Starburst Accelerates AWS Co-Selling with Tackle ACE CRM Integration

Starburst is a data and analytics company that offers a full-featured, open data lakehouse platform powered by the Trino SQL query engine. “Our platform helps our customers securely discover, analyze, and share data for analytics and AI across hybrid, on-premises, and multicloud environments,” says Jessica Fong, senior cloud alliances manager (AWS) at Starburst. Sharing co-sell opportunities with AWS was a manual, time-consuming process that required Starburst to access data from its Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system. “We’re always looking for ways to automate what we’re doing, and we needed to streamline our co-selling and collaboration with AWS by implementing an integration between ACE and our CRM,” says Boone Quesnel, head of global alliances and strategic business development at Starburst. An ACE CRM integration was also a prerequisite for Starburst to participate in some of the most sophisticated programs offered by AWS. Starburst needed a solution to help minmize time consuming efforts.

As a member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), Starburst participates in the APN Customer Engagements (ACE) Program, which partners use to securely collaborate with, receive technical support from, and co-sell with Amazon Web Services (AWS) alliance, sales, and marketing teams. Starburst turned to Tackle for assistance in streamlining its co-selling process. Tackle began by helping Starburst publish its offerings to AWS Marketplace, and evolved the relationship to managing its co-sell submission and facilitating introductions between Starburst and AWS account teams. Tackle then worked with Starburst to deploy an ACE CRM integration, which allows Starburst sales teams to enter AWS sales opportunities to ACE directly from the Starburst Salesforce database. “Our integration helps Starburst eliminate the need to log in to different portals,” says Michelle Liu, senior cloud GTM coach at Tackle. To support the integration, Tackle met weekly with AWS to identify any integration issues and find solutions to those problems.

The Tackle ACE CRM integration has reduced manual work for Starburst by automating the movement of co-selling data from Salesforce into the AWS ACE system. As a result, Starburst has decreased the total time spent from opportunity submission to initial co-selling calls after opportunity approval, which frees up team resources for other co-selling activities. “We have reduced opportunity sharing time with AWS and ACE by up to 50 percent with the Tackle ACE CRM integration,” says Fong. “We've been able to better scale our co-selling with AWS because of that. Tackle helps us co-sell from start to finish.”

Additionally, the Tackle integration’s bidirectional sync capabilities have simplified updates and reduced errors. “Data quality is always important, and the Tackle integrations have helped ensure we're reducing mistakes as we copy data from one system to the next,” says Quesnel. Using the Tackle platform also helped Starburst fulfill the requirements of additional AWS programs. Fong says, “Growing our AWS partnership differentiates us from other ISVs.”