APN Keynote

Finally I am seated and waiting for the first session which is the AWS Partner Network keynote.   As you probably know, SMS is a Consulting Partner with AWS and this first day is to help us exploit that relationship.  The previous picture shows the room as it is slowly filling up.  I would put the current crowd at close to 1,000 and I would guess maybe 2,000 by the start.

They always have a good mix of music at these things with modern rocky/pop mixed with classics.  The crowd is very technical heavy and I'm probably a bit overdressed in khaki's and a dress shirt with jacket.  They don't have the A/C cranked down yet so it's a little warm.  The wi-fi is a little slow since there are like 5,000 devices on it.  You would think with as many conferences as I've been too and the hundreds that I have not been to, they would have figured out this Wi-fi thing.

Two minutes.  The room is packed and I guestimate arount 3,000 now.  "Please take your seats"  That has been said about six times now.  A lot of milling around in the back.  Everyone came in through the back right of the room and everyone's badge had to be scanned.

Ok, here we go.  Customers talking about how great AWS is.  A lot of talk about security and value proposition.

Terry Wise on the stage now.  3rd annual conference.  Acknowledging veterans which is very nice.   Over 1900 marketplace listings.  600 unique products.  2014 launches.... Training and certs, APN Competencies, Quickstarts which complex software, go to market programs, AWS marketplace, APN knowledge base and multi-language support.

Central Focus, Above all else, align with customers.  Win when they win, Win only when they win.

Michelle Routh, CIO of Coca-Cola North America on stage.  Talking about the 2012 Super Bowl and the commercials that go into it.  Talking about the polar bear commercials and now showing them.  They had the polar bears change during the game but the servers were flooded and had to have a SWAT call.  Had to manually build up the servers and then change the load balancers.  Social media killed them.  After the game they realized that they failed.  Wrong tagging caused the outages.

2013 they got more prepared.  Pre-bought 10x planned capacity.  Showing the Coke chases ad.  Servers got flooded again.  Internal marketing groups were getting gunshy.    Placed all of the marketing stuff into AWS.  Cloud = Transformational Technology.   40% cost savings.  Used the money to give back to marketing.  Don't just sell to the CIO.  Also sell to the business as well.

Talking to partners.. us.. "We need your deep expertise".    Security talk now about patching and holes.   AWS handles all of this.   Change management as well.

Auto-scaling is a huge value proposition where a lot of software can't do it.  Licensing.  Enterprises love Metered usage.  No more CPU based pricing.  Establish strategic partnerships.   Ok she's done.

Terry is back on stage.  He is introducing Adam Selipsky who manages AWS field ops.

Best Practices - Joint Customer Engagment.
1.  Provide Value Addes Solutions
2.   Work with AWS to Define Lighthouse Accounts
3.  Engage Early and Define Rules of Engagement
4.  Focus on Customer Outcomes
5.  Position the Cloud Value Proposition
6.  Define the Customer's Cloud Journey
7.  Partner with the Customer's IT staff