Amazon Web Services hiring ISV team to beef up Australian partner presence

The hefty wage bill at AWS is evidence of the talent war among cloud players to make sure developers are building applications for their clouds. AWS already has devoted legions of software engineers that were first drawn to AWS for test and dev. This latest recruitment spree looks like a bid to formalise these relationships within its evolving partner program.

AWS has also been scaling up its ecosystem of "consulting partners", which include IT service providers that help customers migrate workloads from on-premises and traditional hosting environments as well as rewrite client applications to run on the Amazon cloud.

Some of its most celebrated Australian partners include larger companies such as Bulletproof, Melbourne IT and Datacom, as well as a bevy of IT firms that built their business on AWS, such as ITOC, Base2services, Data Solutions Group, PolarSeven, CloudTrek and many more.

The company's most aggressive cloud rival, Microsoft, boasts the opposite strengths and weakness – it possesses a much deeper partner channel, but arrived later to public cloud and is now working feverishly to shore up the new breed of cloud app developers and smaller software vendors.

Earlier this month, news spread that Microsoft was merging its partner teams into a single business unit, a move that should allow it to focus more on ISVs. The software giant's One Commercial Partner business will be led by Ron Huddleston, corporate vice president of enterprise partner ecosystem, and will consolidate the ISV team, enterprise partner team and worldwide partner group team.

In December, Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice president of the Microsoft worldwide partner group, was reported to have spurred partners toward application development on top of Microsoft's cloud. "At the end of the day, I believe that within a year, the majority of our partners will be delivering some sort of value-added differentiation and IP services on top of the technology stack in some way to deliver more value to their customer," Schuster said, according to Redmond Channel Partner.

Microsoft nailed its colours to the mast at last year's Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto, when ISVs were rarely out of the limelight.

In his keynote, chief executive Satya Nadella said: "It is such a golden era for building out your big data applications, your advanced analytics applications, mobile apps, web apps, IoT apps, SaaS applications – you name it, it is an amazing opportunity because infrastructure is infinite, easy to provision, you can have the databases you need, the containers you need and the virtual machines you need to build these applications."

Part of this was Microsoft's AppSource marketplace, which at launch was stocked with 200 software and services developed by the ISV community.

Microsoft hopes another secret weapon in the battle for ISVs will be the ability to link them with its network of resellers.

Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft chief evangelist, said: "We need to find the right way to support the ISVs, connecting them with all the other partner types and creating an even richer ecosystem as the importance of software and unique IP continues to grow. How do we create a connection between those companies that build on the Microsoft platforms, and our traditional sales force and our traditional partner force?"