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Everyone with an eye on AI news and their distant cousins knows that the race is far from over. If Google has doubled down on AI training and research, and Microsoft has expanded its GenAI and infrastructure investments, AWS is also making significant strides. Especially after what we’ve learned from this AWS re:Invent week!
If you thought AWS’ new $4 billion Anthropic bet was the headliner, this re:Invent made it stale news. In his December 2 keynote address, newly appointed AWS CEO, Matt Garman made waves when he announced Project Rainier in partnership with Anthropic – “the world’s largest compute cluster for ML training.”
Alongside it, ran a slew of other updates for AI enthusiasts:
- The new Trainium 2 chips, designed to improve AI training and performance over any existing solution at lower costs than ever before
- Further enhancements to Amazon Q and Amazon Q Developer to make coding and AI agents for business much simpler
- Updates to Amazon Bedrock (including support for NVIDIA models) to make business apps cheaper and smarter by using smaller, task-specific AI models, and
- A brand new AI model in Amazon Nova, that is expected to help in creating text, images, and videos, tailored for specific needs
Yet, if you thought re:Invent 2024 was AWS’ AI redemption arc; it was more than just that. Underscoring every update, spotlight, keynote, and interaction was a far more powerful theme – partnerships. Partnerships are the foundation to AWS' growth and market dominance, and this re:Invent had more updates that would continue to support the evolution of synergies with the cloud provider.
Beyond AI: AWS's commitment to partnerships
Even as Bloomberg pitted the new chips against NVIDIA GPUs, Garman continued emphasizing on the 14-year relationship between the two companies. Today, both hardware partners like NVIDIA and software partners like Anthropic, are what's powering AWS’ AI push.
At the core of this partnership strategy lies strong business acumen. AWS realizes that it cannot solve for every business problem alone. But, by connecting the dots in technology, it can continue to expand its reach and service customers that it wouldn’t have been able to otherwise help.
This is precisely why the AWS Marketplace and its partner ecosystem is such a big part of Garman’s business growth strategy.
That said, here are a few “massive” themes and updates that Clazar’s learned about, in our Las Vegas outing for re:Invent!
Democratizing the AWS Marketplace: New features for partners and sellers
For AWS its cloud marketplace is a comprehensive proposition in closing the loop on a rather solid partner network. Not only is it a means for AWS to build on top of its own products and services by onboarding affiliate technology and service providers on a single platform, but it also is a means for them to drive more platform consumption by helping partners keep their customers within their cloud infrastructure.
As a result, AWS has been long invested in building more support for sellers, distributors, integrators, and resellers so they can reach and close more customers. Today, the AWS Marketplace is a mutually beneficial ecosystem where solution discovery, distribution, and transaction are happening at a solid pace.
AWS understands the potential it brings, and in a bid to double down on joint go-to-market motions, has announced a slew of updates and incentives to further democratize their marketplace for all partners and their own sellers:
Buy with AWS: A simpler procurement experience for software buyers
At AWS re:Invent 2024, we got a bit closer to unifying direct and marketplace sales channels.
The internet is democratic and customers look at diverse sources of information before they make a decision. Yes, it involves commercial hubs in software like the AWS Marketplace, but it also involves the vendor’s own website, where purchases have traditionally happened.
The new ‘Buy with AWS’ feature lets software vendors embed a purchase button on their websites, enabling customers to buy third-party cloud software using their AWS credentials. With ‘Buy with AWS’ software buyers can now use their cloud commits to procure solutions, even if their purchase decision is made outside of the AWS Marketplace interface.
Independent software vendors (ISVs), resellers and distributors embedding the button on their website, can continue to provide custom pricing, demos, and AWS Marketplace specific discounts, and other AWS Marketplace features straight from their websites.
This isn’t an entirely new feature. So far, businesses over 50 AWS customers are already live with the ‘Buy with AWS’ button, but it was at re:Invent 2024, when it went from beta to public.
💡Eligibility: Buy with AWS is available for all ISVs, resellers and distributors
From procurements to payment with the AWS Marketplace
When announcing the public rollout of ‘Buy with AWS,’ Dr. Ruba Borno, illustrated the creative enlistment of this new feature, as an alternate payment option.
Major AWS ISV Databricks used the button as a payment option within their buyer interface, beside credit cards. This reinforces how AWS’ slashing of marketplace fees to a maximum of 3% at re:Invent 2023, has reduced the burden on transactions to as little as credit card fees, making the AWS Marketplace more lucrative as a channel.
For buyers, marketplaces are now also a surrogate wallet that helps them bypass financial friction, extensive reviews, and uncomfortably stretched out procurement cycles.
Better AWS co-sell motions with support and seller incentivization
When Nadav Tzuker appeared on our podcast, he mentioned co-selling as the epitome of marketplace success. It is why most businesses would launch a markeptlace motion in the first place.
