AWS CEO Adam Selipsky On Gartner Magic Quadrant Allegations, Andreessen Horowitz Cloud Cost Claims And Egress Fees

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky, in an exclusive interview with CRN, disputed Gartner Magic Quadrant allegations that AWS uses high-pressure sales tactics; called the controversial Andreessen Horowitz report on the cost of cloud computing “highly misguided” and referred to AWS egress fees as an issue that customers have not raised in any “material way.”

Doubling Down On Partners

Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky said the company is “absolutely” doubling down on the channel as the longtime cloud market leader ramps up its investments in co-selling with its 100,000-plus ecosystem partners.

“We’re really just entering the meat of adoption of the cloud, and as we get there, and we move more and more into that mainstream and into very use case-specific and industry-specific needs, the importance and the role of the partner ecosystem will only continue to increase,” Selipsky said in a nearly hour-long conversation at AWS’ Seattle headquarters in October.

Selipsky, the former president and CEO of Tableau, took over as AWS CEO in July when Andy Jassy stepped aside to replace Jeff Bezos as the CEO of parent company Amazon.com.

The AWS partner ecosystem is a “distinguishing strength” against rival Microsoft, Selipsky told CRN.

“The fact that AWS has a 100,000-partner ecosystem strong and growing rapidly, the fact that we work so deeply with these partners, the fact that we invest so many resources both technically as well as [in] headcount in creating really strong, compelling partner relationships, all go into making the experience for our customers much better—whether they’re working with ISVs (independent software vendors), whether they’re working with systems integrators or business consultants, or whether they’re working with distributors or solution providers,” he told CRN.

Selipsky said he sees AWS leveraging partners to drive deeper into vertical markets, including telecommunications, consumer goods and financial services, as customers demand more “targeted” cloud solutions.

“I think it will be really important that we have really strong partners in every significant industry vertical,” he said. “We’ll continue to add a lot of partners in each of those areas. I hope a few years from now we’ll have done an even better job in terms of providing capabilities to make it really easy for partners to onboard, to skill up and ultimately to serve end customers with us in a very seamless way.”

As to whether AWS has any target on the percentage of revenue it wants to drive with partners, Selipsky said there is no “quantitative” goal. “I want us to serve each customer in the way that’s best for that customer,” he said. “In some cases, that will mean a very light partner element; in other cases, it’ll mean a deep partner contribution where the partner is even leading the relationship and leading the engagement.”

Here are some of the edited highlights from Selipsky’s no-holds barred, wide-ranging interview with CRN.

On How He Got Into The Technology Business

For the first almost decade of my career out of school—eight years, plus business school kind of interrupting it in the middle—I was actually at a management consulting firm [Mercer Management Consulting]. And over time, I did more and more work with the communications and computing industries, and so by the end of that time, I pretty much was in the tech industry. This was in [the] Boston [area], and I was interested in getting back to Seattle, where I’d grown up and also to this hotbed of internet companies that had sprung up in Seattle. So I came back here and landed at [Seattle-based] RealNetworks, where I was for six years before I came to AWS. At that point, I really had jumped in with both feet into the internet space.

On The Ability Of Technology To Transform Businesses

What excited me then is the same thing which fundamentally excites me now, which is in each one of these areas within technology, there is the possibility of transformation—to transform how people consume things. And in the case of that first job that I had at RealNetworks, Real essentially invented digital media, and that ended up transforming how people consumed audio and video. And in the case of AWS, it really transformed how IT happens on the planet and ultimately how customers can be innovative and can move faster in their businesses.

And the same was true at Tableau, by the way, which is fundamentally trying to help change the world through data. In each of these experiences that I’ve had—and I’m sure there are many others as well—these organizations, if they can innovate in the right way, have the ability to, in their own corner of the world, have the ability to change how the world operates. I find that very exciting.

Each of those companies that I’ve worked for really had this missionary component to them, where they had both the ability and the fervent desire to change their corner of the world for customers.

On How He Got His First Job At AWS 16 Years Ago

I’d been at Real for six years, and I received a phone call from the head of executive recruiting who knew me because I’d actually provided a reference for somebody else who ended up at Amazon. She remembered me and called me and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this job that I just think you might be interested in.’ And she told me something about ‘turning the guts of Amazon inside out’ so that other companies could use it. And I have to confess, I didn’t really understand what she was talking about, but it sounded intriguing. And I knew Amazon was a great company, so I decided to explore it.

