AWS re:Invent 2023 - Partner Keynote with Dr. Ruba Borno
As children, our imaginations run wild. Anything is possible. [car engine accelerating] [music playing] But as adults, we start to believe that some things are impossible. At 22 years old, I was 7,000 miles from home, legs ravaged with burns from an accident. I'd just been told I'd never walk normally again. Things I wanted to accomplish started to feel impossible.
I needed to rekindle my imagination. I needed a partner. My mom told me to imagine, if you could accomplish anything, what would it be? I set my sights high. 18 months later, I finished the Chicago Triathlon in first place.
That sparked something in me, but the right partners, anything, was possible. [music playing] I'd always wanted to climb Mount Everest. What if, with my mentors, climbing partners, and a small bit of my operations team, I not only summit at Mount Everest, I climbed the highest peaks on each continent faster than anyone before. [cheering] My team pushed me to wonder. Crossing Antarctica? What if? My team grpi[. A new coach, polar experts, logistics, partners with skills, plans, ingenuity.
A wooden post marked the end of my 900-mile journey. Yeah! We did it! [music playing] I had walked over 900 miles alone. So, many people had made it possible. My team was with me all along, challenging me to wonder, to make the impossible possible.
With the right partners, you can exceed your wildest dreams. What's your impossible? Please welcome the Vice President of AWS Worldwide Channels and Alliances, Dr. Ruba Borno. [music playing] Good afternoon, Las Vegas! [applause] And good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you joining us online.
It is so good to be back here again with you for the Global Partner Keynote at re:Invent 2023. Now, in the opening video, you saw that Colin O'Brady had a sense of wonder about life and all of its possibilities. And then he suffered an accident. It almost ended his ability to walk normally again. And it almost ended his sense of wonder. But with the right partners, he was able to remember the belief that anything was possible.
He set his mind on goals that many told him were too difficult. They were too big. And with each new challenge, whether it was relearning how to walk after his accident, or running in his first triathlon, or climbing the seven highest mountains on each continent faster than anyone had done before, what he needed from his support system grew. And with the help of partners like seasoned coaches, partners like expert climbers, certified nutritionists, he not only achieved these lofty goals, but far exceeded them. And he broke 10 world records along the way.
These were goals that capitalized on that childlike wonder, on that unbounded imagination. And they were goals that seemed impossible until they were reached for the first time. Goals that resulted in impossible firsts.
So, I'd like each of you to remember what it was like to be a child. To have that wonder when your dreams were bold, when your imagination was limitless, and when you thought everything was possible and nothing was impossible. So, as adults, the trick to maintaining that sense of wonder is to always be curious.
And the key to accomplishing your dreams is to ensure that you have the best team behind you. And I'm talking about the best partner network supporting you every step of the way. AWS is here for you to help our customers and your customers realize those dreams.
Together, we work in lockstep. We reject limits. We overcome obstacles. And we tap into the creativity and imagination that we all have inside to realize those impossible firsts. And to realize them together. Now, these are impossible firsts like there are so many examples that you've all accomplished.
Now, we've all heard about data and analytics at the edge. Now, imagine the edge being an orbiting satellite. D-Orbit, which is an AWS partner that's a leader in space logistics and transformation, along with Unibap, an AWS tech partner, they sought to accomplish that impossible first at that edge. They went after the challenge of being able to be the first to automatically analyze massive volumes of raw satellite data in orbit, knowing which images to prioritize and only downlink the ones that are most useful. Their impact, increasing processing speeds, driving real-time inferences, and reducing what needed to be stored.
They imagined and they accomplished, pushing the boundaries of what's capable at the edge. And it's one of so many stories of impossible firsts that because of you, our partners, you made them possible. Now, all of you in this room are helping our customers achieve these goals.
And we're here to help you go even further. So, I ask you, what is your impossible? I know many of you think about how to help our customers with that question every single day. And this week, we recognize the top partners who helped customers with these types of groundbreaking transformations. Now, with over 150,000 partners in the AWS Partner Network, it is a tall order to review the performance data, the submissions, and the nominations. So, we asked Canalys to conduct a fully objective third-party review to select the 96 winning companies that you see on the screen. If you are from one of the partners that's named here, I ask you to please stand up and recognized, and please give them a round of applause.
[applause] Congratulations to every single one of you. Your mindset for growth and innovation helps you attain more for customers and for yourselves. So, how much more? I want to call out the partners on the AWS Marketplace. A new Forrester study found that channel partners who build and scale an AWS Marketplace practice can realize 234% return on investment.
50% faster deal closure and four to five times richer deal sizes. Those are significant numbers and they will help you reach new possibilities because they help you reach more and more customers. We're focused on creating value for you so that we can co-create value for our customers. So, today, I'm excited that you're going to get a glimpse into how AWS and our partners are helping customers break new ground. Break new ground with solutions and industries like financial services, media and entertainment, and the public sector, and there's so many more. You're also going to learn how we're creating connections that result in opportunities that were not there before.
We've got new programs and new incentives that reward you for pursuing new opportunities. You will see how we're developing all new use cases that are industry changing through purpose-built solutions powered by generative AI, of course. And you will learn how the AWS Marketplace continues to maximize reach and relevance for each and every one of our partners with end-to-end tools to help you sell more and to enable customers to find you so that you can help them with all of those challenges that we talked about. You will also learn the power of partnerships to tackle the most complex global challenges that impact us all because we are just getting started. Now last year, I gave you all a call to action to help customers come onto AWS for the first time so that they can realize the many benefits of the cloud to transform their businesses.
