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Taking the Trouble Out of Ticketing with ServiceNow and AWS Support APIs
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By Farook Babu, Cloud Delivery Leader – DXC Technology By Jim Boling, Integration Product Owner – DXC Technology By Peter White, Integration Product Architect – DXC Technology By Dan Hattrup, PhD, Customer Solution Manager – AWS
DXC Technology
A fundamental component of the Operational Excellence pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework is evolving your environment, incorporating continuous improvement over time.
Moving to the cloud should be transformational for a business, by adding agility, and making it easier to innovate. It’s important to remember the innovations are often small, incremental in nature, and designed to solve a “legacy” problem from an on-premises environment.
DXC serves more than 6,000 customers in 70 countries, and as an AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) DXC needs seamless integration for ticketing, support, and two-way communication to provide world-class customer service to clients.
The guiding tenets for this work focused on the Well-Architected Framework—incorporating design principles such as performing operations as code; operational health metrics such as time to close a ticket; and the aforementioned evolution.
All of this allowed DXC to simplify work for customers inside and outside the organization. An added benefit for DXC is that the API-driven integration to AWS Support contributes to the AWS MSP audit and review.
This post explains the previous environment, the old customer service workflow, and how the work was done to integrate ServiceNow and AWS Support. Finally, we’ll share the successes DXC achieved within the current environment.
Pre-Integration Architecture
As a service provider, DXC frees up customer resources from platform work through automation, managed services, and environment provisioning. These services enable DXC customers to focus on higher value work in the application stack.
The AWS Well-Architected Framework identifies various models of separating responsibilities between the end customer, a service provider like DXC, and AWS. The different models require support interactions between the three entities to varying degrees. In our current situation, AWS is responsible for the platform, DXC provides managed services, and the client focuses on their business applications.
AWS refers to this as a Separated Application Engineering and Operations (AEO), and Infrastructure Engineering and Operations (IEO) with Central Governance and a Service Provider model in the Well-Architected Framework. The support structure is detailed in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1 – Separated AEO and IEO with centralized governance and a service provider.
The end customer is responsible for the blue area in the diagram above, while DXC is responsible for the purple area. AWS performs work within the orange area.
If there is a disruption to service availability, customers need to diagnose and remedy problems at the application level, and communicate platform disruptions to DXC. Meanwhile, DXC needs to be able to isolate any disruption at the service or platform level in conjunction with AWS.
The common thread tying this all together is the ServiceNow ticketing system, allowing communication between the three layers as a central repository for incident reference.
Original Workflow Process
Prior to integrating ServiceNow with AWS Support, the DXC operational technicians followed a manual process. Problems were recorded in ServiceNow, and an AWS case would be opened via web, chat, or phone, depending upon severity.
If an AWS Technical Account Manager (TAM) was required, that was another process and conducted via email most of the time. There was little to no automation in this process, and multiple opportunities for failure instead of being a reliable mechanism (see figure 2).
Figure 2 – Original workflow process for AWS Support engagement.
Recognizing there was an opportunity to improve on this process, DXC initiated an internal review, starting with their customer base and working backwards to a solution.
Customers may have multiple AWS accounts, some of which may not be managed by DXC, in addition to those that are. They may also have their own instances of ServiceNow that would require integration with the DXC ServiceNow environment.
DXC narrowed the options to improve the service provision process to the following three:
Applying Lean techniques to the manual process. While some improvements could be realized here, not enough value would be gained with this approach.
Use an existing ServiceNow plugin to accomplish the integration; after review of what was on the market, nothing met DXC’s needs.
Build a bespoke solution that any DXC organization could utilize when needing to exchange tickets with AWS. This solution would meet the needs of the DXC Cloud Operations team, and it was scalable to other teams within DXC’s global footprint.
Integration Architecture and Work
Once the path forward to create a leveraged integration solution was made, DXC created user stories, set out the project plan, and divided the work into two sprints. System integration, and testing was scheduled with AWS Support following those sprints.
Recognizing the variable demand for this solution, the development team based the solution around AWS serverless options, starting with AWS Lambda and using AWS Step Functions to sequence the Lambda stages.
DXC designed an Integration Adapter for AWS Support, utilizing widely available AWS services such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), among other services. This was done to ensure scalability within DXC’s other lines and business, and to make it replicable via consulting engagements for other DXC customers facing similar challenges.
After the initial build was tested within the DXC systems, the next two weeks were dedicated to testing integration with AWS Support and finally completed with the assistance of the AWS TAM on the DXC account team.
