News

At Partner Event, AWS Rewards Specialization

• By Gladys Rama
• November 29, 2016

Cloud leader Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a few updates to its partner program on Tuesday that benefit partners that have developed specialized technical practices and focus areas.

The company launched two new programs -- Public Sector and Service Delivery -- and a searchable partner directory called AWS Partner Solutions Finder on Tuesday during its Global Partner Summit event in Las Vegas. All three programs are now open to qualifying members of the AWS Partner Network (APN).

Public Sector Program
As its name suggests, the AWS Public Sector Program is geared specifically toward partners whose practices cater to the government, education or nonprofit industries, either fully or in part. Membership in the program gives partners access to AWS' public sector sales and marketing teams. Partners can also access public sector-focused marketing resources in the APN Marketing Central.

In addition, authorized Public Sector Program partners can easily promote their solutions to the right customers through the Partner Solutions Finder, which lets customers search for partners based on specific industries, use cases and technical expertise.

Partners can further differentiate themselves by qualifying for one or more of the following categories that are included under the broader Public Sector Program umbrella:

• Authorized Government Reseller Program: For APN Consulting Partners who are qualified to resell their services to public sector customers.
  
  
• AWS GovCloud (U.S.) Service Delivery Program: For APN Consulting Partners and APN Technology Partners that have demonstrated expertise in working with AWS GovCloud customers.
  
  
• AWS Government Competency Program: For APN Advanced Tier Partners with expertise in working with government customers from any country.

"Our goal is to help enable you to build a successful business focused on serving public sector customers," said Kate Miller, senior content manager for the APN, in a blog post. We know that you have specific business needs depending on the specific public sector use cases that are your main areas of focus, and we've structured the AWS Public Sector Program to be able to provide specific resources, benefits, and guidance in the areas of Government, Education, and Nonprofit."

APN members who are interested in joining the Public Sector Program must meet several requirements, illustrated in this table:

Among the program's launch partners are Smartronix, Blackboard and SmartSimple, Miller said.

Service Delivery Program
AWS also announced on Tuesday a new program designed to showcase partners that have developed expertise around specific AWS offerings.

According to a separate post by Miller, the AWS Service Delivery program is geared toward partners who have proven track records in delivering solutions around the following services:

• Amazon Aurora
• Amazon RDS PostgreSQL
• Amazon DynamoDB
• Amazon Redshift
• AWS Database Migration Service
• AWS Server Migration Service
• Amazon Kinesis
• Amazon EMR
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon Machine Learning
• Amazon API Gateway
• Amazon CloudFront
• AWS WAF
• AWS GovCloud (U.S.)

To qualify, APN partners must meet Standard tier requirements, as well as provide a pair of recent (less than a year old) and verifiable customer references for any given service.

Benefits of membership in the Service Delivery Program include targeted listings in the Partner Solutions Finder and access to product-specific AWS teams, roadmaps and workshops.