Cloud News
AWS Outposts GM: ‘Off-The-Charts’ Interest In Hybrid Cloud Service
Donna Goodison
‘It really has the potential to help open up new avenues for us and help customers accelerate their cloud migrations by filling this hole that was really difficult for us to address before for all the workloads that need to remain on premises,’ says Joshua Burgin, general manager of AWS Outposts.
How are you going to execute on this? Who will provide the integration services? Will AWS have to have its own people or these APN partners on site with the customers to get things going?
With most of the software vendors -- even the storage ones like Pure Storage and Qumulo and NetApp -- these are software-based solutions that people can deploy themselves. They also have professional services organizations, but we don’t anticipate that most customers will need on-site support for that any more than they would need support for running the software solutions from these vendors for their on premises equipment or running these solutions inside their AWS account. Some of these…are larger enterprise-grade solutions, and the deployment of them -- when it comes to integrating with your back-end ERP (enterprise resource planning) system or other databases -- require integration effort, but that’s not Outposts-specific. And then, of course, the global systems integrators...the business they’re in is either local or remote integration services.
Are there opportunities for other AWS partners to make money with Outposts?
We don’t have a reseller program. The Outposts are sold directly through AWS. We do work with a small network of colocation providers to make sure that -- for customers who don’t have an existing colo provider or want to move out of their own data center -- we vet the operational and security bar of certain colos, so that we can make good recommendations. Most of (these AWS partners) charge for the solutions we’re talking about here in the Service Ready Program. They can make money in the same way they do deploying services on AWS regions through the Marketplace or through on prem, whether it’s a maintenance contract or a subscription license. We provide all those same capabilities on the Outposts.
