Dr. Ruba Borno Keynote Recap - AWS re:Invent 2023

December 1, 2023

Cloud Technology

Dr. Ruba Borno unveiled a wave of groundbreaking announcements and advancements for AWS Partners. Learn about exciting updates like the Generative AI Center of Excellence, an upgraded Partner Central, and improvements in Partner specializations!

Dr. Ruba Borno, Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances, gave an enlightening keynote highlighting some important changes and innovations for Amazon Partners. She opened her discussion by highlighting that with the right partners, anything is possible. We should always be curious. The key to accomplishing your dreams is to have the best team behind you, and it's AWS Partners that make our customer's dreams possible. The vast team of AWS partners enabled an impossible first of bringing over twenty-one thousand new customers into AWS.

Enhancements to the AWS Partner Experience

We learned about new enhancements to the Amazon Partner Network that aim to make the partner experience top-notch. Looking forward to 2024, the Amazon Partner Network aims to invest more in multi-partner collaborations. Next, they aim to standardize collaboration, solution development, and GTM processes with the Strategic Collaboration Agreement.

Caylent has already seen the impact of this through their own Strategic Collaboration Agreement agreement signed in July of this year. Another enhancement includes changes to the Migration Acceleration Program (MAP). The enhancement aims to simplify the experience for partners, streamline funding approval processes, right-sizing the investment for lift-and-shift migrations, and many other additional incentives.

Simplifying the MAP process is key for our customers who want a simplified experience when engaging with us for their migration projects.

Generative AI Center of Excellence

As with most of the keynotes this week, GenerativeAI announcements took center stage. Dr. Borno's discussion was no different. The AWS Partner Network has released the GenerativeAI Center of Excellence, which aims to be a place for AWS Partners to reference the growing use cases surrounding GenerativeAI.

Increasing demand for specialized capabilities presents itself at even the most mature enterprises. The ability to quickly implement and realize business outcomes is crucial for businesses in a rapidly changing market. The Generative AI Center of Excellence will help enable partners to obtain the detailed education and training resources that need to be able to create and deliver solutions to customers

By using the Generative AI Center of Excellence, partners can now familiarize themselves with GenAI offerings that will help them maximize customer outcomes. Leaders across the Amazon Partner Network provided their specialized information to help us further understand the dynamic Generative AI landscape and the considerations we must understand to be effective.

The increased demand for specialized skills cannot be disregarded. The Generative AI Center of Excellence hosts both technical and non-technical specialized content that showcases the latest developments and insights around generative AI. It contains optimized learning paths that will help AWS partners in their journey to implement revolutionary solutions.

Most notably, it will provide insights into third-party foundation models (FMs), applications, and developer tools to support the diverse business needs of mutual customers. The center of excellence shares unique industry perspectives and differing approaches to developing and deploying artificial intelligence. We were thrilled to learn that long-time Caylent customer Boston Consulting Group is one of its many content contributors!

Finally, the Generative AI Center of Excellence will be complemented by forums that facilitate AWS and partner knowledge sharing and the development of joint thought leadership, collectively advancing the thinking and applications of generative AI for our joint customers.

The information, insights, and engagement provided by this release is important to our customers because it underscores the idea that AWS is committed to providing its partners like Caylent with the tools and training to help deliver innovative GenerativeAI solutions at every layer.

New releases to Partner competencies

83% of AWS customers polled rank specialization as one of the top three selection criteria when they are selecting a partner with which to engage. Customers care about technically validated partners and it has been proven by their feedback as a key to customer success.

The AWS Partner Network has introduced three new competencies. The AWS Resilience Competency will help AWS customers improve the availability and resilience of critical workloads running on AWS. The AWS Cyber Insurance Competency, targeted towards small and medium-sized businesses, will help customers find affordable policies from insurers that integrate their security posture assessment through a new, simplified customer experience with AWS Security Hub. Lastly, the AWS Built-in Competency will help customers find partner solutions that automatically deploy AWS foundational services together with partner software in order to simplify and streamline the deployment experience. This is important because it enables partners to further specialize their solutions to more discreet and specific use cases of our customers

Summary

Overall, this keynote contained several exciting announcements for those in the AWS Partner Network. I especially enjoyed hearing Adam Selipsky, CEO of AWS, give some closing thoughts on stage with Dr. Borno towards the end of the talk. He highlighted how the AWS Partner Network is critical to deploying our customers' data and Generative AI strategies. Silepsky noted how partners are crucial to helping AWS customers be provided with the best opportunities for their workloads. Most importantly, he reinforced the idea that partners should be highly skilled. Partners should invest in the training and resources in order to deliver the highest level of service. By doing so, Partners are able to maintain a strong degree of trust with our customers, so they keep coming back to engage with us.

From migrating and modernizing your infrastructure, building cloud native applications & leveraging data for insights, to implementing DevOps practices within your organization, Caylent can help set you up for innovation on the AWS Cloud. Get in touch with our team to discuss how we can help you achieve your goals.

Cloud Technology

Chris Gonzalez

Chris Gonzalez is a Cloud Architect at Caylent. He has a passion for serverless computing, well-architected solutions, cloud infrastructure, and professional development. His background incorporates insights from over a decade in education, financial services platform infrastructure, and cloud consulting. His technical expertise consists of implementing complex cloud infrastructures for enterprise financial services firms, as well as intricate Kubernetes solutions built on EKS and open-source products. Chris currently lives in Knoxville, TN, and enjoys spending time with his wife and two kids, tinkering in his home lab, and hiking in the Smoky Mountains.

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