Well, you answered that call. So far this year, you've launched tens of thousands of opportunities for new customers to AWS. That is awesome and you all deserve a round of applause for that amazing work. [applause] And one of those customers is a startup streaming media company. Launched in 2018, they had an amazing library of compelling documentaries.
They were growing quickly but faced a daunting task. How do they share their library with a global audience? They'd have to translate that library of films into languages spoken by each of their audience members. It felt impossible because translations could cost thousands of dollars per video. So, they went to the AWS Marketplace and found a Managed Services Provider Partner and Premier Consulting Partner, Mission Cloud.
Now I love this story and I know you will too. So, let's hear it directly from the team that made it happen. Please welcome Thomas Lucas, Co-founder of MagellanTV, Simon Anderson, Founder and CEO of Mission Cloud, and Julia Chen, Vice President of Partner Core at AWS. [applause/music playing] Tom, we just got a glimpse of who MagellanTV is, and it's so impressive. Can you tell us about your journey to main stage at re:Invent with our Premier Partner, Mission Cloud? We have to go back in time.
So, my colleague Greg Diefenbach, who's in the audience here, and I had spent several decades making films for American networks. Then came the streaming revolution and we saw that we could break off from those networks and establish a direct relationship with viewers and establish a kind of global community of documentary watchers. So, our brand became MagellanTV and you got a little taste of it here.
But to really prepare for the next phase of the streaming revolution, we really had to crack the code on making our content more accessible to the world. So, that's when we turned to Mission Cloud. Simon, tell us about Mission Cloud and your unique engagement with MagellanTV, please. Thanks, Julia.
So, Mission Cloud is a pure play AWS Partner doing consulting and managed services. And we've got about over 300 certified professionals, AWS Certified. And we really focus on a whole range of skill sets from DevOps to CloudOps, to data analytics and machine learning, in this case. And our culture is really aligned as well with AWS with core values like focused on the mission, and action and accountability.
And MagellanTV, originally, came to us for cost optimization and a security audit through the AWS Marketplace. But we've really trained their team to sort of not only do that initial work but look beyond it and say, well, look what are your goals as a company, and really trying to understand those business goals. And so, in the case of MagellanTV, once we understood that you were really trying to make your documentaries just shine anywhere in the world, we basically said, well, "What if we could create a generative AI solution for you that automated the entire workflow of translating, and transcribing, and dubbing into any language that you chose?" And that was the beginning of a very creative partnership. So, I love the idea of asking what if, right, and that led to making the impossible possible. So, Tom, what did Mission Cloud propose to you after you gave them your initial requirements? Well, those what if questions led to a proposal that we thought was pretty audacious.
It's an automated workflow that converts an entire documentary soundtrack to another language with minimal human involvement. Now a documentary is typically made up of multiple speaking voices, narration, music effects. So, this system would have to accommodate all of that then translate words and context, address idioms and slang and technical terms, and even culturally sensitive terms and then put it all back together with the original timing.
So, this can really redefine the economics of distribution because it cuts the cost of dubbing by an order of magnitude. Now who benefits? Mainly it's the filmmakers that we work with because they now have access to audiences they wouldn't have had before. And the audiences themselves as well. So, what I'm hearing from you is there's so many benefits to these innovations outside of just the technology itself. So, Simon, why is it important for you to work with companies like MagellanTV? Well, we really love working with startups and emerging growing companies and even enterprises that are really trying to disrupt their industries, you know, go beyond with AWS.
That's one of the amazing powers of AWS. And we believe that cloud and now, you know, new technologies like generative AI are really just some of the most powerful new technologies in modern history. So, our commitment is that we want to go out there and work with these companies. And, particularly, in the case of MagellanTV, if you think about it, MagellanTV is in a global highly competitive content industry. They need any advantage they can get to be able to get their business model out there.
And so, once we started, our team really started digging in on the solution. Dr. Ryan Reese who's their global digital strategy specialist, he basically put together a solution using a lot of classic AWS services: SageMaker, Bedrock, Transcribe, Translate, and so on, and Polly.
And it's an amazing solution that is really proving very effective for Magellan. So, GenAI is a very disruptive and complex topic. Can you both tell me what benefits you're deriving from it? Well, our audience is made up of people who self-identify as lifelong learners. And so, for them it's kind of like a bridge into a world of shared interests: history, science, space, adventure, travel, and so on.
So, it's kind of like the audience really is the beneficiary of this. And I just encourage every partner out there to really lean into generative AI. We're seeing a broad range of use cases and solutions, just like with MagellanTV. But rather than just describe more about what we did, we thought that we'd actually do a demo of this, the opening caught video translated using this technology.
Should we show all the clip? Sure. And this is a portion of it. [video clip playing - various languages spoken] [applause] Thomas and Simon, I've learned so much from our conversation today. It's really a privilege to get to spend time with both of you. Do you have some closing thoughts for the audience? Sure.
I mean, beyond the business benefits, actually this has been a lot of fun. A great collaboration because the Mission Cloud team has been very smart. They're very intuitive. They listen very well.
They ask a lot of questions. And on our part as well, we've learned a lot from the creativity. I mean, working with filmmakers is just amazing, and preparing for this is fantastic. But I would also like to say that, you know, to every partner out there, AWS has been incredible for Mission Cloud. We're only six years old and we've grown a lot over that amount of time.
And just so appreciate everything that AWS is doing, including bringing us together on this stage. Absolutely. Thank you both for your partnership and your insights. It's been fabulous to speak with you and work with you. Thank you, Julia. [applause] What a great example.