On Why He Left AWS To Become CEO of Tableau, And Why He Returned To Head Up AWS

First, I’ll say it was unexpected to me that I left AWS in the first place. I was really heads-down five years ago in 2016 and received a phone call about this opportunity to be the CEO of Tableau. I was really enjoying AWS and really committed to what we were doing for customers, but this was just an unusual opportunity, particularly in Seattle, in terms of a successful public company with a great product and a great community. And I thought that it would be interesting, it would be fun, and I would really learn from them. And I really did, and I think it was a fantastic experience and also a really developmental experience for me.

Four and a half years later, I was lucky enough to receive another unusual opportunity when Jeff Bezos decided he was going to move into new role, and Andy Jassy was going to become the CEO of Amazon. I was fortunate enough to be able to come back in this role, this time as CEO. There are a lot of reasons why that was compelling to me. One is, as I mentioned before, I’d always loved Amazon, I felt like I fit in well here. The culture was always one in which I thought I could work well and could thrive. Beyond that, I just absolutely love Amazon’s customer obsession and the way that it figures out how to understand and then act upon what customers want in a way that very few companies I believe ever have been able to. And then another reason is around the innovative spirit at the company and the way that the company actually organizes and creates mechanisms to promote innovation at a scale and at a pace that, again, I think very few other companies have ever achieved. And those are wonderful, wonderful things to be part of.

Andy and I worked together side by side for 11 years when I was here, because I came to AWS in 2005, about a year before we launched AWS. From the very early days, Andy and I worked very closely together. So when his big news hit, it was very natural that he and I just began talking. It was big news after all, and one thing led to another, and here I found myself.

On Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s (Pictured) Advice As Selipsky Took Helm Of AWS

We continue to work very closely together, as you would expect—and Andy cares a lot about AWS, both because of his history, as well as because that’s important in his current role—but at the same time, you know, he’s been very clear that the AWS management team is expected to run the business. And we have the responsibility of making the right decisions for our customers.

He did give me some advice. He said—and these are not new things to me, by the way, but it certainly sometimes just helps to be reminded of things you already know—one was that we just have so much innovation left to do for customers, there’s so many more products and services and capabilities that customers are clamoring that we build. We really want to keep innovating at a very fast clip on behalf of our customers. So that was one.

Second is that therefore for us as a busines, for AWS, it’s still very, very early on, despite the significant size and growth rate of AWS right now. Most of IT still runs on-premises, and most of it has not yet moved to the cloud. And over the coming five or 10 years, there will, we believe, continue to be massive waves of enterprises, startups, government agencies and all sorts of other organizations who are going to migrate their IT to the cloud. It’s really very early on, and we have a chance to build something which is truly enduring, which is really exciting.

And then the final thing was really just to be myself, and different leaders have different characteristics. We all have our own unique strengths and weaknesses, and no one … can be successful if they try to be somebody else. It’s important for me to embrace who I am and lead in a way that works for me, which in some ways will be consistent with Amazon and many other AWS leaders. And just like for anybody else, some of those things will be really my own unique style.

On What’s ‘Important’ To Him At AWS

I would just say things that are important to me include—in addition to really continuing to press on customer obsession and on high rates of innovation—it’s really important to me that we continue to be an exciting place that inspires our employees and a place that makes them want to get up out of bed each day and come to work, whether it’s in their living rooms or here in the office. And I really want to continue to focus on the things that really will make us Earth’s best employer, which is a goal that we have. It’s an aspiration, it’s a vision, and we’ll always have more work to do to get there.

And the other thing is that Amazon really has a belief that we can and should be an important and a useful part of the communities in which we operate. That includes local communities, our national communities and the global community. That’s everything from homelessness or other local issues, all the way to sustainability and climate change. And we’re doing more and more as a company in all those areas, and I’m really enthusiastic to help put my shoulder to the wheel of those types of efforts and to ensure that we use our success and we use our scale to help all the communities in which we operate.

On ‘Doubling Down’ Even Further On Areas Where AWS Is Successful

Clearly AWS is not a turnaround, so it was not my goal to come in and instantaneously try to institute wholesale changes. This is a very successful business. I think my job is to help us double down on the things that we’re already doing that are important and that are going well, then also to help us identify new areas that we can be in or existing areas where we think we can do better.