Architecture
The technical solution leverages features of ServiceNow to facilitate the communication. As examples, it uses the Standard Incident eBond Interface as the foundation to build a Partner-Group style eBond (bi-directional integration) between DXC and AWS.
Flows are built in ServiceRamp in the DXC-SP tenant using ConnectNow and the Integration Adapter for AWS as endpoints. This allows for asynchronous communication between the support groups, which facilitates ticket resolution when support groups may be geographically dispersed.
Figure 3 – Service integration framework for support tickets.
Outbound interactions from DXC to AWS are event-driven. Updates made in ServiceNow are fed to AWS in near real-time and translated into “create” or “update” actions performed by the Integration Adapter for AWS against the appropriate AWS account.
Inbound transactions from AWS to DXC are schedule-driven. New or updated cases in AWS Support Center are discovered based on a polling cycle, and are translated into “create” or “update” actions performed by the Platform-DXC Incident Capability inside ConnectNow. The polling cycle is set at a five-minute interval.
New Workflow Process
The figures below provide a comparison of the previous and current processes. In the original process, note multiple manual steps (creating, resolving, closing tickets) and lack of integrated reporting against the SLA.
Figure 4 shows the original unidirectional automated communication (AWS notifications picked up by eBonding, but not the reverse), which meant that work completed by DXC had to be communicated to AWS Support separately. This could lead to delays in resolution, while waiting on updates for troubleshooting and resolution.
Figure 4 – Original Incident Management workflow (manual).
The new process automates creating, updating, and closing tickets based on the status provided by AWS or the DXC CloudOps team. Figure 5 shows the new incident management workflow, including automated ticketing process, as well as bidirectional communication between the teams.
Automating updates allows for services teams on both sides to quickly see the status of a ticket as well as next steps in the system. In addition, automatically closing tickets at resolution eliminates a manual process that adds no business value, but can create reporting issues if a ticket is accidentally left open.
Figure 5 – New Incident Management workflow (automated).
Outcomes and Rewards
After completing this build in late 2020, DXC has applied this ServiceNow automation in daily operations. Through the first half of 2021, there were an average of 40 cases per month, across all severities.
The automated interaction between AWS Support teams and the CloudOps engineer from DXC has helped with greater awareness of issues, regular updates on the tickets, and more accurate resolution estimates. All of the tickets this year have been resolved within the service level agreement (SLA), and the average resolution time is under 24 hours across all severities.
This new platform has led to quicker communication, and easier access to AWS technical expertise, combining for faster resolution for our mutual clients.
Conclusion
The cloud provides opportunities for businesses to be nimbler in how they interact with both customers and service partners. Using cloud best practices allows for faster innovation, and lowers risk when experiments fail, due the ease of spinning up low cost environments.
Automating processes can eliminate steps that do not add value (such as closing out tickets), which benefits the company by lowering the risk of accidental omissions, and can expedite the most important tasks (like troubleshooting, communication).
A simple challenge of “how can we make an old process new again?” led to DXC leveraging best practices, innovating in-house, and greater customer service.
Interested in integrating your ServiceNow environment with AWS Support, discussing how to automate internal support processes, or becoming more agile using the cloud? Learn more by contacting your AWS account executive and AWS – DXC partner team representative.
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DXC Technology – AWS Partner Spotlight
DXC Technology is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and MSP that understands the complexities of migrating workloads to AWS in large-scale environments, and the skills needed for success.
*To review an AWS Partner, you must be a customer that has worked with them directly on a project.
Aruba and AWS Enhance Branch-to-Cloud Connectivity Performance with AWS Transit Gateway Connect
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By Samuel Pérez Buñuel, Sr. Solution Architect – Aruba
The Aruba SD-Branch solution treats public hosted cloud environments as a managed node in the SD-WAN overlay network, as we described in a previous blog post.
This is done in an automated fashion, orchestrating the complete lifecycle of bringing up an Aruba Virtual Gateway in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), connecting it to all of the relevant resources and even managing high availability for redundancy within or across AWS Availability Zones (AZs).
Bringing the SD-WAN into the public cloud environment has clear benefits:
Single pane of glass for the entire SD-WAN environment (and even the LAN environment in the case of SD-Branch).
End-to-end route and tunnel orchestration (integrated as part of Aruba Central).
Quality of experience mechanisms such as Forward Error Correction (FEC) or Dynamic Path Steering (DPS).
At the same time, AWS Transit Gateway simplifies the connectivity across multiple VPCs, putting an end to complex peering relationships.
