“There’s never been a better time to be an APN Partner. Customers are turning to the AWS Cloud to address an increasingly broad set of needs across their organizations, which translates to business opportunities for the APN partners that help them achieve their goals,” said Dorothy Copeland, General Manager, Global Partner Programs, AWS.
“This is why we continue to invest in programs that help APN Partners differentiate based on the specialized value they provide to customers. AWS Competencies and other APN distinctions help customers know that an APN Partner can deliver the right expertise, solution, or technology for the job.”
New Programs
The three new APN Programs will support and differentiate APN partners who provide solutions and expertise for specific services, workloads, and industry verticals. According to the company, AWS Service Delivery Program, the APN Public Sector Partner Program, and the VMware CloudTM on AWS Partner Program will provide tools, training, and benefits to support and distinguish partners in Service Delivery, Public Sector, and VMware CloudTM on AWS.
- The AWS Service Delivery Program: Identifies APN Consulting and Technology Partners that have passed technical reviews, and have a validated track record of customer success with a specific AWS service. For example, a customer planning to use Amazon Redshift can look to partners that have earned Amazon Redshift Partner status to provide tested and validated expertise or solutions.
- The AWS Public Sector Partner Program: Designed for APN Partners with solutions and experience to help deliver government, education, and nonprofit customer missions around the world leveraging the AWS Cloud. With more than 350 partners at launch, the program helps qualified APN Partners build and accelerate their AWS Public Sector business.
- The VMware Cloud on AWS Partner Program: In October, VMware and AWS announced a strategic alliance to build and deliver a seamlessly integrated hybrid offering that will give customers the full software-defined data center (SDDC) experience from the leader in the private cloud, running on the world’s most popular, trusted, and robust public cloud. VMware Cloud on AWS will be delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand, elastically scalable service that leverages AWS’s global footprint and breadth of services. Launching in 2017, the VMware Cloud on AWS Partner Program will focus on supporting customers as they deploy and operate VMware Cloud on AWS.
Financial Services and IoT
The two new AWS Competencies claim to enable and promote partners who have demonstrated proven success in Financial Services and Internet of Things (IoT). According to AWS, the Competency Program highlights APN Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas. The company claims that with the new additions, the program now covers 16 different workloads and verticals.
- The AWS Financial Services Competency: Recognizes APN Consulting and Technology partners that have demonstrated industry expertise and offer solutions for customers in banking and payments, capital markets, and insurance.
- The AWS IoT Competency: Showcases APN Consulting and Technology Partners that provide proven technology and implementation capabilities for a variety of IoT use cases, including intelligent factories, smart cities, energy, automotive, transportation, and healthcare.
Connecting with APN Partners
To help customers more easily find the right partner and solution for their specific business needs, AWS launched the APN Partner Solutions Finder, a new website where customers can search for, discover, and connect with APN Partners. AWS states that customers often ask where to go when looking for a partner that can help design, migrate, manage, and optimize their workloads on AWS, or for partner-built tools that can help them achieve their goals.
The AWS Partner Solutions Finder provides customers with a website where they can easily search, discover, and connect with trusted APN Technology and Consulting Partners based on their business needs. Customers can easily search AWS-vetted partner profiles based on criteria such as location, industry, use case, and products. The AWS Partner Solutions Finder helps customers quickly identify authorized AWS Resellers or validated AWS Managed Service Providers, and find APN Partners who hold specific AWS Competencies and AWS Service Delivery Program distinctions.