An AWS customer that's having so much impact around the globe. A partner that leaned in to help them achieve their goals. An amazing proof of value of the AWS Marketplace as well in helping match customers with the right partner.
Now, it's also a reminder that there are so many net new opportunities and prospects that we have yet to move to the cloud in AWS. And this is a great opportunity for all of us. While sometimes acquiring these new customers can seem like a challenge, we want to make sure that you're able to help these customers realize they're impossible firsts with AWS. And we're going to reward you for it. In August of this year, we launched the Customer Engagement Incentive.
And this was designed to support all of you in engaging companies that are new to AWS. It gives you a consistent and simple global framework that will help you fund every stage of the customer sales cycle. And so, you can get started through the ACE Pipeline Manager in AWS Partner Central. Since this customer engagement initiative was introduced, again, in August of this year, partners reported launching 87% of eligible opportunities, helping so many more customers re-imagine their businesses, a huge opportunity for all of us.
And our ability to imagine and think more expansively is critical if we want to do more for all of those customers. You heard Adam yesterday and Swami this morning talk about our advancements in GenAI. This is an amazing opportunity for AWS and for all of our partners, but most importantly, for our customers.
McKinsey research estimates that GenAI could add as much as $4.4 trillion to the global economy annually across the 63 use cases they analyzed. And you, our partners, have already been capitalizing on this.
You've already produced over 90 GenAI partner demos. And there are more than 50 GenAI solutions from you on the AWS Marketplace. And we have just begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. And you are the catalysts. You're the catalysts for customers to dream bigger.
You're the catalysts for them to harness the true potential of generative AI. And you're exemplifying this opportunity every single day. Now one partner that I'm excited to work with on a regular basis is Accenture. I'd like to welcome Andy Tay, Lead of Accenture Cloud First, to the stage to tell us more about their AWS partnership. Andy? [music playing] Welcome, Andy.
Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me. We are so excited about the announcement that Adam made yesterday about Amazon Q.
So, tell us what does this mean for Accenture? Yeah, Ruba, thanks. And thanks again for having me. Amazon Q, as we discuss, in generative AI as you know, has truly ushered in a new era of innovation and transformative value across both business and technology. And in fact, in a recent survey that Accenture did, we found 97% of C-suite indicated that they view generative AI as a transformative element in moving their market share. That's 97%. But to really get the value from it, we've got to help them figure out ways to adapt and adopt the technology into their environment.
That's why I'm super excited to be here today to announce the service that we've developed to help our clients develop software, solutions, and accelerate their application modernization journeys faster with Amazon Q. It's a jumpstart service that enables them to maximize the value of Amazon Q by taking the right steps and getting their technical environments ready for an AI-assisted development future, and managing the tooling and the automation from an ongoing perspective to drive the right efficacy and accuracy. We're bringing, Ruba, the very best of Accenture capabilities with AWS capabilities, both from an engineering perspective, but it also accelerates a perspective to drive this value. And our customers are going to be able to bring their use cases from concept to production faster than ever before, while also addressing key topics like governance guardrails and responsible AI, and processes and all of that, as they build out their digital core. That's absolutely key if customers are going to adopt next-gen technology and the emerging technology, something that's rapidly changing like GenAI.
Now, one thing I really appreciate about our partnership with Accenture is you're always early adopters with AWS. You lean in, you train your people, you get them to be able to deliver to our customers. So, tell us about the generative AI piece and how you're using AWS to deploy solutions to your customers. Ruba, generative AI as you know is truly showing incredible promise in the software development lifecycle.
And we've been an earlier adopter with Amazon CodeWhisperer in Accenture and we've seen 30% boost in performance. And we expect that to increase even further with Amazon Q across security but also quality and performance. So, we're going to see that. Now to bring that to scale even more, over the next two years, Ruba, we're in Accenture committing to enable up to 50,000 of our development engineers on Amazon Q and CodeWhisperer. That's 50,000 of our development engineers. That's fantastic.
And then we're going to go one step further, we're going to bring extra value to our customers, our joint customers, by taking AWS GenAI capabilities and betting it into our integrated automation platform to drive even greater efficiencies faster for our clients. So, Ruba, those are just two examples of what we're doing in Accenture using AWS capabilities to drive value for our customers. I love the commitment. 50,000 developers trained on this, and I think that's what it takes but I also love more, importantly, the results that you're getting, the 30% boost in productivity.
Thank you so much for the partnership, Andy. I know there's always so much more for us to do together. More to come, thanks a lot. Thank you. [applause] [music playing] Now, we love it when we come together with partners to accelerate customer success. And GenAI is providing all new opportunities to do just that. But the nascency and the rapid pace of innovation of generative AI means that our customers need you now more than ever.
At the core, customers need help ensuring that they get their data and security foundations right. AWS and our partners are building and delivering an incredibly comprehensive suite of foundation models, applications, developer tools to support a wide range of business needs. And those business needs can be mission critical, and they certainly were for one customer who's responsible for an aging fleet of more than 5,000 aircraft, many of which have no designated replacements and are likely to be flying continuously for the next 10 to 20 years. Now this customer was facing costs in excess of $28,000 per hour. They needed to make the seemingly impossible possible. Reduce costs, improve efficiencies and predict the fleet's performance.
