How to Build an AWS Consulting Practice

Ok, I've met up with Shane and Tony and had some lunch and some snack.  I needed the sugar and caffeine lift.  This session is on How to Build an AWS Consulting Practice with Josh Hofmann and Markus Sprenger.

About 300 people in the room.  So here we go.

1.  It's still Early.  We are in Year 3 of a 10 year adoption cycle.  Market for public cloud consulting will grow ten times faster than overall IT professional services.  AWS job postings show 1,500% increase since 2011.

2. Go Global in Minutes

3.  Managed Solutions are Driving Revenue.   Infrastructure >> Software >> Managed Services

4.  AWS Improves Margins and Team Performance

5.  The APN (Amazon Partner Network) can Help You

Value Proposition of AWS Cloud (Graphic that I'll put up later)

Cloud Value Realization has Many Paths

The Journey -- Plan the Work
Experimentation, Limited Use, Widespread Use, Corporate Standard

Three Ways to Develop a Practice
Be a Specialist -- Embed AWS into existing practices, Be a transformer -- Develop overall cloud transformation practice, Do both

Two paths to building a practice
Specialists -- Explore and Adopt
Transformers -- Expand and Transform

The Specialists -- Sales Opportunity, Combine software or domain expertise with on demand infrastructure to create turnkey solution:  Leverage cloud interest and adoption to generate new clients in your area of expertise:  Opportunity to expand beyond pure SOW into full practice

Need:  AWS Architect, AWS Software DevOps Lead, Cloud Sales Leader

25% on top of AWS for Managed Services Fees (Margin)

The Transformers -- Cloud Adoption Framework
Core Perspectives -- People, Business, Platform, Maturity, Process, Security, Operating
Touch lots of people and parts of organization. Must have skills in all of these.

Building the Adoption Roadmap
New Skills -- Change Management, Technical Skills, Security, Risk, Compliance, Project Management, and potentially technical specialists (SAP, Big Data, etc)

6 Step Plan
Business Plan, Planning, Capabilities, Lighthouse Customer, Replicate, Scale

Next Steps -- Understand AWS Economics, Find your niche and differentiate, Consider MSP or partner strategy, invest in solution frameworks (your IP), build your business plan, methodology, and map out capabilities, Leverage APN programs to expand customer base, review APN consulting best practices guide.