And no matter how successful we’ve been in the past, there are—just given the rate of change in the industry, how quickly our market segment is evolving and just the rate of growth of AWS—there are always going to be big opportunities in all those areas to double down even further on successes, to find new areas in which our customers need us to innovate and to improve existing things that we do. I’ve really been trying to find and focus on the most important of each of those.

On Growing The AWS Partner Network

We already have a partner program with over 100,000 partners, and we’re adding 50 new partners per day to the APN. I don’t anticipate that letting up anytime soon. If you fast forward, we will have significantly more partners in the program. In addition, I think we will have many more types of partners in our partner programs.

We started with the baseline APN and added a lot of capabilities over time, different categories of partners. Over the last year or so, we’ve added things like a security provider section and a couple years ago within our AWS Marketplace, which is obviously a partner program, we added a managed service provider area. We will continue to build these out.

I could imagine us potentially getting more and more into industry verticals as customers—whether it be in the telco space, the consumer goods space, financial services space—as they ask for more targeted solutions. I think it will be really important that we have really strong partners in every significant industry vertical. We’ll continue to add a lot of partners in each of those areas. I hope a few years from now we’ll have done an even better job in terms of providing capabilities to make it really easy for partners to onboard, to skill up and ultimately to serve end customers with us in a very seamless way.

We’ve built up a lot of those capabilities over the last few years, whether it’s in the mechanics of the APN itself or in the programs we have to work with partners to help larger organizations, larger companies to migrate workloads to the cloud—to AWS—or programs to help partners train and certify, and skill up their own employee base.

We do a lot of free training. We provide very heavily discounted certification capabilities. And we have lots of programs such as Restack [multi-year strategic collaboration agreements with AWS partners, where both AWS and the partner commit resources to accelerate the partner’s cloud transformation] and ISV Accelerate, which help different types of partners to really get up and running and become really important parts of the overall AWS ecosystem.

On AWS’ ‘Day One’ Partner Ecosystem Commitment

I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that our partner ecosystem has been a vital plank of the overall AWS strategy since day one. Since we opened our doors to customers, we’ve had partners who were vital to our customers and therefore vital to AWS. And all we’ve really done is to expand the capabilities that we offer and expand our ability to work well with partners. But the strategy itself and the strategic importance of the partner ecosystem have really remained frankly constant, and I expect it to remain so in the future.

On AWS’ ISV Accelerate Program And Doubling Down On Partners

If you look at ISV Accelerate, which is a program which enables partners to actually go to market with AWS and to co-sell in key areas, we now have hundreds of partners in this ISV Accelerate program. It’s just one example of how we actually have been doubling down. Or if you look at our efforts to provide free or very heavily discounted training to ... probably tens or hundreds of thousands of employees at our partners. That’s another example of where we’ve already doubled down. The plan is to really continue that momentum, continue that acceleration. We’re really just entering the meat of adoption of the cloud, and as we get there, and we move more and more into that mainstream and into very use-case-specific and industry-specific needs, the importance and the role of the partner ecosystem will only continue to increase.

On Whether AWS Has A Goal On Percentage Of Revenue Coming From Partners

I really don’t think of it as a quantitative goal. I want us to serve each customer in the way that’s best for that customer. In some cases, that will mean a very light partner element; in other cases, it’ll mean a deep partner contribution where the partner is even leading the relationship and leading the engagement. What I really want us to do is to optimize for each customer as opposed to having a top-down goal that’s good for us. It’s hard to say you’re customer-obsessed if you’re setting goals that are only about you and not about what’s good for customers.

On Gartner Magic Quadrant Claims That Customers Reported Pressure From AWS Sales To Increase Annual Spending Commitments By 20 Percent To Renew Contracts.

With all due respect, I think that’s absolutely not accurate. To take a step back, we’re almost a [$65] billion-a-year business, which last quarter grew at about [39] percent year over year. In a business that size, with the number of employees we have, I could probably find you one or more of anything—be it wonderful, be it awful or be it indifferent. The ability to find a very small number of anecdotes about anything, whether it’s positive or negative, in a business that size is not particularly helpful.