And they did it all using generative AI. Let's hear from the team that approached this challenge and led the way. Please welcome Jay Bonci, the Chief Technology Officer from the U.S. Air Force, Tom Siebel, CEO of C3.ai, and Jeff Kratz,
Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Channels and Alliances at AWS. [applause] Jay, Tom, welcome. Thanks for taking the time to join us here at re:Invent.
Tom, I'll start first with you. You know, you've had a number of wonderful announcements recently, exciting new developments here with AWS. Can you share a little bit about those announcements and the importance for customers like the U.S. Air Force? Well, we're very pleased to announce today the availability of C3 Generative AI on the AWS Marketplace.
It's available today. For those of you interested, you can just click on this QR code and get access to the product. It is a no-code environment where you will instantly have a fully functional generative AI application up and running. So, it's quite a significant development. It's available now.
And for those of you who are interested, I encourage you to click on the link and go for it. And Jay, you've been working with C3a.i as well as other vendors. You know, it's critical for the United States Air Force that it continues to be ready.
What type of challenges are you facing now and how are you thinking about technology addressing those? So, the main challenge of the Air Force is to provide technological superiority over the adversaries and competitors of the United States. Alongside our coalition partners, we operate in an incredibly diverse and complex environment. We have an enormous fleet of aircraft, that's our main sort of line of business, and we ask a lot of our service members to be able to operate anywhere in the globe. This means having technology that acts at the scale that we need to operate, but also in numerably difficult conditions and that needs to be [PH] ruggedizable, field-repairable, and understandable by new service members who just come into the service.
And so, we have this incredibly dense challenge between very new aircraft and very old aircraft. And it's incumbent for us to have things like AI to be able to help us just bring additional leverage to those efforts. And those are some pretty big challenges. Tom, how are you working with the U.S.
Air Force to address those challenges of aging aircraft, making sure they're ready, but also positioned in the right places? We've been working with our partners at AWS and the United States Air Force since 2018 on this project that is called PANDA, operated by the Rapid Sustainment Office. So, the rough number is there are 5,000 aircraft in the United States Air Force, average airframe is 30 years old, and on any given day, 50% of these aircraft will deploy. And so, the project that we began in 2008 and is now in full production, we have aggregated all of the data, all of the telemetry, for example, a B-1 bomber has 42,000 sensors, the maintenance systems, the flight sorting systems, the inventory systems, the weather at the time that it happened, from the entire fleet now for decades.
This is 100 terabytes of structured and unstructured data, and then we've built hundreds and hundreds of machine learning models that will identify system and subsystem failures, say flap actuators, or igniters, or auxiliary power units. It'll identify failure 50 to 100 flight hours before the system fails so that we can then repair the aircraft in scheduled maintenance when it stops in Munich or Bahrain, avoid the unscheduled downtime. And the result is we're able to increase the availability of aircraft on any given day at the United States Air Force by 25%.
At the scale of the United States Air Force, that's a lot of lethality that's in the air instead of in the hangar. And such critical importance. You know, Jay, when you think about the partnership that you have with C3.ai and AWS, how do you think about partnership and how did it get started? What do you look for in those relationships? So, as Tom alluded to, the key challenge of our partnership is scale, right? So, we have 800,000 enterprise users or employees, as you can think of them, we operate in 180 locations across the globe, and we have a budget in the billions. And that would place us somewhere squarely within the Fortune 10.
And so, we need technology partners like C3.ai and cloud service providers like AWS who can come along and scale with us and go to the austere locations that we need to operate in. This is incredibly important. We also have to operate in a way that is fiscally responsible, secure and it plays within the rules that the United States has set out for doing business with the government. And so, what we ask of those partners is really to find the mission thread and come along with us on that journey and to help us bring technology to the fight no matter where it is.
We think of these technology companies and these key cloud service providers as really as national strategic assets that are there and ready when we need to be there and ready. Well, thank you so much for both of you sharing your thoughts and insights with us today. We greatly appreciate it. -Thank you. -Thank you.
Thank you. [applause] Thank you, Jay, Tom and Jeff. What a great example of how GenAI is helping customers reimagine the way they do business, transform their supply chain and realize efficiencies that weren't possible before. We want our partners to help as many customers as possible take advantage of the capabilities that GenAI has to offer.
So, we recently introduced a GenAI Center of Excellence focused on advancing customer applications in GenAI. It gives you direct, immediate access to our fields and technical resources, gives you access to enablement content and trainings in a just-in-time manner which is critical in the rapidly evolving GenAI landscape. And we developed this with leading partners, several you've heard from this week: Anthropic, Nvidia, and Capgemini, among many others. This Center of Excellence is a crucial bridge between the potential of AI and the growing landscape of tools, applications, and use cases that have the potential to revolutionize our customer experiences. This is an important resource to help you. First, help you familiarize yourself with the unique capabilities and value propositions of AWS through guided learning pathways.
Second, help you specialize in developing industry-specific GenAI practices and solutions. This Center of Excellence connects you with leaders across the AWS Partner Network who are already developing applications so that you can learn from them and partner with them. Third, we help you build your generative AI solutions and practices with AWS faster because you're leveraging data-driven insights, tools, and best practices. We at AWS are ready to support you, support your GenAI proofs of concept, provide you with subject matter experts, funding support, and working backwards methodologies to make sure that you're building the right things for our customers. And lastly, we want to help you engage with customers and other partners to build a long-term view that will scale over time. And you can start leveraging all of these resources now.
You can either go to the AWS Partner Central or the AWS generative AI website today. So I urge you all to go. And of course, GenAI is a welcome addition to the stack of solutions having an amazing impact across all industry sectors. Our industry-focused approach working in lockstep with all of you meets customers where they are on their technology journey and works backwards from their industry-specific needs to help achieve their unique business objectives. Many of you have leaned in and I love sharing these examples.
