Channel Needs to Navigate the AWS Cloud With Care
January 9, 2017
Grazed from ChannelInsider. Author: Mike Vizard.
With Amazon Web Services now several times larger than rival cloud service providers combined, the presence of AWS across the channel is ubiquitous. In fact, at the recent AWS re:invent 2016 conference, the company revealed that in the last year, it has added more than 10,000 partners. Competition between partners across the AWS cloud ecosystem is already fierce.
AWS is also starting to extend its influence beyond the public cloud, and a new AWS Lambda service can run compute functions locally. At the same time, AWS is recruiting partners interested in moving workloads that previously ran VMware in a local data center environment into AWS. In addition, AWS is targeting workloads running on Oracle databases that can now run on a new Postgres database service that’s compatible with existing Oracle applications…
But for all opportunities that AWS is affording the channel in terms of new programs, it’s not clear how far the public cloud provider’s ambitions will extend into managed services. AWS already offers many managed services, including a raft of new ones that include an IT automation offering based on the Chef IT automation platform and an AWS Batch service for the processing of batch-oriented applications. Like all things in the cloud these days, the line between where the cloud service provider ends and the channel partner begins remains fluid…