What’s more helpful is to look at the overall patterns. It is absolutely clear, if you go out and talk to AWS customers, that they tell us all the time that we behave very differently than their old-guard technology vendors, and that it is a completely different dynamic. Literally this morning, I was with the CEO of a Global 1000 company, and he was telling me that the best part about what they’re doing with us is the relationship that they have with all the field resources with whom they work—that’s the salespeople, the solutions architects, the support staff and the partner alliance managers that help them work with partners. I hear that all the time, and it’s honestly the highest compliment that anyone can pay us.

We do not run our business based on pressuring customers at the end of quarters or at the end of our fiscal year. You can’t be customer-obsessed if you are only obsessed with selling according to your own calendar. To be honest with you, I had absolutely no idea last week that it was Sept. 30, the end of a quarter. There were no cues around me, there was nothing going on, there were not people rushing into my office. I did not have finance teams banging down my door. And that’s because we’re just going about our business, and we’re not trying to jam anything down customers throats. And when you do that, customers really notice it, you lose trust, and the relationships suffer.

First and foremost, what we’re trying to do is build long-term, trusting relationships with customers, with our ecosystem partners. I believe that for all of us—partners and AWS alike—that will actually create the best and the biggest business over time if we behave that way.

On AWS Innovation In Data And Analytics

It’s clear that there is so much demand from customers to continue to innovate in the data and analytics space. And we already have a very broad portfolio of services, from databases to data warehouses, to data lakes to different services for querying and for doing business intelligence. But I think that customers still have a lot of needs that we’re going to have to understand and work and innovate very quickly on to meet. We’re going to continue to apply a lot of resources in that whole data and analytics space.

When you think about data, it’s important to take a very holistic view. You have to think not of point solutions, but of the entire lifecycle of data. Sometimes I make a joke about a day in the life of a bit. You have to think about data being ingested, and sometimes that’ll be at the edge somewhere. And it has to be put in some kind of a data lake or repository. And usually you have to have some way to clean it or transform it or extract it. Then it has to make its way into a data warehouse or some other repository where you’re ultimately going to store it. And then there are lots of different ways to query that data. And the right way to query the data depends on what you’re actually trying to do with it. And then ultimately, for a lot of data, you’re going to want to visualize it, understand it and collaborate and share on it, so you can ultimately, as an organization, make effective decisions quickly based on that data.

And if you look at that entire lifecycle of data, I’ve come to believe very strongly that you have to manage across that. And you’ll see a lot of companies with point solutions, and some of those solutions are very effective. But at the end of the day, customers are really going to need that entire lifecycle of data managed. We’re going to continue to work not only to have really effective point solutions, but also to create the overarching capabilities that enable the management of that data over time.

On AWS’ Investments In Artificial Intelligence And Machine Learning

It’s still very early in the development of AI and machine learning services. We’ve put considerable resources into our ML capabilities and have really exciting services such as Amazon SageMaker in the machine learning space, which continue to grow really rapidly. We continue to innovate on a lot of new features within those existing services, as well as on a lot of new services in the machine learning space.

We will continue to offer those services—those base-level services—directly to customers, so they can use these machine learning services in all sorts of applications. And by the way, our partners consume many of those machine learning services as well and utilize them in the value-added services that they’re providing to customers. And then in addition, we will continue to bury those machine learning capabilities inside of other services—inside of capabilities that we provide to customers—just to make those services better. And the customers won’t even necessarily know that it’s an Amazon machine learning service that’s doing something smarter and intelligent inside of the application that they’re consuming.

On AWS’ Commitment To Provide Collaboration Tools For Workers

This is an area in which there’s going to be a lot of innovation in the world for years to come, and I think lots of different companies have their own take on it. We have a lot of important capabilities already. One is Amazon Chime, which is our videoconferencing and chat service. That’s consumed both by customers directly, as well as OEMed by various partners for use inside of some of their technology. I think absolutely AWS will continue to innovate and come out with services that are really important for our customers in collaborating.

And by the way, this is an area where our partner ecosystem is really important. We’re great partners with Slack. We’re great partners with Salesforce overall, who, of course, now owns Slack. And both Slack and Salesforce more broadly have really interesting collaboration capabilities. I think both with the things we produce as well as, importantly, partnering with other companies, we’ll take really a multi-pronged approach.