Examples like United Airlines working with our partner Slalom, which has been investing in machine learning and AI growing United's analytics capabilities for years. Now these investments laid the foundation that's now benefiting from GenAI to improve work in areas like customer care, network operations, the employee experience, and revenue management. This is helping United significantly enhance the service that it delivers to customers every day and better run their operations. Another amazing example is Blackstone in financial services. They're working with Pinecone and AWS to deliver a solution that helps them move faster with existing resources.
So let's see how. [video clip playing] The pace of innovation in AI has been dizzying to say the least. Generative AI really took us all by storm earlier this year, but what's really fascinating is how quickly we've grown accustomed to seeing this within a lot of the products that we use on a day-to-day basis. We're seeing a technology shift that is generational. This is going to change the industry, it's going to change the economy, and it's something that no company can let pass by. Blackstone is the world's largest alternative investment manager.
We manage over a trillion assets on behalf of pension funds, high-net-worth individuals and sovereign wealth funds. Previously, what was really difficult was taking the millions of documents that we have and turning them into useful pieces of information. When building generative AI applications, especially with text, you want to connect your large language model with your company's data. The way you connect your own company data, make it compliant, accessible, relevant, up-to-date, governed, secure is with a vector database, which is the part that we provide.
Our relationship with AWS and Pinecone has allowed us to build applications to empower our investment teams and our investor relation teams. Now, with generative AI, we can take all this unstructured data, this text, PDFs, PowerPoints, and start to gain insights in brand new ways that previously were really, really difficult to tap into. The idea really is for the application to get the right information from your own company's data provided as context to the large language model so the result is much more accurate.
Finding the right partners is absolutely critical in your success. What we found with AWS and Pinecone is really the perfect match for not just our cloud architecture and the flexibility that we need, but also the innovative tools and subject matter expertise to build the right applications to solve the problems that we face today and tomorrow. That is such a great example of using tailored services to power change and customized journeys for our customers. And our customers want more. A recent Gartner survey of North American and European-based enterprises revealed that in 2021 enterprises using industry-specific cloud platforms was less than 10%, but in just the two years since then, that adoption has risen to 40% as customers work to accelerate their critical business initiatives.
One partner that exemplifies delivering on these business outcomes is ServiceNow. Recently, they signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to make ServiceNow available as a SaaS offering on AWS. In addition, we're co-creating industry-specific solutions that will be available first on AWS and first on the AWS Marketplace starting in early 2024. Here to give you details of this sneak peek is Paul Fipps, President of Strategic Accounts for ServiceNow. Paul? [music playing] [applause] Welcome, Paul.
Thank you for joining us at re:Invent. Thanks for having me, Ruba. So excited to be here. Well, we're really excited about this expanded partnership between AWS and ServiceNow. Tell us what's in it for your customers.
Great. So, Ruba, you know, when you and I first started talking about this partnership, we really envisioned how we would change the game for our customers. And with inspiration from both of our CEOs, Adam, who likes to think big, and Bill, who certainly likes to dream big, we started brainstorming how do we bring Amazon Web Services' vast reach, your data, and your scalability and combine it with ServiceNow's intelligent platform for digital business. And so now just one year later, here we are standing on the stage, and I'm thrilled to announce that ServiceNow will be generally available as a software as a service offering on AWS and AWS Marketplace come January 2024. Woo! [applause] Very exciting. Now, not only does this unlock our customers' ability to run ServiceNow on AWS, but it gives our teams the ability to really co-create and co-innovate first-only solutions on AWS.
Well, one of those solutions that we're working on is a supply chain solution. And we've been working on it with one of the world's largest automakers. So, I'd love for you to tell us more about that. We have, Ruba, and so as you know-- I mean, just imagine you're a supply chain or an inventory manager operating in a globally complex and fast-paced environment, many of which us operate in the same world. You know, you're trying to balance inventory on hand, ESG considerations and you're doing that all relative to your costs, right? So, it's really a difficult task.
And you and I and all of us at AWS and ServiceNow think that should be easier. And so, if you take a step back and you think about our shared vision to really revolutionize that supply chain, AWS and ServiceNow will now integrate AWS Supply Chain forecast capabilities with ServiceNow's supplier lifecycle solution. And so, if you're the inventory manager, what this will mean is the power to predict demand with precision.
And that's going to give them the perfectly stocked factory running at peak efficiency and really free from all those unnecessary storage costs. Meanwhile, if you're the supply chain manager, you're going to be able to use the ServiceNow AWS solution to get instant recommendations on suitable suppliers, allowing them to deliver projects on time, in compliance, and most importantly, within budget. Now, in both cases, these leaders will soon be putting AI to work for them.
And what's great about that is then their chief procurement officer can take those tangible results to their board of directors. Outcomes like skyrocketing forecast accuracy, plummeting inventory costs, and as you know, all leading to maximized capacity utilization. So, Ruba, this use case is just the start of what we can deliver together for our customers. And next year, our teams are co-creating solutions for cloud call centers, ESG, data lakes, ERP modernization opportunities, all kinds of ideas are coming through, all available in AWS. And I'm so excited to see the power of our collective product and engineering teams and really the work they've done to bring to life what we envisioned just one year ago.