With the introduction of the AWS Transit Gateway Connect attachment type, there’s now a native way to connect the SD-WAN and VPC environments.
Customer benefits when using SD-Branch and AWS Transit Gateway Connect are:
Enhanced performance with up to 20Gbps per Transit Gateway Connect VPC.
Increased security, reducing unnecessary exposure of the Transit Gateway to internet traffic.
WAN communications simplification, through orchestrated SD-WAN routing and tunnels as an integral part of the SD-Branch solution.
Scalable dynamic routing between cloud and SD-WAN environments.
Complete visibility from the network edge (and even the end user) to the cloud.
In this post, we’ll go through all of the technical details involved in integrating the Aruba SD-Branch solution with AWS Transit Gateway Connect.
Aruba SD-Branch
Aruba, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is a global leader in secure, intelligent edge-to-cloud networking solutions. Aruba uses a cloud-native approach to help each customer with all aspects of wired, wireless LAN, and WAN. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner.
The SD-Branch solution is part of Aruba’s Edge Services Platform (ESP), a key evolution of end-to-end network architecture, especially when it comes to secure edge-to-cloud connectivity.
ESP provides a unified infrastructure with centralized management that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for improved operational experience. This helps customers enable a Zero Trust security policy on their existing infrastructure.
Figure 1 – Aruba ESP architecture.
Multi-VPC Architecture Overview
Aruba SD-Branch has been able to integrate with the AWS Transit Gateway (TGW) since its introduction by means of establishing a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering over IPsec tunnels established between the Aruba Virtual Gateways (Aruba vGWs) and TGWs.
With the Transit Gateway Connect capability, IPsec tunnels are no longer required and much higher performance (up to 20Gbps per “Connect VPC”) can be achieved. This allows for more robust security as internet-facing interfaces in the Transit Gateway are not needed.
Aruba vGWs are deployed inside a dedicated Amazon VPC labeled as the “Connect VPC.” This is attached to the Transit Gateway through a “Connect” attachment, which enables and secures the communications between the Aruba vGWs and AWS Transit Gateways.
The last step is establishing generic routing encapsulation (GRE) tunnels between the Aruba vGWs and Transit Gateway, and exchanging routing information using BGP. This effectively connects the SD-WAN and VPC environments with a straightforward mechanism.
Figure 3 – Transit Gateway Connect and SD-Branch vGW integration.
Dynamic Routing Between SD-WAN and Cloud
As mentioned, the communication between the AWS Transit Gateway and Aruba vGWs (and ultimately the SD-WAN network) is established by bringing up GRE tunnels between the Transit Gateway and Aruba vGWs.
Once the tunnels are up, BGP sessions are established and routing information is exchanged between the cloud and SD-WAN environments.
Figure 4 – Dynamic routing between SD-WAN and cloud.
When peering with the Transit Gateway, failover is handled by leveraging traditional routing mechanisms. Both Aruba vGWs advertise the same routing prefixes to the TGW. However, to ensure symmetric communication flow, the secondary Aruba vGW should advertise routes that look less preferable to the TGW.
While both internal and external BGP are supported, eBGP is recommended as it allows the use of automatic AS_PATH prepending to influence the routing decisions of the Transit Gateway. Advertising a longer AS_PATH from the secondary Aruba vGW ensures the Transit Gateway chooses the one advertised by the primary Aruba vGW as the best path.
When building an SD-WAN topology with Aruba SD-Branch, the Orchestrator allows for a simple mechanism to establish the preference across nodes advertising the same prefixes.
Figure 5 – SD-WAN DC-Preference.
Once this DC-Preference has been set, Aruba SD-Branch helps Aruba vGWs automatically translate the SD-WAN routing costs (lower for the VPCs higher in the DC-Preference) into the corresponding BGP routing cost.
When eBGP is used between Aruba vGWs and the Transit Gateway, the Aruba vGWs translate the SD-WAN overlay routing cost into BGP metrics by prepending their own Autonomous System incrementally; for example:
An Overlay cost of 10 is translated to AS-Path prepend = 0
An Overlay cost of 20 is translated to AS-Path prepend = 1
An Overlay cost of 30 is translated to AS-Path prepend = 2
Additional incremental Overlay cost continue to result in incremental AS-Path prepend.
Figure 6 – Dynamic routing in normal and failover situations.
End-to-End Visibility
One key reason to bring SD-WAN nodes into the cloud environment is to have unified visibility of the WAN environment.
In the case of Aruba SD-Branch, that visibility is extended to the entire branch network, including LAN network elements such as Switches and Access Points, as well as a full monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting for all client devices.