On AWS’ ‘Very Strong Track Record’ In Security

Security is job zero at AWS. It comes before anything else. And after that, our next priority is operational performance—being available and having strong performance. As a result, we actually apply a tremendous amount of resources to security, both in centralized dedicated security teams as well as to a large amount of headcount inside of each of our service teams who are focused on security.

We have a very, very strong culture around security and a lot of mechanisms to ensure that we are constantly understanding where we have opportunities to improve our security posture for our customers—both automated capabilities as well as human-based capabilities. As a result, AWS has a very strong track record in security and in operational excellence, which I believe is second to none in the cloud industry.

On AWS’ Custom Silicon Strategy And Graviton2 Price Performance Advantages

A few years ago, we decided that there was a great opportunity to improve raw performance as well as value, which I would define as price performance, for customers if we could optimize the processors—the chips that customers use. So we began to do custom development of processors. We obviously will use those chips inside of the compute instances that we provide to customers. We, of course, don’t do that manufacturing ourselves. Speaking of our partner ecosystem, we have many, many important partners who do that piece.

We obviously will use those chips inside of the compute instances that we provide to customers. If you compare our Graviton2-based compute instances to the prior generation—which are not Graviton—there’s [an average] 40 percent price performance improvement. That’s extremely validated. It’s not manipulated numbers, it’s not in a lab. We are told very consistently by customers that they’re seeing that 40 percent improvement. Those are the types of dramatic gains we think it’s really important that we strive for, and we’re going to continue to innovate.

There will be future generations of processors as well aimed at basic core computing, aimed at GPU workloads, machine learning workloads and more. We’re working on a lot of new processor capabilities to address many different types of workloads. We have a lot of innovation coming down the pike for customers in this area.

On A Report On The High Cost Of Public Cloud From Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Andreessen Horowitz.

The notion that companies can run more cost-effectively on their own instead of on AWS is highly misguided for even large and scaled customers, and there are a number of reasons for that. Our customers are all in business to serve their customers, and they’ll have the things that they need to do to add value to their customers—and they’re really good at that. And what we need to do to serve our customers is to build infrastructure which is highly secure, highly available, can operate at massive scale and can run at really low cost. That’s what we have to do well and frankly, that’s just not the business that most of our customers are in.

Given our scale, given that we are almost a [$65] billion-a-year business operating worldwide with over 25 infrastructure regions around the world, over 75 availability zones—which you can think of as data centers or data center complexes around the world—we have a scale and the ability to invest that is very hard for other companies to duplicate.

But at the end of the day, I think the best answer to the question is the answer that customers give. If you look at … technically savvy internet or software companies—if you look at Netflix, if you look at Airbnb, if you look at Pinterest, and there are many, many, many other examples—they are all running on AWS. They know that both their cost structure—but more importantly, their agility and their flexibility and their ability to innovate—are much, much higher partnering with us and running on AWS. Together with our partners, the capabilities that we’re building do mean that we can serve customers both more cost-effectively and with more innovation than they can accomplish if they run on their own premises.

On Claims That AWS Has Been Dismissive Of Multi-Cloud

As what we believe to be the most customer-obsessed company out there, we’re going to follow our customers’ lead. And the thing we hear most loudly from customers is that they want us to keep innovating within AWS. There are a lot of new services they want us to build, there are a lot of new capabilities within existing services that they want us to build.

There are plenty of examples of where we are interoperable in a very seamless way with all sorts of other capabilities out there, and we’ll continue to work on those as well. So just for example, we very recently collaborated with an important partner, NetApp, on a file system service within AWS called Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. Obviously NetApp is providing SAN or storage area network capability through ONTAP. And a lot of customers want all of the tooling and processes that they’re used to with ONTAP to run their SANs, and they also want all the benefits of the cloud, of AWS. Now, by working with NetApp to enable ONTAP on AWS, customers can seamlessly ... migrate to AWS, they can seamlessly run in both environments simultaneously. And, if they wanted to, they could move everything off of AWS back on to on-premises ONTAP. And you see the same thing across databases. We support SQL Server databases, Postgres, many other flavors. And we actually make it very easy for customers to move their workloads wherever they want to.