But as you know, it's all about our customers and it's really our customers who are truly inspiring our teams to really accomplish the impossible together. And I love that about ServiceNow and AWS. We're both customer-obsessed. You mentioned designing with the supply chain manager in mind, the inventory manager in mind, the chief procurement officer in mind. Thank you so much.
I know this is just the beginning. Thanks, Paul. It really is. Thank you, Ruba. [music playing] [applause] Now, customers value partner specializations. They value our partners having a depth of knowledge from Competencies, AWS Service Ready, AWS Service Delivery, they want to know which partners will help them achieve their impossible firsts and which partners have the best expertise to achieve their goals. In fact, new Canalys research shows that 83% of customers polled rank AWS specializations as the top three selection criteria for our partners, with 74% of customers who review their partners' vendor certifications at least two times a year to verify that they're continuing to upskill in high demand domains.
This is the value to customers that drives our investment in specialization partners. AWS now offers more than 100 unique partner specializations to help customers find the right partner. Every year, we launch new specializations working backwards from the partner expertise that AWS customers need most.
We heard feedback from our partners, and we revamped the specialization program to meet your needs. We're consolidating our Competency, our AWS Service Delivery and AWS Service Ready into one cohesive specialization program to help customers more easily find you to find the right partner for their business. We've standardized these requirements across the programs to reduce the administrative burden on you and reduce any barriers that may come, and we've further invested in helping our partners accelerate customer success through a new alignment between the community of specialization partners and the AWS service acceleration team. This team is to help arm you with the right AWS resources, insights, and support.
So why do customers care about specializations and competencies? They know that an AWS Competency partner is technically validated and has proven customer success. And today, I'm excited to announce that we're making several new ways for customers to find differentiated partners. And I want to highlight just a few.
First, is general availability of our AWS Resilience specialization. [applause] This is a must-have that our customers have been asking for. Partners can help customers meet their resilience responsibilities with a standardized framework that includes design, operations, and recovery.
Also, now generally available is the new AWS Cyber Insurance specialization. Using the AWS Security Hub, customers can quickly provide insurance insurers the data they need to more effectively evaluate risk and security posture. And working with AWS Cyber Insurance Partners, customers can find affordable policies and receive a quote within two business days.
And finally, I'm happy to announce the general availability of AWS Built-In for ISVs. [applause] This produces an AWS-approved infrastructure as code asset, which customers use to automatically install, configure, and integrate the ISV partner solution with foundational AWS services. This saves customers time, it saves partners time, it simplifies the process for our customers to deploy third-party software through automated packages.
We are so excited about this. And helping customers with one of their biggest challenges, security continues to be a focus for us. Now, last year we announced Amazon Security Lake, which enables customers to centrally aggregate, manage, and derive value from security-related log and event data. This service was designed with partners in mind to help customers manage the increasing complexity of their cybersecurity environment.
Today, Amazon Security Lake has more than 65 partners who've built integrations to help customers. Partners can publish and ingest data quickly. And they can do this because Amazon Security Lake is stored in the Open Cybersecurity Schema Framework, or OCSF, format.
We started with 18 launch partners last year, and since then, the OCSF community has grown to 166 participating organizations. Customers can send logs into the OCSF schema from more than 100 sources, allowing security teams to achieve greater visibility into potential security threats. Often, we see customers needing to work collectively with solution integrators and ISVs to help them with this complex security posture.
Now, what if you were the CISO of the largest hotel brand in the world? You are overseeing cybersecurity for more than 8,700 properties in 139 countries, servicing nearly 189 million elite members. You need to make security part of every customer transaction without compromising the customer experience. Well, the right partners and services are critical to your success.
To hear more about this story, please welcome Arno Van Der Walt, SVP and CISO for Marriott, Emily Mossberg, Global Head of Security from Deloitte, Ankur Shah, SVP and GM from Palo Alto Networks, with Chris Niederman, Managing Director, Global Systems Integrators at AWS. [applause] Arno, Emily, Ankur, thank you for joining me on stage and welcome. So, Arno, I'd like to start with you. I find it amazing that Marriott started as a nine-seat root beer stand in 1927 in Washington, D.C.,
and now Marriott, over 96 years later, is the world's largest hospitality company. As a chief information security officer, what's your impossible? Let me answer that question by providing a little bit of context, Chris. Marriott's purpose is to connect people through the power of travel. And we've been delighting our guests by providing memorable travel and hospitality experiences. We've built our reputation by putting our people first and providing excellent customer service. We believe that service needs to be human-centered, data-driven, and technology-enabled.
For us, trust is everything. And our approach to taking care of our people naturally ties into our data security philosophy as well and that creates the connective tissue between our business and our cyber strategy. Our impossible is to make security ever present, transparent, and as frictionless as possible in these human-to-human interactions without sacrificing security. As we continue down our digital and technology transformation, data, security, AI are all top of mind. These technologies are unlocking tremendous value for Marriott but for the hospitality industry at large as well.
We are, for example, on the business side, piloting ways to enhance our guests travel experience by providing them with very targeted and relevant local recommendations and personalized itineraries. Excellent. I really like that, "Human-centered, data-driven, and technology-enabled."
I'm going to use that. I really like that a lot. So, Emily, we're going to come to you next. Arno outlined a challenging problem set. What's yours? And how do you approach solutions in the evolving cybersecurity space? Chris, you know, for me, coming from a cyber point of view at Deloitte, our impossible is a world where cyber-attacks are no longer credible threats.