Figure 7 – End-to-end visibility of LAN and WAN in Aruba Central.
The demarcation point is the connection between the Aruba vGWs and the Transit Gateway, where routes get redistributed from SD-WAN into BGP (and into the Transit Gateway).
The Aruba Central portal provides easy access to details such as how the Aruba vGWs are exchanging route prefixes with the Transit Gateway.
Figure 8 – Route exchange between vGW and AWS Transit Gateway.
This information complements what is available in the AWS console. The dynamic routing information can be visualized.
Figure 9 – AWS Transit Gateway dynamic routing.
The topology for this particular deployment can be visualized.
Figure 10 – AWS Transit Gateway Network Manager.
Summary
The combination of Aruba SD-Branch with AWS Transit Gateway Connect provides a simple, orchestrated way to address edge-to-cloud communications.
Users can be located at a headend site, smaller branch site, or in a microbranch like a teleworker or SoHo environment. They can even be accessing their corporate network through a VPN client. Likewise, applications can be located in private data centers or public cloud. This design provides a consistent set of features and functionality for network access with complete independence of where the user may be coming from.
Aruba’s SD-Branch solution enhances the benefits of integrating with AWS, as it turns the public hosted cloud environment into a managed node in the SD-WAN overlay network. Aruba vGWs can scale to terminate thousands of IPsec VPN tunnels from all sorts of remote locations. This makes it easy for your locations to directly access hosted workloads on AWS.
Aruba vGWs simplifies the simpler environments where all workloads are located in a single VPC, while also addressing the more complex scenarios by integrating with the Transit Gateway. This enables robust, high-performance communications between the SD-WAN and cloud environment.
The content and opinions in this blog are those of the third-party author and AWS is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this post.
How to Support Incident Management by Reducing Alarm Fatigue with Amazon DevOps Guru
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By Brayan Marin, DevOps Engineer – Triumph By Nikunj Vaidya, Solutions Architect – AWS
Triumph
As businesses continue to build faster and more scalable systems, the need to increase reliability is constantly on the forefront of your stakeholders’ minds.
As a result, many monitoring tools are loaded onto an environment, increasing alarm noise but never actually identifying the root issue.
With Amazon DevOps Guru, you can take advantage of a fully managed service that cuts down on alarm noise. You can offload administrative tasks with operational issues quickly, and DevOps Guru applies machine learning (ML) to analyze operational data, application metrics, and events to identify anomalous behavior.
This post covers how Triumph Technology Solutions, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and dedicated provider of AWS-centered cloud services, got the most out of DevOps Guru by integrating it with PagerDuty, an incident management platform that provides alerts, automatic escalations, and on-call scheduling for your team.
This integration allowed Triumph to reduce alarm noise and better pinpoint the root cause of issues for their customer before they caused outages.
Customer Story: Greenworks Tools
Greenworks Tools, an industry leader and ecommerce retailer for battery-powered outdoor power tools, was facing issues with too many alarms and noise in their system prior to enrolling in Triumph’s managed services program.
On average, they were spending 1-2 hours trying to get to the root cause due to too much noise from priority alarms they were receiving. To solve that problem, Triumph’s managed services team chose Amazon DevOps Guru which leveraged machine learning (ML) models to help surface critical issues before they cause severe issues or outages.
By using DevOps Guru, which would only send the identified critical alerts directly to the Triumph managed services team via PagerDuty, Greenworks Tools saved on average 1.5 observability that were reallocated to higher priority tasks.
“DevOps Guru was very beneficial to our incident response. It provided useful insights we previously didn’t have, and it helped reduce our response time to find a root-cause of an issue by an hour on average,” says Eric D., Sr. IT Manager at Greenworks Tools.
Getting Started with Amazon DevOps Guru
In this section, we’ll walk through how Triumph set up DevOps Guru and integrated it with PagerDuty for the customer.
Triumph began by setting up Amazon DevOps Guru. It’s important to note that DevOps Guru is a regional service, so in the Getting Started sequence you can choose to analyze all resources in your selected region or specify them individually.
In this case, Triumph chose to go with the entire region. Once you select Enable in the Getting Started sequence, you’ll be able to see all of the resources analyzed in a dashboard.
Figure 1 – DevOps Guru dashboard.
If you go to Insights, you can see a previous alert that was closed. Instead of digging through many small alerts regarding target response time, DevOps Guru let Triumph know directly that something within the stack was unhealthy.
Figure 2 – DevOps Guru insight summary.
