AWS' Pip Gilbert on partner trends, cloud migrations and Marketplace takeup

Pip Gilbert has said that her initial conversations with AWS partners one month into taking over as the company's ANZ head of partner have revolved around a common theme of "ambition". 

"Partners are very much looking at how do they grow their own businesses by better serving our joint customers," she explained.

"I love that they're challenging me with questions around how do they go faster? How do they better target their unique advantages into the customers that we work with? How do they help address areas that are underserved or go bigger with the customers they already have?" she said.

Gilbert said another trend she's observed in her time spent with partners so far is that despite a lot of businesses having already migrated to the cloud, there are an "enormous amount" that still need to take advantage of what cloud can offer for their businesses in terms of "agility and unleashing innovation".

"Between us as AWS and partners, one of the challenges that we need to address together is, how do we help challenge those customers to see that value and realise it as quickly as possible?" she explained to techpartner.news.

"There's some workloads that have perhaps been 'untouchable' until now, because of perceptions of them being deeply ingrained, core-type systems - the CBA example is a fantastic example of that."

Gilbert was referencing the recent migration that Commonwealth Bank engaged in, migrating a critical core banking platform to the cloud that supported 16 million customers and 40 per cent of payments across the Australian economy, handling 70 million transactions a day.

CBA claimed that the migration delivered improvements across customer experience and performance, resilience, operational simplicity and cost.

"That would have been very nerve wracking for whoever was signing off on going ahead with a migration and modernisation there, and really leaning into the modernisation angle of it because of what it unlocked, but that should be a strong signal to all Australian and New Zealand businesses that those harder to migrate workloads are now accessible, and they can now unleash that full value," Gilbert said.

Automation and AWS Marketplace

With the use of AI increasing, Gilbert warned against businesses automating what currently exists rather than automating for the future.

"You should be looking at how do you improve and reinvent that process to reduce the number of steps, reduce the time it takes, and then automate that reinvented process," she stated.

"Partners that are playing in those spaces, they're going to be the ones that seize the opportunities that are ahead."

Another focus Gilbert outlined for the rest of 2026 for is ensuring that all of partners are taking advantage of AWS Marketplace.

"It's a real accelerator to their growth as a business, and when their business is healthy and they're growing, we've got the community we need to serve our customers," she said.

"ANZ customers have got a really reasonably mature understanding of how to procure through the AWS Marketplace, they're understanding how that simplifies their procurement journey and the partners are responding to that by really taking advantage of that customer demand to use that as a procurement mechanism."

"Loving the challenge"

Gilbert - who first joined the business in 2020 and took over as head of strategy and operations, for ANZ in 2023 - said the move to her partner role has been "really exciting and challenging all at the same time".

"I definitely have appreciated the foundation that I've had in knowing about the AWS business here in Australia and New Zealand to help me ramp quickly," she told techpartner.news.

"Having that exposure to being part of setting the ambition for ANZ, the strategic priorities [and] the way that we go to market, has meant that it's been a very easy mindset shift for me - from 'how do I help make the AWS sales team successful' to 'how do I help make partners successful as an extension of the AWS sales team'?

"I’m loving the challenge of all the new learning, meeting all the people - it's really exciting."