AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

AWS Foundational Technical Review Expands to Include Service Offerings

By Jing Ning, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By Krystle DuBeau, Sr. Product Manager – AWS

Partners with service offerings now have a faster route to promote those offerings to AWS customers and AWS Sales teams by completing a Foundational Technical Review (FTR).

The AWS FTR for Service Offerings validates a partner service offering, which highlights technical and customer engagement capabilities, and increases visibility with customers and AWS teams. Once an offering has been validated, the listing is published in AWS Partner Solutions Finder (PSF) and internal AWS sales discovery tools.

Partners on the Services Path with consulting, professional, and managed services can now use the FTR to adopt security and technical best practices, increase discoverability, and accelerate their journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Previously, this was only available for partners with software offerings.

These listings highlight partners’ superpowers and detail the use cases and industry workloads the offering supports, making it easier for customers to find the right partner for the right opportunity.

In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of the FTR for Service Offerings and how to get started validating an offering.

Benefits

Validating an offering through the FTR for Service Offerings allows partners to target specific industries and use cases, showcase their skills, enhance their offering discoverability, and accelerate their partner journey to differentiated solutions.

  • Adopt AWS best practices: The FTR provides guidance on adopting best practices that are key to customer success. Adopting the right foundation increases the long-term success of your offering and establishes scalable mechanisms.
  • Increase your visibility: Offerings validated through the FTR are published in Partner Solution Finder where AWS customers can find and engage with partners based on their unique business needs. These validated offerings are also searchable by AWS Sales team to support co-sell motions. Additionally, System Integrators (SI) with implementation offers can use the FTR to qualify the offering for publishing in the AWS Solutions Library. Launch partners have incorporated these listings in their go-to-market activities, Immersion Days, workshops, and social posts to target specific customers and enhance their campaigns.
  • Differentiate your offering: As an offering scales, adopting the right foundation can help accelerate your journey to AWS Specializations such as AWS Competency and AWS Service Delivery.

What Partners Are Saying

Partners who participated in the pilot include SoftServe, CDW Canada, Reply, AhnLab, Autoverse, IT Era, Futurails, Forward Security Inc, kreuzwerker GmbH, PhoenixDX, Skaylink GmbH, tecRacer, XalDigital, IDS Corporation (Sunny Cloud), TekStream Solutions, CGI Inc, and ISBC.

“Conducting this FTR, my team was able to fill the gaps and improve [our] service offering,” says Ruslan Kusov, Cloud CoE Director of SoftServe. “The first FTR helped SoftServe start creating more repeatable solutions and packaging them to service offerings.”

By validating their service offerings, partners can earn customer trust, develop their go-to-market activities, and grow their business. “Having our service offerings validated by AWS helps us demonstrate our expertise and relationship with AWS,” says Adrian Wnek, AWS Alliance Lead from Skaylink.

Sven Ramuschkat, Founder and CEO of TecRacer Group says, “The FTR for Service Offerings increases visibility of our consulting services and helps customers find proven and high-quality partner services in the marketplace.”

Eligible Offerings

The FTR is applicable to a broad range of packaged, end-to-end offerings which can be delivered via repeatable consulting engagement, including:

  • Professional services: A range of services that supplement customers’ teams with specialized skills and experience to help them achieve sustainable business advantages. Professional services include the design, implementation, deployment, and adoption of AWS cloud-based solutions. They may also include training and ongoing support.
  • Consulting services: As part of the wide range of professional services offerings, consulting services are often provided as a standalone service. Examples include regulatory and compliance consulting, risk management and controls, and cost optimization. Partners offering consulting services produce artifacts such as compliance reports, security posture assessments, and Well-Architected framework reviews.
  • Managed services: Full lifecycle solutions—from consultation on initial solution design to building applications, through ongoing optimization and support. Examples include security management, incidence response, application management, application modernization, and CI/CD pipeline management.

Partners can validate and publish multiple eligible offerings. The FTR validates a partners’ technical and customer engagement capabilities and mitigates risks for customers, partners, and AWS.

Each offering is validated against a set of foundational controls. This includes assessing technical capabilities in areas like, security, domain expertise, and risk mitigation; as well as customer-facing capabilities like project management, solution implementation, and outcome assessment.

Get Started

AWS Partners on the Services Path can learn more about applying to review and validate their service offerings in the FTR for Service Offerings Guide in AWS Partner Central (login required).

Once an offering is created and the Foundational Technical Review is requested in Partner Central, a Partner Solutions Architect will reach out with next steps.