Exclusive: As AWS Turns 15, Doug Yeum Predicts Even More Innovation
Amazon Web Services just celebrated a milestone birthday. The cloud vendor turned 15 on March 14. In the intervening years, AWS grew from the not-so-publicized Elastic Compute Cloud and S3 storage developer into the world’s largest public cloud provider — a fact that can still surprise even longtime insiders.
“Who would have thought the cloud industry and AWS would become the size that it is?”
That’s the musing of Doug Yeum, head of worldwide channels and alliances at AWS, a title he has held since July 2019. Prior to that, Yeum served as chief of staff to Andy Jassy, who is leaving AWS to become CEO of Amazon. Yeum, then, has watched, and been part of, significant change since joining AWS in 2014. Now, as AWS heads into its 16th year, efforts on behalf of indirect partners show no signs of slowing. As one example, on March 31, AWS officially released the Mainframe Migration Competency, first announced at the 2020 re:Invent conference. Yeum called the launch “important and unique.”
“We’re the first in the industry to do that because more customers are asking partners to migrate mainframe applications to AWS,” he said. On the whole, he added, the competency represents “a huge opportunity for our partners.”
Look for AWS to unveil an expanded version of its machine learning competency soon, too, in addition to other areas of specialty. AWS sees potential for a range of partner competency programs, “whether technology-focused or industry-focused,” Yeum said. Customers are seeking such expertise when they choose their AWS partners, he noted. In response, AWS will introduce more competencies this year.
“We’re making sure we’re making the right investments into our partners and making sure we have the right differentiation in place,” Yeum said.
With that in mind, Yeum says AWS will keep pushing the boundaries.
“AWS is always focusing on innovating at a faster rate than any other company out there,” he said. “The impact AWS is having not only on our customers … but on all the great partners, both SIs and ISVs … gets me very excited. I think over the next 10-15 years of our business, you’re going to see more of that.”
Key Accomplishments, Lessons Learned for AWS Channel
As Yeum heads toward his second anniversary as AWS channel chief, he offered some reflections on accomplishments. The overarching one comes down to listening to partners and customers. That’s an ethos started by Jassy and carried on by Yeum and his team. As a result, services including contact-center-as-a-service platform Amazon Connect have morphed into big practices and revenue for some channel partners.
“The existing solutions were expensive and hard to manage,” Yeum said. “When we came out with Connect, it was much more flexible and customizable. … A number of partners were really eager to build a business around it.”
That success came of AWS’ willingness to listen to what organizations were requesting, Yeum said. “The majority of services we’ve developed over the years have been because customers told us they needed it.”
The same goes for initiatives for partners themselves — most recently in the form of …