This reduced the amount of time it took by directing Triumph right to the stack to let the team know what was unhealthy so they could fix the latency issues.
Setting Up Fast and Reliable Incident Response
The native DevOps Guru integration with PagerDuty allowed Triumph to receive direct alerts quickly and reliably. With this integration, Triumph connected an escalation policy with DevOps Guru and had a staff member from the managed services team be the first responder any time an alert is sent out.
To set up fast and reliable incident response, go to Settings in DevOps Guru and notice you can be alerted via Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS). In our example, this step allowed Triumph to integrate with PagerDuty.
Setting Up an Amazon SNS Topic
In the AWS Management Console, go to Amazon SNS to create the topic to integrate with the PagerDuty URL generated in the previous step. For Triumph, SNS relays notifications directly to PagerDuty and provides various contact options to the team.
All they needed to do is create a Topic, name it appropriately (TT-Managed-Service-Security-PagerDuty-Alerts), create a Subscription, and attach the integration URL. Finally, they added it to the Topic that was just created.
Figure 3 – SNS subscription.
Back in Settings, Triumph added the SNS topic that was just created. Now, when DevOps Guru sends out an alert, Triumph will be able to be the first responder with a clear remediation plan set out by DevOps Guru.
Figure 4 – DevOps Guru settings.
Incident Response Moving Forward
To demonstrate how DevOps Guru helps cut time on incident response, let’s look to another recent alert triggered by the service.
Figure 5 – DevOps Guru insight details.
Immediately upon arrival, Triumph noticed it had aggregated multiple alarms regarding 5xx count errors and that the Elastic Load Balancer is throwing out errors.
This prompted an investigation where Triumph noticed one of the target groups registered an unhealthy host, causing the load balancer to return some errors.
By being led directly to the root cause, Triumph terminated the unhealthy host quickly. This helps reduce the time spent troubleshooting the application to determine where these errors are coming from and frees up more time.
Conclusion
Triumph Technology Solutions helps customers like Greenworks Tools make their transition into the cloud easy, and provides comprehensive monitoring solutions with managed services to ensure they work soundly without having to worry.
With this Amazon DevOps Guru solution in place for Triumph’s customers, they are no longer responding to active incidents rather being proactive to prevent any actual incidents. This leads to a more reliable and fault tolerant environment for Triumph’s customers.
To learn more, please contact Triumph for your DevOps needs.
Triumph is an AWS Competency Partner and dedicated provider of AWS-centered cloud services, providing migrations, DevOps, application optimization, machine learning, and data analytics services to SMEs and enterprises.
*To review an AWS Partner, you must be a customer that has worked with them directly on a project.
New AWS Partner Program Launches and Updates Announced at re:Invent 2021
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Thank you for joining us in Las Vegas for AWS re:Invent 2021. We hope you are enjoying all of the educational content and big announcements!
If you missed anything this week or just want to recap, we have rounded up the most relevant launches, program updates, and educational content available for the AWS Partner community.
Reminder:Virtual options for re:Invent breakout sessions will be available December 6-10. Register here >>
Watch the AWS Partner Keynote
The annual Global Partner Summit offers content and activities designed specifically for AWS Partners. Our focus is on the role AWS Partners play for customers and how various AWS Partner Network (APN) programs can help you differentiate your business and reach new customers faster.
The AWS Partner Keynote was delivered on November 29 and featured Doug Yeum, Head of Global Partner Organization; Sandy Carter, AWS VP, Global Public Sector Partners and Programs; and Stephen Orban, General Manager of AWS Marketplace and Control Services. Watch it here or on YouTube!
Launches and AWS Partner Program Updates
During AWS re:Invent 2021, we announced a host of new AWS Partner programs and updates that you can learn more about below.
NEW! AWS Partner Paths: A New Way to Accelerate Engagement with AWS
AWS Partner Paths are a flexible way to engage with AWS, providing a curated journey through partner resources, benefits, and programs while simplifying the engagement model for partners, expanding access to benefits, and providing a more intuitive and streamlined experience.
AWS Partner Paths replace our technology and consulting partner type models—evolving to an offering type model. Partners can enroll in one or multiple Paths based on their unique customer offerings.
NEW! AI for Data Analytics (AIDA) Partner Solutions
We are excited to introduce AI for data analytics (AIDA) partner solutions which embed predictive analytics into mainstream analytics workspaces. These AI/ML solutions from AWS Partners have interfaces and integrations that help bring predictive analytics into the normal workflow of business experts.
