The Perks of the AWS Accelerated Development Program

You're listening to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro, a place to learn about how to grow your business and stay ahead of technological advances before they become mainstream. This episode is sponsored by Ingram Micro's Expantage, the next level way to transform your business's potential and reshape how customers see you through advanced transactional data. Let's get into it. Welcome to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro.

I'm your host Shelby Skirhawk, and our guest today is Tad Davis, Growth Solutions Advisor for Ingram Micro. Tad welcome, Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me today, Shelby really appreciate it. Thank you.

Well. Today we are talking about AWS Accelerated Development Program. So Tad want to introduce you to the podcast because we haven't had you on before. So just quickly tell us a little bit about yourself and how you made your way to ingram Micro.

Yeah. I've actually been in the distribution channel now for going on twelve years. I joined Ingram Micro in twenty twenty one May of twenty twenty one and been working with this accelerated Development program since say about June of twenty twenty two. Such just a little bit about my history getting like I said, getting to this point.

Yeah, well, so the Accelerated Development Program, I guess just just off the top then, I mean, tell us about it. What does it do? So this is a program, it's a partner enablement program through AWS that they brought to Ingram and we started running again, like I said, back in twenty twenty two, across the globe. And I think that's one of the things that ENTIRESTWS about this is that we're a global distributor and we can start putting this enablement program in place in each of our different countries.

So as a kind of high level overview, this is really a program that partners when they come in to AWS, there may be an abundance of information there and they may not have the best best idea of where to go from step one and step two. And with this Accelerated Development program, there is four different pillars that help provide structure and almost like a step by step process to get them from where they are today to becoming a more ready to go to market partner for AWS and also a partner that can demonstrate their technical capabilities with data WS.

And just so the program this is like, how imitation only is it? I guess what's that process? Then? But how do you get started and just describe the program to us?

How often? What does it look like? How much time commitment does it have? I guess if you can kind of fill in those blanks of what type of commitment this program is.

Yeah, definitely, I'll break that down into a few different pieces. So this is a fully funded program between INGRAM and AWS. There is a cost associated, but there's no cost of partners. And to your point, it's invitation only, right.

We want to find partners that are heavily engaged, that show a commitment to taking on these tasks, to being able to meet the name of the program to accelerate their development of AWS. And so we work for partners that meet certain criteria and be able to reach out to them and talk a little bit more about the program in detail to see if this is something they are interested in. One of the things that I really like about this program is that the partner is getting a person in their local country that's dedicated to them on their journey that helps them understand AWS from a is so to speak, and really is there to be the person that asks questions when they're struggling through this.

And the reason why I put it in that type of frame, if you will, is that partners that maybe don't have if you think about us seeing like a guide that's navigating the anthon forest, if you speak, if you think of it like that, yes, if you don't have a guide, it could take you eighteen to twenty four months and you may fall into some traps or pitfalls, right, but then working with us, we're navigated around those traps as pitfalls. We're helping you understand funding programs, go to market, how you can look better to AWS so to speak, because we get questions like that from partners, how can I look better to AWS and thereby a good trusted source for my customers Around eight WS and so we do that around four different milestones.

Those are Amazon Partner Network, Alignment learning kind of the foundation of AWS, and Partner Central how they basically keep track of opportunities at AWS and do and share opportunities with partners. Then that partner is responsible for registering and new opportunities that they bring in for AWS as well. So it's establishing really that kind of co sell motion in that AP and alignment then we get into technical validation. So what are solutions that you deliver today that run on AWS or what kind of professional services do you offer in AWS?

And how can we may work with AWS to have them validate your solutions or your delivery of AWS solutions. There's programs that they have for that, and so we help them navigate those different technical requirements of those programs so that they receive that AWS validation, that stamp of appool And oftentimes there's programs out there that have marketing development funds that are associated with achieving a certain technical capability. And then for our partners, that kind of leads us right into go to market.

Right, so what kind of go to market materials does AWS require of me? To be a partner in good standing? You know, you need a business plan, want to make sure that you've got a good battle card that helps you AWS accountment managers understand who you are and what you do in the business. You know, we work with you on building joint marketing plans as you go to market for the next year.

And then lastly, there's a procurement side of this that's focused for partners that are in the public sectors space. So this program is open to commercial and public sector partners, but if they do have a public sector interest or even a footprint in the public sector space, that can leverage the benefits that each of our Ingram countries bring to their public sector partners. In public sector, for AWS is a variety of things. It could be education, not for profit health care.

It could be local and state government, it could be federal government. It could be military, you know, space tech, ad tech kind of things as well. So people get really sometimes they get tripped up around what public sector is because they're like, I, you know, I don't do anything with state, local, or federal. It's like, what about not for profit healthcare?

Those kind of things? Got it? Got it? Okay?

Well, So the thing that really stands out to me then is the that analogy of having kind of a guide or a navigator that typically this this process kind of the go to market it would be eighteen to twenty four months, you said, and with in being enrolled in the Accelerated Development program with Ingram Micro kind of as your your navigator or your guide, you can cut that down to six to nine. Months, right exactly. And we've seen partners that will come into the program that are extremely aggressive.

They're like, hey, give us homework, and I don't. I try to be you know upfront, it's like it's maybe the first time since UNI that you had to do homework. But you guys are going to you know, you guys are going to have homework. We'll talk a little bit about that in a minute, like what does that look like as far as time commitment.

But we've have partners that are so aggressive, they're like, give us all the homework. We want to work on the weekends. We want to get this done. And we've seen them graduate in two months.

