AWS has made ISV services growth the key message at this year’s AWS partner keynote during its annual re:Invent conference.

AWS head of global partner organisation, Doug Yeum (pictured), and VP global public sector partners and programmes, Sandy Carter, unveiled a raft of new selling options and support for ISV partners, including the introduction of AWS ISV Partner Path.

Carter says the vendor wants to make it easier for MSPs to add services as an expense. “We want to make sure that our partners are easily able to find what’s most relevant to them,” she said. She added that demand had been growing from within the AWS partner network for more new and more flexible services opportunities. “We have more than 50 new partners joining the AWS partner network every single day. So having the right structure for those partners to easily navigate and the right resources for them are something that’s very top of mind for us.”

Part of that announcement is that AWS is now allowing third-party professional services to be sold on AWS Marketplace. AWS Marketplace is the vendor’s online catalogue with thousands of software listings from ISVs and resellers and MSPs.

At last year’s AWS London Summit, there was a somewhat lukewarm reception to updates on AWS Marketplace from partners in the ExCeL Centre conference hall. This year, Yeum is calling on partners to get on board now saying, “speed matters”, and suggesting that they not be “left on the side lines”. “In return, AWS is making big investments into these partners to help them with their transformation journeys,” he said. “Our goal is to help our partners to maximise the value of their existing assets, their customer relationships, their deep industry experience and their unique offerings to deliver differentiated value to their customers.”

CPI spoke to the CTO US-based AWS partner CloudCheckr shortly after the broadcast. Jeff Valentine said AWS’ latest marketplace enablement could be a game changer in 2021.

“Now we can start selling professional services we never had before,” he said. “Our customers need to consume via contract vehicles, especially in the public sector, which Marketplace specifically enables. So we’re really excited to sell more through Marketplace in the future.”

He added that it’s the AWS announcement that will have the most influence on his business that he’s heard from re: Invent thus far. “We’re seeing a lot of momentum around ISVs and SaaS companies within AWS. “You can talk about verticals all day long, whether that’s healthcare or transportation or logistics, but with the ISV and SaaS marketplace, once you own a part of that, you own that fan-out as well. So you own the SaaS vendor’s customers and all of their spend. And so what we’re really looking forward to is working with AWS to work more of those sorts of companies. That’s very much aligned with the way in which we’re growing.”

The final two key announcements from Yeum’s keynote were the launch of AWS SaaS Boost, an open source ready-to-use reference environment that helps ISVs migrate applications to a SaaS delivery model on AWS, and that AWS has expanded its AWS Competency Program into four new competency areas: travel and hospitality, energy, mainframe migration, and public safety and disaster response.