In an effort to strengthen its strategic alliances, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has released a new set of features and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings on AWS and the AWS Marketplace, both of which are immediately available to hundreds of thousands of AWS’s partners. Today, Ruba Borno, AWS’s Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances, took the stage to discuss the cloud provider’s partner initiatives, which she believes will be well received by the channel.
AWS and Atos: Revolutionising the Infrastructure Outsourcing Industry
During Ruba’s keynote, Amazon Web Services and Atos announced a global Strategic Transformation Agreement that will help Atos customers with large-scale infrastructure outsourcing contracts, accelerate workload migrations to the cloud, and complete digital transformation. Atos has chosen AWS as its preferred enterprise cloud provider, and AWS has named Atos as a strategic partner for IT outsourcing and data centre transformation, both as part of the multi-year, industry-first agreement. Through the terms of this agreement, Atos will expedite its customers’ transitions to the cloud by providing advisory services in business and technology, digital engineering, and managed services. In addition to helping Atos improve its workforce and increase efficiencies in its data centre, cloud, and security operations, including the selective migration of legacy data centres and IT hardware assets, AWS will collaborate with the company to create and deliver new industry solutions for IT outsourcing and data centre transformation to customers around the world.
Atos will collaborate with its more than 800 global customers of managed infrastructure services to design a new managed, hybrid-cloud service portfolio that includes the option to migrate some workloads to AWS as part of the agreement. To aid customers in their adoption and transfer of workloads to AWS, the service would feature a highly industrialised migration process, solution accelerators, and the firms’ combined expertise in large-scale cloud migrations. Atos’ customers will be able to take advantage of the cloud’s portability, security, resilience, innovation, and sustainability by combining AWS’s extensive portfolio of services (which includes analytics, compute, databases, machine-learning, and storage) with Atos’s knowledge as a Global Systems Integrator.
Atos staff will receive AWS training as part of the strategic relationship, increasing their capacity to aid clients during their own digital transformation processes. In order to hasten its customers’ adoption of the cloud and assist them in making the most of its benefits, Atos plans to train its employees to earn more than 20,000 AWS certifications over the next three years.
“This marks the beginning of a significant transformation of the infrastructure outsourcing industry. Through our collaboration, Atos’s customers will be able to realise the benefits of moving to the cloud, including reduced operating costs and carbon emissions, as well as increased business value and accelerated digital innovation,” said Ruba. “We’re excited at the opportunity to work with Atos to upskill their workforce, helping to expand their expertise in cloud technologies so they can enable customers to build, develop, and innovate on the world’s leading cloud.”
AWS and Slalom: Strengthening Strategic Cooperation for Future Generations
During the same keynote, AWS and Slalom, a global business and technology consulting firm, extended their global Strategic Collaboration Agreement. As part of this partnership, the two organisations will collaborate on AWS to create vertical solutions and accelerators for the energy, financial services, healthcare, life sciences, public sector, and media and entertainment industries, as well as provide end-to-end cloud migration and modernisation services for these businesses. By 2023, AWS and Slalom will have collaborated on go-to-market strategies and co-investments to support Slalom’s expansion into Ireland and the Netherlands, and over the next three years, Slalom will continue to expand into additional countries in Latin America, Asia Pacific, and throughout Europe.
The deal is an expansion of AWS and Slalom’s 2019 announced relationship to provide AWS | Slalom Launch Centres that aid businesses in speeding up their IT service modernisation and business transformation initiatives. Launch Centres give customers access to Slalom’s business transformation, software engineering, and analytics experience in addition to AWS Professional Services, a worldwide team of AWS professionals who help customers achieve their targeted outcomes with the cloud. More than 160 customers have used Launch Centres to successfully migrate and update to AWS during the past three years.
AWS and Slalom are teaming up to create solutions for customers facing unique problems in their industries. Slalom, for instance, has a solution on AWS called Slalom Meter Data Analytics that uses Amazon SageMaker (AWS’ service for building, training, and deploying machine-learning models in the cloud and at the edge) to aid utility and renewable energy customers in enhancing billing accuracy, energy efficiency, and outage prediction. In addition, the two organisations have introduced Slalom Agile Supply Chain, a solution designed to assist manufacturers in incorporating flexibility and resilience into their supply chains in order to cut costs, boost output, and enhance the quality of service they provide to end users.
Ruba Borno, Vice President of Worldwide Channels and Alliances, AWS
“Slalom has a proven track record and is a trusted partner in providing innovative business and technology consulting services to our mutual customers, helping them accelerate their transitions to the cloud and leverage the vast portfolio of AWS services to drive innovation,” said Ruba. “By extending our collaboration with Slalom, expanding more broadly into markets together, and combining Slalom’s consulting and technical skills with our leading cloud services and migration expertise, we are giving customers a broader range of capabilities and offerings to better support their cloud strategies and digital transformation journeys.”