AWS AIDA includes partner solutions from Amplitude, Anaplan, Causality Link, Domo, Exasol, InterWorks, Pegasystems, Provectus, Qlik, Snowflake, Tableau, TIBCO, and Workato.
AWS Graviton processors are custom-built to enable the best price performance for workloads in Amazon EC2. As customers adopt AWS Graviton-based EC2 instances, they need the right software solutions to help integrate, deploy, monitor, and secure their Linux-based and containerized workloads.
We are excited to announce the new AWS Graviton Ready Program, part of the AWS Service Ready Program which validates software products built by AWS Partners that integrate with specific services such as AWS Graviton.
AWS is committed to supporting the global energy industry in safely meeting the energy demands of the world today, while accelerating the industry’s transition to a more balanced and sustainable energy future.
The new AWS Energy Competency Program differentiates highly specialized partners who have demonstrated technical expertise and repeat customer success. These AWS Partners enable energy producers to build and operate assets efficiently and safely, while working to transition to a lower carbon world.
NEW! Introducing AWS Migration and Modernization Competency Partners
Application modernization is an important and growing migration strategy for many businesses. To make it easier for AWS customers to find partners with validated migration and modernization software offerings, we are excited to announce the AWS Migration and Modernization Competency.
This designation features AWS Partners that have validated expertise developing and implementing solutions for customers across key areas, including business case analysis and application mobility.
NEW! Accelerate Mainframe-to-Cloud with AWS Mainframe Modernization and AWS Partners
We are excited to launch the AWS Mainframe Modernization service, a unique platform for mainframe migration and modernization allowing customers and partners to plan, migrate, modernize, and run their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed development and execution environment on AWS.
The service enables two proven and popular patterns—replatforming and automated refactoring—and has the goal of mitigating the risks and accelerating mainframe-to-cloud projects. Learn more about AWS Partner offerings from Accenture, Advanced, Astadia, Atos, Capgemini, Cognizant, Deloitte, DXC Technology, HCL Technologies, Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), and Wipro.
NEW! AWS GameDay Benefits Help Partners Build Cloud Skills and Engage with AWS Experts
AWS GameDay is a collaborative learning exercise that tests skills in implementing AWS solutions to solve real-world problems in a gamified, risk-free environment. We’re excited to introduce new AWS GameDay benefits for AWS Partners in several of our differentiation programs: AWS Service Delivery, AWS Service Ready, AWS Competency, and AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP).
AWS GameDay League is made up of teams from global partner companies who compete against each other in hands-on technical challenges to build new cloud skills capabilities and have fun while doing so. AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK) gives partners the ability to integrate their products with real-world scenarios to be leveraged as repeatable, lead-generating events with customers.
Each year, we honor members of the AWS Partner Network who are leaders in the channel and play key roles in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on AWS. Announced throughout the year, AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of born-in-the-cloud and traditional consulting and ISV partners whose business models have embraced specialization and collaboration.
Please join us in congratulating these leading AWS Partners for their 2021 success!
The APN Ambassador Program is a vibrant worldwide community of technical experts from AWS Partners. They are prominent leaders who are passionate about sharing their AWS technical expertise, authoring blogs and whitepapers, creating and delivering public presentations, and contributing to open source projects. We are proud to recognize some of the top 2021 APN Ambassadors from across the world.
Congratulations to all of our awesome APN Ambassadors!
What does it take to build and run a successful SaaS business on AWS? This is a question the AWS SaaS Factory team gets often during our conversations with AWS Partners and customers who are moving to SaaS. While there is no single formula, we have been observing some common patterns and strategies that help organizations maximize SaaS success.
In a recent webinar series, AWS SaaS Factory demystified some of the common patterns and strategies with AWS Partners Druva, NetWise, Stripe, Crowdstike, and Snowflake.
Data and Analytics Partners Scale Their Business with AWS Partner Differentiation Programs
In the data and analytics world, many customers have learned how expert AWS Partners can help them rethink and modernize their data architectures, or migrate and manage data warehouses, data-driven applications, and governed data lakes on AWS. To set your data and analytics business apart, it’s important to leverage the AWS Partner Network and our various differentiation programs.
Whether you are just beginning to build or expand your AWS-based business, we offer programs to help you succeed.
AWS Partner Differentiation Programs Help Customers Find the Right Partner for the Right Job
With more than 100,000 AWS Partners across the globe, how do you find the right partner for the right job? AWS Partner Network differentiation programs help customers find a short list of trusted cloud partners with diverse expertise.
Learn about the four APN programs that provide technical validation based on AWS services, workloads, use cases, industries, and managed services: Service Delivery, Service Ready, Competency, and Managed Service Provider (MSP).
