Enabling success for AWS ISV Partners in the public sector

To address global challenges and support communities in new ways around the world, public sector organizations are responding to a growing demand for innovative solutions. Amazon Web Services (AWS) independent software vendor (ISV) Partners support the public sector in accelerating the adoption of new services without the investment of developing and maintaining their own applications, accelerating digital transformation and improving citizen outcomes.

In my time managing the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Public Sector Partner team for the United Kingdom and Ireland (UK&I), I’ve worked with a wide range of partners in the region. I have seen our global ISV Partners change their business models from a traditional perpetual license model to a software as a service (SaaS) model; a wide range of new ISVs that provide vertical-specific solutions grow into successful businesses; and many service partners provide software solutions.

The AWS Partner team’s goal is to help our partners grow profitable businesses while accelerating digital transformation for UK&I public sector customers. There are two clear ways we support ISV Partners to achieve this: helping partners reduce their costs by spending less, and helping them sell more.

Figure 1. AWS helps ISV Partners reduce their costs by spending less and increase their revenues by selling more.

Figure 1. AWS helps ISV Partners reduce their costs by spending less and increase their revenues by selling more.

Helping ISV Partners reduce their costs

With the current global economic uncertainty impacting AWS Partners, it is imperative at this time that we help partners reduce their costs. There are significant cost benefits in moving to the cloud. Partners such as Infor, a global leader in industry-specific business cloud software, reduced their storage costs by 50 percent by moving about 11 TB of data to AWS.

The AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR) can help partners identify AWS Well-Architected best practices specific to their software or solution, helping them optimize environments and gain savings beyond simple “lift and shift.” In addition to finding savings from technical optimization, our team can help partners maximize pricing models, such as with Savings Plans, which can reduce their bills by up to 72 percent compared to On-Demand prices.

Our AWS Service Partners often support our ISV partners on their journey, including helping make sure they are fully optimized. Team Satchel, who delivers learning experiences globally, for example partnered with Strategic Blue to help optimise their cloud spend. Strategic Blue worked closely with their engineering team to put in place bespoke commitments, like Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Reserved Instances or AWS Saving Plans, based on their usage forecast, providing greater discounts.

Helping ISV Partners sell more

There is an old adage about increasing sales by either selling more to existing customers or selling to new customers; AWS can help partners in both of these areas.

Partners can use the breadth of services from AWS to innovate and expand their offerings to their customers. The Hackett Group’s Cloud Services Study, sponsored by AWS, found customers achieved a 29 percent increase in staff focus on innovation and a 43 percent faster time to market for new application features or functionality after migration to AWS. AWS is continually expanding services to support virtually any cloud workload, and we now have more than 200 fully featured services. AWS Partners often use services beyond core compute and storage to enhance their solutions, including analytics, machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI).

There are many examples of how partners have used these offerings. Data cloud company Cloudwick created Amorphic, a complete data and analytics solution that integrates over 60 AWS services. With Amorphic, customers such as The Essex Centre for Data Analytics (ECDA) gained insights into thematic areas such as the availability of mental health services and predicting the drivers and aggravators for certain types of crime.

Axial3D is helping to transform surgery by providing previously unavailable insights to clinicians. Their highly accurate 3D printed models of specific patient anatomy allow clinicians to better prepare for surgery. Applying ML to medical image segmentation has transformed the process of creating and delivering a 3D printed model within 24–48 hours, a task that previously would have taken 6–8 weeks.

Another example of extended offering comes from Iron Mountain, a global leader in innovative storage and asset lifecycle management. Iron Mountain uses AWS AI and ML services to enable customers like His Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) to extract the text and data from scanned documents in more than 50 languages and in many file formats.

AWS has numerous dedicated partner resources to help unlock the full potential of the breadth of services available to enhance their solution offering. Often, AWS ISV Partners work closely with AWS Service Partners to help them on this journey and provide managed services.

There are many different ways AWS supports ISV Partners in expanding their public sector customer base. Co-selling with AWS account teams or with AWS Service Partner account teams, can drive new business and accelerate sales cycles. Databricks increased their AWS Partner–led channel by 300 percent year over year (YoY) using the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, which connects participating ISVs with the AWS Sales organization.

The AWS Marketplace enables customers to search, select, purchase, and deploy software in a cloud environment, providing a simple route to market for partners. A recent Forrester study, commissioned by Snowflake, an AWS Partner, and AWS, found customers have the potential to achieve a 405 percent three-year return on investment (ROI) by procuring Snowflake via AWS Marketplace. Faster time to market results in reduced labor costs, increased profit, and savings in infrastructure and data platform costs.

AWS offers numerous funding programs available for partners to support with training, new product and solution development, and go-to-market activities, enabling partners to reach new customers and differentiate their business. Splunk used AWS funding to provide the University of York a proof of value (PoV) of their security information and event management (SIEM) solution. The PoV demonstrated the business case to the university. In addition, the data and modeling could be carried over from the pilot when the contract was signed, effectively giving them a head start on getting systems up and running.

Moving to AWS enables partners to simply scale to support customers globally. Crowdstrike is a leader in cloud-delivered, next-generation endpoint protection services, threat intelligence, and response. They use AWS to pivot and spin up resources when needed, rather than using capital expenditures to build their own data centers, allowing them to deploy in more than 170 countries.

Conclusion

These areas of focus should be the basis of a partner plan, enabling partners to reduce their costs and sell more to both existing and new customers. The AWS Partner teams around the world have a clear goal: help AWS Partners build successful, profitable AWS businesses. Please continue working with your partner manager to discuss these different areas of opportunity and develop a clear plan on how AWS can best help you achieve success.

AWS Public Sector Blog

Enabling success for AWS ISV Partners in the public sector

Helping ISV Partners reduce their costs

Helping ISV Partners sell more

Conclusion

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