AWS boss to Australia - make us work harder!

Amazon Web Services' ANZ lead Paul Migliorini has called on the channel to make life challenging for the cloud leader.

Speaking with CRN at the AWS Partner Summit this week, Migliorini was accompanied by newly-appointed channel chief Corrie Briscoe and head of partner and ecosystems solution architecture Adrian De Luca to chat about all things cloud in Australia.

When asked about what he'd like to tell partners, Migliorini asked the channel to challenge AWS even more.

"What are the things we can be investing in? How can we be thinking bigger together? How can we be inventing on behalf of our customers collectively, we love our partners to be challenging us a lot harder in that respect."

Migrations matter

Among the topics the trio touched was on-prem-to-cloud migrations, which Migliorini said still represent a big opportunity.

"Globally, we're $31 billion business growing 41 percent year over year, we estimate that this is a $1.5 trillion dollar opportunity. So in the general scheme of things, it is still early, irrespective of how much activity we're seeing," Migliorini said.

Migration matters because while the concept of cloud is well-understood and generally accepted, organisations are yet to let go of legacy infrastructure.

"What's really interesting right now is that, if we listen to what our customers are telling us is that…  they want to free up scarce capital, and they want to remove the dependency on legacy platforms as quickly as they can.

"There's a lot of legacy complexity that these organisations need to get through. And the reason it's such a significant topic, and I think will continue to be for at least three to five years, is that as most organisations build more and more ambitious innovation agendas, what they find is that the constraint around legacy continues to become more and more of a problem.

"So what we're starting to see is customers trying to find ways to accelerate that in some cases, it's as simple as customers wanting getting to a point where they need to do a hardware refresh, or a data centre renewal or something like that.

"And their financial stakeholders or business stakeholders saying 'I can't justify any capital', so they're doing accelerated lift and shift work to move them out of those old data centres and off those legacy platforms."

There's a handful of other factors that will keep lift-and-shifters around for a while, like AWS's recent partnership with VMware, Windows Server 2003's end of life, regulatory requirements and the persistent requirement of shifting enterprise apps to the cloud.

Shiny toys

As for shiny new toys like artificial intelligence and the SageMaker machine learning platform that AWS unveiled in 2017, Migliorini said Australian partners have adopted them strongly.

New channel chief Briscoe weighed in with an example from one of AWS's star partners, DiUS.

"You obviously heard a bit about Solve Geosolutions and the work that DiUS is doing, leveraging SageMaker and a number of our analytic services, to really help Geosolve analyse imagery so that they can spot where the minerals and obviously mine. So it's driven heaps of efficiency and cost savings within the Geosolve business," Briscoe said.

"What's interesting, though, in that example is DiUS and Geosolve have managed to create almost an as-a-service model where they can go and package that and look to take it to other geological organisations."

When asked whether AWS's largest partners like Accenture, Deloitte and DXC were getting in on the machine learning action as well, Migliorini said global systems integrators are investing heavily in those areas, but are working with consultancies of all sizes.

"You're looking at these organisations with really deep specific capabilities… Kablamo, DiUS, and Intellify, these sorts of companies… they're working with these larger integrators as well in that really cohesive way for customers. And I think that's one really nice thing about the evolution of the way the partner ecosystems are working today."

Miglironi wrapped up with his three key messages for the channel, which included his call for partners to challenge AWS harder.

"The first is that success will come from thinking long term about customer success, which means that putting a focus on outcomes, no matter how small project or revenue is, everyone will be rewarded by customers for the long term. So we want our partners together with us to think long term and to put customer outcomes ahead of any other short term game.

"The second point I'd make is that our partners need to pick what they're going to specialise in and do it extremely well. I really think customers can see it when you're being superficial."