Access AWS Partner Benefits: Your Roadmap to Cloud Success
Explore the main reasons to partner with AWS. Unlock growth opportunities with our comprehensive guide on the advantages of teaming up with AWS.
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Lessons learned from My Own AWS Partner Journey
My APN (AWS Partner Network) journey started in August 2018, not too long after I joined Epsagon (now part of Cisco), an amazing and super innovative startup that provides observability and cost monitoring platform for serverless applications.
During the process of becoming an AWS partner, I went through the AWS documentation and realized that it is quite challenging to follow. I thought it would be helpful to summarize the key steps and milestones in this “Partner Journey” and create some sort of a step-by-step guide, that will include some practical insights that I learned along the way. In this post, I will be focus on the WHY — the main drivers to partner with AWS.
Let’s start!
Unveiling the Motivations Behind Partnering with AWS
To discuss the “WHY,” I’ll start with a short description of how Epsagon is related to services provided by AWS.
In 2014, AWS launched AWS Lambda, which allows companies to build “serverless” applications. Serverless architectures offer dramatic cost savings and increased speed of innovation, yet a lack of visibility and unpredictable costs are threatening mass adoption. This is where Epsagon comes to help, by providing an automated platform which focuses on distributed tracing.
As the serverless space is currently dominated by AWS, Epsagon’s team is focused on serverless applications that run on AWS. We intend to support other cloud vendors in the future, once the demand grows.
Due to the nature of our business, all of Epsagon’s customers are AWS customers that are building applications using AWS Lambda. Therefore, we understood pretty quickly that a partnership with AWS is the right thing to do!
At the beginning of the process, I was a bit skeptical, to be honest. I believe that in any successful partnership both companies should be able to contribute to the other. For me, it was obvious that AWS can help Epsagon (especially after learning about the APN program as will be detailed), but what is the motivation for AWS? AWS is one of the biggest enterprises in the world — how can AWS benefit from a partnership with a startup such as Epsagon?
Well, it seems that Epsagon can indeed provide a great value to AWS. First, as Epsagon helps AWS customers to better track their applications’ performance, these customers can be more confident in expanding their serverless footprint (AWS Lambda usage in this case). This is a great motivation for AWS to partner up! Second, I learned that AWS invests great efforts to support their customer, even if that means that AWS will not be the one to provide the desired solution. So, by locating valuable solutions in the market and validating them, AWS provides their customers a great service.
Exploring the AWS Partner Summit: A Gateway to Success
For anyone that is interested in a partnership with AWS, or already has one, I would recommend attending an AWS Partner Summit. I attended the AWS Tel Aviv Partner Summit on October 2018 and found it VERY useful. I was able to get an overview of the interesting opportunities that AWS has to offer to partners in different stages.
The most important thing that I learned from the summit is that I should work on a PARTNERSHIP PLAN that will help me make the most of this partnership.
On that note, I would like to share one of my favorite slides which were presented in one of the AWS Partner Summits and guides me through this journey.
After the summit, I put together a detailed plan and started to execute it. By creating the plan, I gained a holistic view of the process, which helped me to execute it efficiently. These are the milestones that we achieved so far here at Epsagon:
Assessing the Partnership Opportunity: Key Considerations
Many companies skip this step and jump right into partnership programs, and that might waste valuable time by doing that. A partnership with a AWS is not for everyone.
The first thing to do is to assess the partnership opportunity. In some cases, a partnership with a certain AWS is not the right move, and it would be better to invest your resources elsewhere.
In order to assess the partnership, you should answer the 5 following questions:
Assessing the Impact Potential of AWS Partnership
- If you don't have customers using AWS, the potential of creating a partnership with AWS is very low. The more customers you have that are also AWS customers, the easier it gets to access partner programs.
- If you are running on Azure for example, and want to partner with AWS, the motivation for AWS to partner with you will be low (unless you are multi-cloud and have a decent consumption with AWS as well).
- If your product impact AWS consumption of your customers, that is the ideal sweet spot for an AWS partnership. Even an indirect impact is valuable. For example, if your product saves time for the technical team, and now they can spend more time scaling their application, you impact cloud adoption. Even if your product reduces cloud costs, it can help customers scale their cloud adoption, which can also be ideal.
Step-by-Step Guide: How to Become an AWS Partner
If you made it this far and realized that an AWS Partnership is the right move your business, follow this guide to become an AWS Partner.
Free Access: Cloud Partnerships Playbook for Your Success
I provide the Medium community a free access to my Cloud Partnerships Playbook, presented in this online course. Click here for a free access.
