Smaller partners asked if AWS field sales teams could be better incentivized to leverage them more and if AWS could provide a framework for smaller partners to interface with sales representatives.

We’re always going to provide the right environment for our partners to be successful when working with AWS and when engaging AWS sales teams and jointly with us on AWS customers. We’ve internally have had obviously many discussions about how we do that better and how we make it easier for our partners to know how to engage us. That’s why we decided to make the announcement on the partner engagement principles that we recently announced on our blog post as well as on our website. We wanted to emphasize to our sales teams and to our partners about how we think about partners and AWS working together. Just laying out some key principles around the way we think about it, I thought, was really important. Our leadership thought it was really important that we re-emphasize that, and that’s why we went through the trouble of trying to articulate that publicly. I think that’s going to help our partners understand the approach that we take. I feel like the framework is there already. Can we do it better? I think so. And we’ll continue to listen and then make the necessary changes.

Some of the smaller partners may feel like they don’t get as many opportunities to engage. But it’s not like we’re saying, “Hey, it’s only large partners who can engage AWS.” We have a network of over 100,000 partners, and these partners are part of our community, because they’re already doing things with us or they want to do things with us. But our sales teams (are) not incentivized in any way to just work with large partners. They will always figure out which partner is the best partner for that customer and then make that decision.

Our customers want to work with partners who have a differentiated value that they can bring to them. That’s why we have consistently said that, “Partners, we think you should differentiate your value, and one of the ways you do that is by working close with AWS around some of the competencies that we have and we will continue to roll out. When you do that, it not only gives the customers more confidence to engage you, but also our sales teams to engage you, because we know that that’s where you’re going to be able to add value.” We will continue to push that. We’re doing everything that we can to help our smaller partners be successful with us.