And I really believe that we can move closer to that direction through building secure environments where customers and partners can share security data, threat intelligence, and we can power those environments with GenAI and machine learning models. Those models will help make getting to security autonomy a reality. I mean, the challenge that we have today is that there are not enough security experts. We have a ton of data, but we don't have enough information. And we have a number of disparate solutions and vendors, making cyber very complex and very expensive.
We need to unify and simplify what we're doing in the cyberspace. We need to be able to quickly identify new threat vectors and move rapidly to remediation, and most importantly, we need to be able to recover important critical business processes and functions and drive resiliency into our organizations. Excellent. I like that, security autonomy, making that a reality and simplifying it. Super important.
Ankur, same question to you. What is your impossible challenge at Palo Alto Networks? And how are you working with partners to address the evolving cybersecurity environment? Yes. Look, as the audience knows, cloud has been an unbelievable enabler to transform customers across all industry vertical, transform their businesses.
At the heart of the transformation is applications. Customers are able to build and deploy applications faster than ever before. The average customer I talk to now have over 100 applications.
And with GenAI, AI writing the code, you're going to see more and more customers having more applications. This is fantastic. With cloud-native application, you can actually have a piece of code deploy literally thousands of infrastructure elements and deploy application components on top of that. Now, what is true for application is also true for security risk. A single problem in code gets magnified in cloud.
You can introduce a vulnerability in code, and it gets multiplied as you deploy the cloud infrastructure in the application. Now, the challenge with this is, like Emily said, there are not enough security professionals. There's a 100-to-1 ratio between developers and security people. And this is a battle. This is an impossible battle that, unfortunately, security teams are unable to win.
At Palo Alto Networks, our mission is to make impossible possible. And we do that by helping customers fix issues at source and block breaches in runtime. We take a holistic code-to-cloud platform approach, give a single platform that helps customers get to the impossible in today's world, which is zero risk and zero breaches. Excellent. Arno, I'm coming back to you. So, you're the CISO in a large global enterprise.
What do you say to those who are facing proportional challenges but are smaller, leaner organizations? I think, first of all, find a way to connect your cyber strategy with your business outcomes. We're all facing the same challenges as information security professionals. What we do happens largely behind the scenes and it's so pivotal to maintain the trust of our consumers for our brands and our products. All companies must find a way to scale to the ever-increasing attacks that are taking place. These attacks are getting more complex.
And the fact is that we just can't scale out with people. There's a limited tech talent pool that we're all competing for and we're constantly looking for the right people on the security side at Marriott as well. We're also looking at ways to complement their capabilities by using AI and automation. For example, we're finding ways to leverage business data and security telemetry to accelerate threat hunting and to improve and be more efficient in identifying fraud in our environments. This is all made possible by bringing together business and security data.
So having the right partners is, of course, key as well. And we're fortunate to work with the great companies on this stage to help us innovate and also execute our cyber strategy. Yes. I think having the right partners is absolutely key in combining the forces of an ISV and a consulting partner to best support and serve your needs as ger customer. That's true customer obsession. So, Emily, given everything we just heard, what are your keys to success from a GSI perspective? From a cyber perspective, first, I would say, cybersecurity has to be a priority across the organization from the top down.
And it needs to have accountability at the C-level and the board level. And clearly, the regulations that we're seeing today are moving us in that direction. Secondly, as mentioned by many of us, we've got to drive towards security autonomy.
We have got to harness the power of AI and machine learning, and that will allow us to be able to do more with less. It will move us from human intervention to human oversight, and that's going to be really important. And the reality is, what has gotten us to this point today is not going to be what propels us to the future. We have got to change the way we're thinking about it. And at Deloitte, we're building a new platform that brings together the core components required for a security program, allowing them to become interoperable.
And working with core ISVs like Palo Alto, and building it on top of AWS Security Lake, we're able to bring together the best components from across the ecosystem and drive an ecosystem play that will allow us to move towards resiliency in the enterprise. Emily, very well said. So, Ankur, you've heard both your stage mates up here talk about the value of partnering to support our customers. So how important is it for ISVs to collaborate with GSIs and come together as a unified cybersecurity community to best serve our customers? Look, it's absolutely critical.
We have some of the best cybersecurity minds and products on the planet at Palo Alto Networks. We know how to build products, but to deliver a solution for customer requires intimate understanding of the people and the processes. And this is where partners like Deloitte have been helping and instrumental in delivering that holistic solution, operationalizing the product, ensuring that our customers, you know, have reduced risk and breaches. Excellent. And the importance of, we call it tri-party, right? We have technology partners with consulting partners, GSIs, on behalf of our customer here with Marriott. And I think that's a super important message for everybody in the room.
So, with that, I want to thank all three of you for joining me on stage here. Your insights and observations have been absolutely tremendous, and I hope everybody in the room gained a little bit more knowledge and insights and take something away from it. So, with that, thank you. -Thank you. -Thank you, Chris. [applause] What a great example of when partners connect the total is greater than the sum of its parts.
And the power of connections isn't just partner to partner, but most importantly, connecting customers to our partners. A great example is Interpublic Group or IPG, a premier advertising and marketing services company. They worked with IBM and AWS to modernize their mission-critical SAP landscape. And to accelerate their move to the cloud, they used the AWS Marketplace to procure and deploy solutions from three more partners SUSE, HashiCorp, and Commvault. It's an important example of the power of the AWS Marketplace, and it's a power that we're continuing to invest in every single day because you're seeing incredible results.