Average is probably like six months some partners because they may have I mean, there's a lot of things that can happen, you know, during our nine months timeline and everything like that. So somebody leaves, somebody with your certifications that you held for MS. Maybe they leave and you have to start over on that part that thing happened. That's why we kind of built in that nine months graduation pipeline, if you think of it like that, and so to that point as well, you might get a great thing for you, which is like a lot of business all hands on deck to deliver this particular scope of work.

Which means you may have to put this by the side for you know, a few weeks or things like that. So again it's just about the level of the amount of time and dedication that you can have your people put into this as far as how fast you graduate. So there is there's you know, there's a commitment there, there's some work to it. What type of time commitment on average I mean six to nine months, but you know, for a person that's that's looking at a weekly basis, what does this program look like?

Yeah, great question. So we when we start the we asked the partner to set up a weekly cadence and there should be somebody at the partner that's the point of contacteing of them as the project manager and usually want them from an AWS perspective, to be to have the quote unquote alliance lead Permissions in AWS partner central to and they're kind of the, like I said, the project manager for this. So we'll meet with them every week for about thirty minutes and see how we're doing on the different enablement sessions or different tasks like trying to get certifications, trying to you know, launch opportunities in aws's customer engagement portal and determine, you know, how many more meetings we're going to have that week with different members of their team.

So it's not like I'll say it like this. So when we're thinking about members of a team at a partner that we're going to work with, we want to work with somebody in sales marketing something, somebody that's the technical snee or lead for their technical team, for their delivery team, you know, and then somebody like I said, that's like their alliance lead or their strategy. But we don't need all those people on these weekly calls. We just need that one project manager kind of person.

And then if we're talking about, you know, building out your pipeline and entering opportunities into the AWS Customer Engagement Portal, like okay, so we probably need to have a one hour meeting with the sales team and maybe just the leader of the sales team so they understand how to load opportunities into this AWS Customer Engagement Portal or ACE portal and how to basically register these deals with AWS. Then we might have another one hour session with just the technical lead and say, let's look at your solution that you deliver on AWS or some of these solutions that you deliver with AWS services, you know, what does that look like?

Do you have an architecture for these things? There's a checklist that AWS will want you to fill out to validate different solutions. Can we meet you know those items that are in the checklist. So again, not everybody all at once, but more of people here and there.

But yes, different groups will have different homework. Okay, okay, yeah, I mean there's a lot of information there, and I think among the hyperscalers, there are programs out there that have all this information that you know, I can see the partners feeling a bit overwhelmed. So where where do partners start? You know?

That's that's one of the things that we're seeing more and more out of AWS is the drive for pushing partners to work with the distribution channel and work with Ingram Micro to be able to help them understand you know, it makes sense of all this information that's out there. If you think we're going back to that jungle analogy, you're thinking about all of this information just coming at them, you know, in a waterfall. We're like, okay, so here's the steps on the stones that we have to take to navigate our way through or around that waterfall of information, and we're seeing that, like I said, more and more push to distribution.

I do have to highlight real quick. You know, AWS recognize Ingram Micro as a Global Partner Distributor of the Year for twenty twenty four, following up on our success from twenty twenty three. So that's a great thing. But I think they understand that we can help we can help partners scale where AWS may not have that capability, and it's been pushing more of it to distribution to be able to help them scale out more and more.

Got it? Got it? Well? Yeah, So I guess as we start to wrap up our episode, we've gone over you know, basically this Accelerated Development program.

I wonder if we can kind of I'd love to summarize and kind of give our listeners maybe those one or two takeaways from the episode. So Tad, like, what what do you want partners listening to this episode to understand most about AWS Accelerated Development Program? I think, or what I would like then to understand the most if like this this is a program that will really help them out and build out their AWS strategy if they don't have one. To date, we've seen numbers come from AWS with the graduates that we had, We've got over one hundred graduates now and still one hundred more partners in the pipeline.

That's these are kind of the last question we're talking about is scalability, because we can continue to keep stealing and working with so many partners. But what I want them to hear is more of based on the stats from our graduates, we've seen triple digital increases as far as increases and the number of opportunities they register into that ACE portal, we've seen triple Well, all of our graduates contribute over twelve million dollars to AWS revenue, you know, after going through this program.

So again, if you put in the time, you know, I always like to say that, like for AWS, you've got to put in the time, put in the work to see the results to be able to achieve the different programs and the benefits that go with those. And that's what I would really like partners to take away from this is that we're here to help you understand what you need to do to be able to be successful with AWS excellent. Well for listeners who do have any questions about you know specifics that we talked about today or want to find out more.

How can that reach out? Yeah, so I would say definitely reach out to your local Ingram rep in your country and they can put you in touch with the Accelerated Development representative in that country to work with them. Again, we talked about this a little bit earlier. There's a nomination process, so we want to establish where you are today and see if you're ready to jump into this program.

And if you're not, that's perfectly fine because we're going to enable you to take the steps needed to give from where you are today to then be able to join this program and start working through the programs and benefits that are out there. Excellent. Well, Tad, I appreciate your time and your insight today. Thank you so much for joining me.

Yeah, thanks again for having me. Really appreciate it, Shelby. Yeah, thank you listeners for tuning in subscribing to B to B Tech Talk with Ingram Micro. If you haven't subscribed, be sure to do so and don't forget.

You can find all of these episodes on the Ingram Micro Exvantage platform. Until next time, I'm Shelby Scarehawk. You've been listening to B to B tech Talk by ingram Micro. This episode was sponsored by ingram Micro Exvantage.

B to B tech Talk is a joint production between Sweetfish Media and ingram Micro. To listen to this episode and many others, visit ingrammicro dot com.