On AWS’ Stand Against ‘Technical Lock-In’

We don’t believe in trying to create technical lock-in. We want customers to be here because they want to be here. And in fact, philosophically, we believe that the less lock-in there is, the more willing and eager customers will be to move to the cloud. In addition, I think our partner ecosystem is important. We have a ton of partners—we have ISVs like NetApp, but there are many, many others—with whom we partner to enable customers to run workloads in multiple places.

We have a ton of systems integrator partners who are more than capable of working with customers to help them migrate workloads to wherever those customers want them to be. And just like we think it’s our job to serve customers, we think it’s our SI partners’ job to serve customers, and they’re going to help them run their workloads wherever customers want those workloads to be.

On Claims That AWS Egress And Bandwidth Fees Are Excessive

This is not an issue that customers have raised with us in any material way, and that’s because overall AWS pricing is extremely low. And frankly, it’s revolutionized the IT costs of almost all of our customers, compared to what they’ve traditionally paid for a wide swath of their hardware, software, networking or data center services that they consume.

AWS has lowered costs well over 100 times in our history. We have a really strong track record of always looking to innovate to lower our own costs and then to lower the price that we charge for customers.

If you look specifically at providing bandwidth, I think there’s been a lot of misinformation out there. The majority of costs required to transfer data is actually in fixed network equipment. It’s not about the variable bandwidth of moving a bit.

AWS remains extremely cost-following in the way that we choose to price in each of our services. It’s really a philosophy that we have. If you look at how we price across most of our 200-plus services—where do we charge for storage and where do we charge for throughput, and where do we charge for compute and where do we charge for database cycles—it becomes pretty obvious that we’re trying to only charge customers for the resources that they actually consume in a very fair way.

We are going to continue to innovate, and I imagine in many areas across AWS that we’ll continue to continue to lower our prices over time as we lower our costs.

On Why AWS Marketplace Is Becoming More Important

I was really pleased when I came back to AWS to see the progress of the AWS Marketplace. That was an initiative we started while I was here and took a lot of work and lot of resources, a lot of different pieces. Anytime anyone builds a marketplace, it’s a complex endeavor. And to come back and see the technical innovation that the AWS team has managed in the marketplace space, but more importantly, the growth and the customer adoption—both on the partner side as well as the end customers side—has been really impressive.

To see the Marketplace adding so many new categories within it and to see you know how quickly it’s grown has been really impressive to me. This is another area in which we intend to continue to invest.

The Marketplace will only become more important, because more and more customers are going to not only want a full rich ecosystem of AWS partner offerings, but more and more they’re going to want to be able to discover those. And the more there are, which is a good thing, the more there are, the more difficult they become to discover. And therefore, having a really effective, simple, easy-to-navigate marketplace is really important. And furthermore, more and more customers as they get sophisticated in their use of the cloud aren’t necessarily going to want to talk to somebody all the time, and they will want a self-service capability.

AWS Marketplace has a rich variety of partners and of offerings that are easy to navigate and to discover, and provide the ability to really work in a self-service fashion. Another interesting innovation is our adding service providers into the Marketplace and the ability to do business with them to through the Marketplace.

On AWS’ Advantages Versus Microsoft In The Battle For Enterprise Customers

Well, AWS has been the clear leader in in the cloud since its inception. We launched our first paid service, which is our storage service, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), in March of 2006. Because so many other old-guard vendors were first dismissive of the cloud and then dismissive of AWS’ ability to provide cloud services—and then dismissive of the relevance of the cloud to enterprises—we actually got off to a multi-year head start in creating our various services. And because we’ve managed to keep on innovating more quickly than anybody else, we still have a portfolio of services which is both broader in the number of services and deeper in the capabilities that we offer in each service than any other cloud provider. And you see that demonstrated by the size of our cloud computing business compared to others. You see demonstrated by the breadth and the depth of the customer references that we have.

If you look around the world, in every industry, with every use case, the really deep and compelling deployments that customers have done that they’re willing and eager to talk about publicly, it really doesn’t compare to anybody else.

And furthermore, I think another distinguishing strength for us is our partner ecosystem. The fact that AWS has a 100,000-partner ecosystem strong and growing rapidly, the fact that we work so deeply with these partners, the fact that we invest so many resources both technically as well as [in] headcount in creating really strong, compelling partner relationships, all go into making the experience for our customers much better, whether they’re working with ISVs, whether they’re working with systems integrators or business consultants, whether they’re working with distributors or solution providers.