It's no surprise that Forrester named AWS a leader in SaaS marketplaces in Q4 of this year. It's definitely a door opener for some exceptional firsts. Just last month, CrowdStrike became the first cybersecurity ISV founded in the cloud to exceed a billion dollars of software sales through the AWS Marketplace. They joined three other ISVs, yes. [applause] They joined three other ISVs, Snowflake, Palo Alto Networks, and Splunk in this significant milestone. Take Drata, a startup who delivers a leading compliance automation service.
They leaned in heavily into the AWS Marketplace, and in just over a year, engaged AWS on more than 6000 co-sell opportunities, and won more than 1,000 AWS Marketplace private offers. This is a board level priority for them. [applause] And take MongoDB, whose self-service via the AWS Marketplace business has become a strategic channel. Over the past 18 months, their self-service business via the AWS Marketplace has seen an exponential growth rate of more than five times. [applause] Listing on the Marketplace provides you with an opportunity for your customers to discover your product, test it with SaaS free trials, deploy it with a public subscription, and expand their commitment through an AWS Marketplace private offer. It's the simplicity of this experience that brings customers back.
There are currently 2.5 million active subscriptions on the AWS Marketplace. And in the past two years, the number of active customers in the AWS Marketplace has increased by 287%. Our mission is to make this your preferred route to market so you can capitalize on the opportunity to access hundreds of thousands of active marketplace customers to add to the product inventory across 70 categories and total more than 15,000 transactable listings. Part of the process is making it easier for our customers to discover and deploy third party software.
AWS Marketplace is now integrated into 13 AWS service consoles today. The goal is to make your selling experience consistent and easy to access from one place. And our feature velocity continues to increase.
This year, we launched more than 30 new features, doubling the amount that we launched last year, and it will continue to address our partner and customer experience. We consistently hear from our customers that they want an easier way to access SaaS solutions. Today, this presents challenges in configuring and launching when there's a lack of integration with cloud service providers. Which is why I'm really excited to launch the AWS Marketplace SaaS Quicklaunch. [applause] Customers can now quickly configure, deploy, and launch AWS on AWS through CloudFormation templates that are defined and validated by both the ISV, the software vendor, and AWS with the latest AWS security standards.
We also want the AWS Marketplace to serve customers where they are. But until now, access to the AWS Marketplace was provided inside the walls of AWS. So, customers on your site would be sent back to AWS to complete their purchase.
And that's why I'm excited to launch the new AWS Marketplace APIs for sellers, generally, available today. [applause] This enables AWS Marketplace access within your current applications so customers don't have to leave your domains to make purchases. Now's your chance to imagine the possibilities of scaling your business with AWS Marketplace. And we're here not only to provide you with the very best marketplace, but the most attractive incentives in the industry to sell your software and services.
And as part of this value proposition, we are lowering our pricing. [applause] Effective January 2024, AWS Marketplace is lowering its listing fee for public SaaS and data subscriptions to 3%. For partners transacting through private offers, we've created a more, simple flat tiered model. For private offers under a million, they'll be a 3% fee.
For offers between a million and 10 million to 2% fee, and greater than 10 million, 1.5% fee. And for renewals to promote customer retention, it will be 1.5%. So, we're not slowing down in our commitment to you. [applause] We will continue to evolve and you expect to see more and more launches to grow your business on the AWS Marketplace. And we're going to improve your experience on Partner Central and we expect you to hold us accountable. To hear more about how we're doing this with a partner who has a similar vision, please welcome Lenore Lang, SVP and GM, Comms Media and Amazon for Salesforce, and Matt Yanchyshyn, General Manager of the AWS Marketplace and Partner Engineering.
[applause] [music playing] So excited about those launches. I'm also really excited that in October 2022 we partnered with Salesforce to transform the AWS Partner experience by reimagining how AWS partners engage with AWS to build, market, sell, and grow with us. We also want to make it easier and faster for AWS partners to list and transact with the AWS Marketplace. The partnership with Salesforce has helped us move faster. This year alone, just like what Ruba was saying, we launched over 25 features across AWS Partner Central and our CRM Connector for Salesforce. With the new Partner Central, we've launched a completely new self-guided experience that's simple, predictable, and profitable for partners.
Lenore, our two companies have partnered over the last year to help our partners and their customers deliver impossible things. So, from your perspective, how does the vision for the new partner experience align with the Salesforce vision? Yeah, well, thanks for having me. You know, our vision at Salesforce is to always create a seamless experience that delivers intelligence, automation, and personalization with the fastest time to value. And what I love about our partnership is that we have a shared ethos and a vision to be customer obsessed. That is easy to say, but not always easy to do. It takes a deep partnership and a steadfast commitment to the vision.
And that's just what we've created here. And we've made tremendous progress over the last 12 months, bringing this vision to life. The new AWS Partner experience is providing users with a 360-degree view of information within a single pane of glass based on their role. So, for sellers, this means being able to spend more time selling to customers instead of searching for data and tools. And for partners and partner development managers, they will be able to see how they're performing across their portfolio to drive increased sales. We couldn't be more excited that this new experience is being used by over 130,000 partners and over two million users.
As a partner ourselves, we're thrilled to be able to experience this magic. And as a new seller on the marketplace, this is only the beginning. Thanks, Lenore. So, as you just mentioned, Salesforce has powered a lot of the new experiences we've built in AWS Partner Central and the CRM Connector. Can you tell us a bit what's under the covers? Sure. Well, AWS is one of the best consumers on our product portfolio today, leveraging out of the box capabilities in order to provide the best partner experience.
The foundation for Partner Central is built on the Salesforce platform, centered around a digital experience for app development. This allows partners to eas
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