Announcing the AWS Partner Network’s Regional EMEA 2021 Partners of the Year
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Each year, we honor members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) who are leaders in the channel and play key roles in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS Partners are dedicated to helping customers build, market, and sell their offerings so they can grow successful cloud businesses.
AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of born-in-the-cloud and traditional consulting and ISV partners whose business models have embraced specialization and collaboration.
Please join us in congratulating these leading AWS Partners for their success!
DoiT International provides intelligent technology, multi-cloud expertise, and unlimited advisory, technical, and cloud engineering support for digital-native companies. An AWS Advanced Partner and MSP, DoiT works with AWS to help customers take full advantage of AWS and realise valuable improvements to performance, scalability, database storage, and availability, content delivery, and more.
Cloudreach is a leading independent cloud services company and strategic partner for AWS, helping enterprises win competitive advantage through successful cloud transformation. With more than 10 years of cloud-native experience, Cloudreach has built a depth and breadth of expertise in cloud technologies and their application to business. Cloudreach, an AWS Premier Partner with 10 Competencies and 600+ AWS Certifications, has helped deliver hundreds of AWS migration and modernization projects for customers.
Accenture is a leading, global professional services company that provides an end-to-end solution to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. As a committed AWS Partner for over 14 years, Accenture has more than 25,000 AWS Cloud technologists, holds more than 17,000 AWS Certifications, and has a dedicated AWS Centre of Excellence.
Peak unites engineers, data science teams, and commercial decision makers on a single platform to deliver value across a business and transform how business decisions are made. Peak helps customers make commercial decisions using AI, and their “Decision Intelligence” platform is built entirely on AWS and makes AI-driven decision making accessible for companies across the world.
Bytes is one of the fastest-growing AWS Partners globally. For customers, they look for migration and optimisation opportunities everywhere—not just within the public cloud. That means customers can plan an effective cloud strategy whilst ensuring continuous optimisation, therefore maintaining harmony with the rest of their IT estates and business needs. Bytes focuses on ensuring customers receive the highest levels of service and are able to take advantage of any funding programmes to help them on their AWS journey.
AWS Well-Architected Review Partner of the Year – UKI
Rebura is one of the UK’s fastest-growing AWS service providers and focuses purely on using AWS technologies to help customers increase productivity, scalability, cost efficiency, and security. Rebura has invested heavily in the Well-Architected Framework and review process to add value and support their customers.
With a legacy of over 40 years in the contact centre environment, VoiceFoundry provides customized contact centre solutions that empower customers to deliver intelligent and dynamic customer experiences across all channels, leveraging AWS. VoiceFoundry specializes in the design, delivery, and support of Amazon Connect, a cloud-based enterprise contact centre solution used globally.
Fujitsu provides innovative IT services and products globally to over 180 countries in 40 languages through their Global Delivery Centres. Fujitsu has a trusted heritage in managing the complex for customers. Fujitsu co-creates with AWS and customers to drive new value from cutting-edge digital technologies. Fujitsu and AWS’s partnership is constantly evolving and developing to provide industry-leading solutions for customers.
Capgemini is at the forefront of innovation and is well positioned to address the entire breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of digital, data, and cloud in 40+ countries. This year, Capgemini and AWS collaborated closely to help the UK Government respond at pace to COVID-19, the UK’s exit from the EU, and national policy changes. Capgemini has also leveraged AWS Partner investments for the benefit of clients.
Ingram Micro offers a full range of benefits around sales and technical enablement, practice development, and business and financial support. Services include augmented professional services, Well-Architected reviews, complementary CloudCheckr billing platform, operational back office and billing support, Reserved Instance optimization, creative financing options, GTM support, and Immersion Days. Ingram Micro’s partnership with AWS has centred on strong collaboration, as well as developing tools and services to help partners seize the opportunity for growth.
Swisscom is Switzerland’s leading telecommunications, ICT, and managed services provider with a full-fledged service offering. They are a trustworthy, inspiring Swiss local partner with comprehensive cloud transformation expertise. Swisscom offers robust expertise ranging from the design, implementation, migration, and maintenance of cloud solutions and a broad technology offer.
tecRacer is a consulting, managed services, and training company 100% dedicated to the AWS platform. As a Premier Consulting Partner, tecRacer helps customers with migrations, design reviews, and big data projects, while as an authorized AWS Training Partner they offer all AWS courses. As an audited AWS MSP, tecRacer helps our customers to operate their services 24×7.