It didn’t help that, despite this itch, most early stage ISVs failed to enlist AWS Seller support, either for want of strategic planning, or because AWS Sellers were only incentivized to close deals with large technology solution partners.
At re:Invent 2024, AWS released a slew of updates to further democratize their marketplace for all partners and their own sellers by:
- Allowing AWS Sellers to retire their quota by co-selling any SaaS solution on the ISV Accelerate Program (irrespective of size or industry) on private offers transacted through the AWS Marketplace.
- Announcing a new business planning feature that partners of all sizes map out a co-sell plan, align on their better together story, and orient AWS and vendor sales teams in the same direction.
- Launching a new GenAI solution for AWS Sellers to discover, identify, and score partners, and bring them into the right deals.
- Building Partner Connections – a new feature that helps AWS partners find and discover other solutions to co-sell with, on appropriate deals
- Enhancing integrations between the ACE portal and partners’ own tools and systems like Slack and their CRM to boost co-sell collaboration and opportunity management
New specializations and the launch of the AI security category
At re:Invent, AWS followed up with the launch of five new specializations.
This is also followed by the launch of the new AI Security category that makes discovering AI security solutions on the AWS Marketplace easier for buyers.
💡Eligibility: The AWS AI Security category is only open to AWS Security Competency partners
This is an acknowledgement of the changing instances of data and security practices especially with AI as its inflection point, where governance is failing to catch up to the speed and the spread of new applications being built.
According to Gartner, by 2027, 60% of organizations will fail to realize the anticipated value of their AI use cases due to incohesive ethical governance frameworks.
No cap on MAP: Unlimited incentives on customer migrations to AWS
As of Q3 2024, AWS continues to lead the cloud infrastructure market, with a 31% market share followed by Microsoft Azure at 20%. As AI pushes more business workloads to public cloud, AWS realizes that to maintain its dominance, it will also need to continue incentivizing the ecosystem that has supported its growth so far.
In July 2024, AWS announced new incentives as a part of its migration assistance program (MAP). Any partner that brought in a new customer to AWS could find expedited funding support and funds that grew with deal size, up until a threshold.
At re:Invent 2024 Dr. Ruba Borno announced the elimination of previous funding limits for large migration projects, allowing partners to increase their interest and attract high-ticket migrations to AWS.
The new uncapped migration incentives help AWS double-down on its partner network as a means to secure new customers and drive more extensive cloud adoption and customer transformation in a hot market.
The rise of channel: A prediction for marketplace GTMs over the next few years
This year’s partner keynote was also joined by breakaway cloud security startup Wiz, plagiarism prevention service Turnitin, and digital business transformation consultants Ahead as they discussed the importance of channel partnerships on modern day GTMs for cloud businesses.
We learned that channel partners like Ahead don’t just present sellers (Wiz, in this case) with faster deployments, better ‘go-to-market’ experience or expanded reach, they also have the potential to help buyers reduce the time-to-value on their purchases by having a strong understanding of their issues and their operations.
This momentum is also consistent with what AWS has seen. Over 80% of all its greenfield migrations were partner attached, leading them to rethink their migration incentivization strategy.
By 2027, Canalys expects more than 50% of marketplace sales to flow through the channel, highlighting just how important distribution, partner expansion, and collaboration is becoming in modern day sales.
The lesson for ISVs on the marketplace is simple, achieving greater sales outcomes in a competitive economy is now down to the ability to foster an expansive distribution and partner network that goes through the channel.
On the other hand, channel partners on the AWS Marketplace are also generating massive growth by plugging in an information and knowledge gap, reaching across to buyers and finding them the right solutions. According to a Forrester Consulting report, channel partners who build and scale an AWS Marketplace practice can realize 234% ROI, 50% faster deal closure, 4-5X richer deal sizes.
Our customers at re:Invent 2024
AWS re:Invent 2024 was as bright and eventful for our customers as it was for us. At this year’s Partner Awards Gala, our customer Pinecone won the top prize under the GenAI Innovator category.
This was a watershed moment for us.
A day ahead of re:Invent 2023, we were scrambling to get the The Linux Foundation, our (then) latest customer live on the AWS Marketplace. Today, not only do we have ISVs with mature cloud marketplace motions transacting through Clazar, but also a rapidly growing list of software businesses, from rapidly growing startups to large scale enterprises, cracking million-dollar deals and trusting us with their cloud marketplace efforts.
This also includes customers like Honeycomb, who have recently been highlighted by AWS as a frontier-runner in marketplace operations.
Here's why Honeycomb chose Clazar →
That’s all for our re:Invent 2024 wrap up! Here’s looking forward to a new year with new possibilities, updates, features, and stories.
