Any reseller with doubts that cloud is the future of the channel should speak to Samuel Yeats about his experience at the Amazon Web Services Summit last Wednesday in Sydney.
Yeats is CEO of UltraServe, a hosting company that specialises in the retail sector and which provided the infrastructure for Click Frenzy.
He told CRN he had never seen so much action on an exhibition floor.
"The opportunity we had by 8.30am, I could have gone home at that point. You don't see that at any event," Yeats says.
[Photos: Who was at AWS Summit?]
"I turned up at 8.30am and the team had already spoken to 50 to 70 people. We had already chatted to three $100 million-plus businesses. The guys were flustered and bombarded by people running through the door."
Yeats was also blown away by response to his presentation. "When Amazon opened the event, they said they might get 1500 people and I got an email on the Monday [saying] they already had 1500 registered – and 500 registered for my talk."
The conference, held at Sydney's old Fox Studios for the first time because the landmark Sydney Convention Centre is being demolished, attracted 3000 delegates.
Yeats has good reason to be an AWS fan – when the first Click Frenzy melted down under the load of keen bargain hunters, UltraServe resurrected it on a distributed content system using AWS's CloudFront and EdgeCast.
He said he had noticed a change in the types of people now attending the cloud event, which points to a growing sophistication and nuance.
"I expected it to be full of techies [this year] and I was blown away with number of CX-level people who understand these concepts and want to transform their businesses."
Although UltraServe maintains its own infrastructure, it's looking to AWS to take its offerings to the retail sector to the world.
"The greatest thing they give me is global scale," said Yeats. "For the past year we've been discussing that UltraServe is no longer limited to Australia. Everything we do is repeatable. And Amazon allows us to go global at no cost and with minimal risk."
The numbers speak to Amazon's rapid growth as a channel company.
An AWS spokesperson said the company now has around 700 partners in ANZ. Last year's summit attracted 15 sponsors; this year there were 34, many of them local integrators, such as Brisbane's ITOC, Melbourne's RXP Services, Sydney's Oriel and trans-Tasman player Fronde.
One of the special guests at this year summit, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, said the obvious channel opportunity was among small to medium customers who might not have the IT smarts needed to move to the cloud.
"One thing I find pretty interesting in terms of the partner play is that the younger businesses, the internet business, they are very technical and they acquire basic building blocks from us: database, storage, analytics, all of that kind of stuff. Enterprises often have similar IT staff, who are capable of doing that – they have been managing resources for years," said Vogels.
"Then there is this whole, large section in the middle of small to medium businesses. They don't have an IT staff. They may have an IT guy who comes by on Friday afternoon to do the backups. They may run desktop software that supports their small business that is two, three, four years old and maybe not up to par.
"What we see targeting that segment is software-as-a-service, where suddenly SMBs are getting access to software as a service that allows them to compete with the larger enterprise talent," he added.
Working well with resellers
One AWS partner, base2Services managing director Arthur Marinis, has also noticed a change in how the vendor relates to its partners, especially when as it applies to critical security issues such as the Heartbleed OpenSSL vulnerability that was revealed last week to have been silently plaguing websites for two years.
"One of our customers had an issue [that] pulled down the US region," said Marinis. "Our guys got involved and went as far as they could but Amazon had to make a change and within five minutes the Amazon support team had fixed the issue."
He said base2Services is increasingly supplementing its devops and managed services with advice from AWS's support teams to deliver better support to its customers.
Base2Services chose the Sydney summit to release OpsBuilt, its own configuration tool built on the AWS platform that provides a managed, enterprise-grade environment with monitoring and security.
"It provides customers a one-click way to create an enterprise environment so they have disaster recovery and high availability and be up and running in a couple minutes."
Cloud analyst and investor Ben Kepes said the summit showed how the cloud industry has evolved.
"There was none of that, 'Why do we need to use AWS'; everyone was using it [including] a bunch of high-profile enterprises," Kepes says.
AWS has announced 42 price cuts in the past few years; the latest slashed the cost of storage by more than half on some products. But Kepes said the conversation was about more than just placating the customer's CFO.
"The prime initial driver is cost savings, and AWS delivers that. But the more interesting story and the one that starting to develop in this region is that organisations need to innovate."
And to take advantage of the new opportunities, resellers must transform along with their customers.
"[Resellers] are quite polarised – it's more a case of individual partners' propensity to understand the new world," Kepes said.
"It's tricky because the revenue streams in the new world are different and not as lucrative as they were. But my advice to partners is look for ways to 'productise' what they do – services aren't really scalable."
Channel partners who are the first to get a cloud solution in front of their customers can take control because cloud platforms such as AWS and Google don't have intimate knowledge of that business's needs and heritage.
"It needs organisations like UltraServe and other SIs to say, 'AWS is one arrow in the quiver but at the end of the day I'm delivering a bottom-line solution," added Kepes.
[Related: Four secrets of AWS's low prices]
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