We will offer new container and IoT services for partners: AWS’ Terry Wise

Amazon Web Services, the cloud division of Jeff Bezos’ e-commerce empire, is doubling down on container and Internet of Things-based services for its partner networks as the company continues to grow, a top executive of the company said.

“Based on the demand for container and IoT solutions that independent software vendors (ISVs) are seeing from their customers, we have decided to offer new competencies via our partner programme,” Terry Wise, vice president of channels and alliances, said.

The programme will allow third-party vendors to use these solutions on AWS, he added.

According to experts such as Neil Shah, research director at Counterpoint Technology Market Research, containers are increasingly being used by developers as they are lightweight and provide a consistent, portable software environment so that applications can be easily run and scaled anywhere.

At its annual conference re:Invent 2018, the cloud services company launched its AWS Container Competency Program to highlight solutions offered by its AWS Partner Network or APN. Through the programme, AWS will recognise independent software vendors with a product or solution that can integrate with it to improve customers’ ability to run workloads on containers on its platform.

These products or solutions will help customers optimise orchestration and scheduling, infrastructure, application build/test, and deployment on containers, as well as with monitoring, logging, and security of containers, Wise explained.

The channel head also said that the company was launching a device qualification programme for partners with IoT practices. According to Wise, these partners want to identify devices that work well with AWS cloud services.

As part of the service, AWS will let hardware-makers qualify for certification. Once qualified, these devices will be eligible for listing on the AWS Device catalogue—a place where customers can check what devices work best with AWS’ IoT services such as IoT Core, AWS IoT Greengrass, Amazon FreeRTOS, and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams.

These devices include development boards, embedded modules, session border control (SBCs), gateways, sensors and cameras.

Wise also said that AWS was opening up three new tracks under its Navigate programme that allows partners to build a specialised practice on its cloud. The new tracks include DevOps, IoT and high-performance computing (HPC).

The vice president also said that the company's business has been growing at a steady rate across different services.

The firm’s managed business has grown two-fold over the last year along with a 3.5x increase in market opportunity. He also added that AWS had seen a four-fold growth in terms of partner-led migrations.

“Aurora as a service grew by 7x in the last two years,” Wise said, adding that Amazon SageMaker, the company's machine learning solution module, has seen an 89% increase in data model accuracy.

The analytics division has also been flourishing along with other services such as Amazon Connect, he added.

In addition to changes to the partner network, David McCann, vice president of Amazon Web Services Marketplace and Catalog Services, said that the company was launching a separate marketplace for containers to accelerate their deployment.

*The writer is in Las Vegas at the invitation of Amazon Web Services.