Behind the curtains of Amazon Enterprise Support

As most of you who follow me will know I come from a hard core system admin days where as most of us had to build data centers from the ground up taking care of every bit of problem from buying the servers, cabling, installing all the infrastructure in a company including air conditioning.

I can imagine those who resonate with me on this smiling, knowing that we actually were regarded as “technical people” and anything technical including air conditioning, water systems or your boss’ blackberry which refused to work was included in your job description (or added as an annex ). As the years passed by we learned more about IT and at last we are in an era where we all are aware of the responsibilities and separation between technical people who fix IT stuff and technical people who fix AC stuff.

I wanted to explain this as an introduction to my article here because it is quite related to how Amazon Enterprise Support works in the background.

One of the most important, very overseen and difficult factors of becoming successful is finding your niche and mastering it. It takes time to find where you are good at. I mean so good that you are not even aware of that you are so good until someone with a good eye notices it.

Again I can see you rolling eyes saying “What does that have to do with the heading?” Don’t be impatient I’m nearly there.

So think about a place. A place where everyone around you, are those who have already found what they are good at and mastered it to a level whereas a visitor from outside (with a good eye) it takes you a very short time to notice it. You come across different people. There is J. who is one of the best architects you have ever worked with. Then there is E. your technical account manager who is your right hand in getting things done in record time. And then there are 2 Js from sales but in a way, you haven’t seen any sales people before. Two salespeople who do not even mention the word sale or try to talk to you into buying anything. They are more obsessed with helping you in making your life easier (I mean real easy) than you do. Then there are two new faces. Two people you haven’t met before but you can see their effects in the results you are getting. C. from concierge is the person who helps you hop through the payments, reserving instances and problems with your organizational account. And then S. is the person behind it all who is making sure the team is there for you, who you can spend an entire afternoon on coffee talking on the management and leadership techniques.

But this is not all. This is only the technical or work part of things. The real secret how AWS Enterprise Support works lay in the relations they have. You don’t see separate people who are working in their own great worlds, instead, you see a team. A team of very talented individuals, obsessed with how to drop costs, how to start securing your infrastructure, how to create your next big project, working together.

Depending on the personality you have some of you may see this last part unimportant and that’s OK. But if you are a team believe like me you will see the difficulty of achieving this in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual environment and the value it brings to the company, to its the clients.

This is where AWS shines really. Not only being the masters of their niche and the friendliest people you can meet with but people having achieved the secret of working together as a great team.

If you are looking for a corporate handshake photo sorry it is a bad day for you. Here is how you really end up with your Technical Account Manager at the end of the day.