get together and collaborate on one opportunity. I think although that's a featured launch, it's just the beginning. There is so much more in that space of how you stop thinking about a partner to customer journey as a one to one, but really as a collaboration, where there are multiple partners coming together, selling to a customer. So I think that's going to be a big theme going forward, both on the partner central side and marketplace side on marketplace. Also, we have feedback about, Hey, how can I compose a solution for customers, let's say zero trust. How do I take a security offering, a privacy a data monitoring offering, and create one zero trust package, maybe with a professional service in there, and offer it to the customer? So that's a big focus, supporting different business models around the world. So like distribution channels, having multiple downstream partners. How do we enable that? Again, meeting customers where they are in terms of countries, you'll see us continue to, A, expand in more countries around the world, and B, for the countries we are in, you'll see us improve the experience, right? Like native taxation. Just last month, we launched sort of self serve EMEA KYC. So earlier, the KYC process would take weeks. Now it will be done in less than a week. So that's a big focus. A third, very interesting focus is using Gen, generative AI ourselves. I know we sort of talk the talk of getting all customers adopting our generative AI services and stuff like that, but we are ourselves, sort of dog fooding, if you will, an internal customer. 100% there is so much that teams have done. In marketplace. Now when you upload a new listing, we validate it using generative AI, and happens in minutes instead of days. Our support agents have a generative AI agent that we built for them. So when they get support cases for the level 100 or 200 cases, they can see sort of what response the bot would give and simply copy paste it back to the customer. So a lot of work happening there, and you'll see us continuing to bring workflow automation and sort of intelligence to partner Central, so that things don't seem as onerous, right? Like a lot of partners I spoke to in reinvent sometimes they feel like, oh, I have to do my business, plus then I have to come and tell AWS what I did to get the benefits. And that is absolutely not our intention, right? Our intention is to plug into your primary workflow and then automate as much as possible so that as a partner, you all just get the benefits you all deserve, and you all have earned without having to do extra work. That's

Chip   11:03  
fantastic. I love that. Well, Sid, thank you so much for taking some time this morning. And it's been a been a great week. Congratulations on all the all the announcements and the success and and, you know, I guess I was, I was going to say, See you next year, but we'll see you a lot, a lot before then. So fantastic. And thank you for Thanks for joining.

Sid Nabar  11:26  
Thank you. Yeah, thanks for doing this. It's it's a great opportunity to sort of candidly share the work that the team has been doing. So I really appreciate it. Thank you.

Chip   11:34  
Awesome. So thank you as well. And thanks for joining, and we'll see you, see you next time. Thanks everybody. I.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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