Jeff Kratz (Amazon Web Services)
There’s a massive opportunity for Australian partners to step up their modernisation efforts, as Amazon Web Services (AWS) claims the vast majority of locally-based workloads are still being kept on-premises.
Speaking at the partner keynote at the AWS Public Sector Symposium Canberra 2023, AWS vice president of worldwide public sector channels and alliances Jeff Kratz claimed that 90 per cent of workloads in Australia are still being kept on-premises.
As such, he continued, this presents a “huge” opportunity for partners to step in and help shift these workloads to the cloud.
This is even despite the buzz around IT modernisation during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. As for how this buzz is still being maintained, Kratz claimed there are multiple reasons.
The first, he said to ARN, is the continued investment AWS is putting into skilling up professionals and its partner ecosystem.
“From a [COVID-19] perspective, it's still continued investment here that we're making in the channel and our customer success of the differences and the advantages of living on-premises to be able to do that type of effort,” Kratz said.
The next component is the ongoing work AWS is doing with Australia’s government to meet and exceed existing certifications.
“The customers are feeling comfortable with that, especially on security topics,” Kratz said. “When I think about the 300 plus services sitting in Sydney that are just on security and help a variety of different topics, they feel okay until they really learn and understand that and feel that sense of comfort.”
Last but not least, Kratz highlighted that AWS partners are coming into the spotlight and highlighting how they can create the right environments to support modernisation.
Using VMware – an AWS technology partner – as an example, he cited the vendor’s VMware Cloud on AWS product as one pathway for how partners can step in for the migration process; after moving off-premises and into the cloud, the need to move individual applications arises.
“They did the lift and shift over, getting some of the cost benefits, now they're getting even bigger benefits during the modernisation stage and that's where the channel plays a critical role,” he said.
“From day one in the public sector, we knew our business in order to be successful for our customers would need to have the broadest and deepest channel to hit a myriad of requirements from a local rural municipality to downtown Sydney to you name it.”
Kratz also spoke to ARN about the conversations he's having with partners, which may provide hints as to what its channel ecosystem could expect in the way of partner program updates.
Sasha Karen attended the AWS Public Sector Symposium Canberra 2023 as a guest of AWS.