Lemongrass is a software-enabled services provider, synonymous with SAP on AWS, focused on delivering superior, highly automated operate services, accelerating growth, and profitability with robust, reusable migration pattern assets. Lemongrass specializes in the implementation, migration, operation, innovation, and automation of SAP on AWS. The company is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner.
Exasol delivers a fast analytics database and utilizes this speed to make business intelligence solutions faster and easier to use, unify disparate data sources, and deliver machine learning prediction and automation directly in the database. Exasol can be deployed where it works best for the customer: on premises, in the cloud, or both (hybrid).
AWS Technology Partner Transformation of the Year – DACH
Tivian has been a leader in the enterprise feedback software industry for over 20 years. In 2017, they started hosting their U.S. customer base on AWS. In 2020, they decided to migrate their EU-based customers to AWS as well, consolidating IT workloads. They also started a company transformation to a modern era software provider and have transitioned to a Kubernetes architecture while exploring DevOps. Tivian works closely with AWS technical teams and executive business stakeholders to learn and exchange on agility and innovation best practices.
Capgemini is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and is at the forefront of innovation to address the breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of cloud, digital, and platforms. With eight AWS Competencies, 4,600+ AWS Certifications in 40+ countries, more than 7,500 successful cloud projects, and 25 active customer references together with AWS, Capgemini can help you define your requirements, create network architecture and an execution plan, and build cloud-native solutions on AWS.
Elmec is an IT services provider that supports more than 1,000 companies in 100 countries on the path to digitalization since 1971. They supply, design, implement, and manage your IT infrastructure and workplace devices, with 470 technicians (680 employees), a Tier IV data centre, and more than 2,000 technical certifications (ITIL, DevOps, Prince 2).
Reply is a leading, modern consulting firm providing end-to-end solutions on AWS. AirWalk Reply, Comsysto Reply, Data Reply, Sense Reply, and Storm Reply are the companies of Reply Group, specialized on AWS as a whole process from cloud advisory to migration and managed services, with a focus on cloud-native development, IoT, big data, and ML.
AWS Data and Analytics Competency Partner of the Year – Italy
With an ever-growing team of certified AWS experts, beSharp has achieved several Competencies and is a member of the Well-Architected and Solution Provider programs. From cloud migrations to cloud-native development, from DevOps to managed services with 24/7 support, beSharp takes care of every aspect of cloud transformation projects, from strategy to delivery, and operations.
Horsa is a leading ICT Group experienced in designing, implementing, and managing corporate IT solutions. Horsa is a system and solution integrator with 20+ years of experience delivering excellence in ERP, CRM, business analytics, and other technologies. Horsa invests in highly innovative technologies such as big data, IoT, cloud, predictive analytics.
VAR Group – zero12 is an innovation company that designs and develops cutting-edge software to drive customers’ digital transformation through Agile methodologies and continuous delivery. VAR Group helps customers to design ideas, create products, and extract value from data in any commercial area like retail, manufacturing, luxury, fashion, sports, and more.
With advanced observability, AI, and complete automation, Dynatrace’s all-in-one platform provides answers, not just data, about the performance of applications, the underlying infrastructure, and the experience of all users.
AWS Public Sector Consulting Partner of the Year – Italy
AlmavivA is synonymous with technological innovation. Proven experience, unique skills, ongoing research, and in-depth knowledge of a range of public and private market sectors are what make it the leading Italian group in information and communications technology.
Accenture is a leading, global professional services company that provides an end-to-end solution to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. As a committed AWS Partner for over 14 years, Accenture has more than 25,000 AWS Cloud technologists, holds more than 17,000 AWS Certifications, and has a dedicated AWS Centre of Excellence.
Capgemini is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and is at the forefront of innovation to address the breadth of clients’ opportunities in the evolving world of cloud, digital, and platforms. With eight AWS Competencies, 4,600+ AWS Certifications in 40+ countries, more than 7,500 successful cloud projects, and 25 active customer references together with AWS, Capgemini can help you define your requirements, create network architecture and an execution plan, and build cloud-native solutions on AWS.
Orange Business Services (OBS) is the first AWS Partner in France to have signed a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to help enterprises accelerate their digital transformation in the areas of modernization and migration, data analytics, AI/ML, and security. With around around 300 AWS-Certified staff, Orange Business Services is an AWS Advanced Partner, AWS Managed Service Provider (through their acquisition Basefarm), and AWS Direct Connect Service Delivery.
Devoteam Revolve is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and offers customers a wide range of services on AWS, including migration, data, and machine learning, as well as serverless architecture and security. Their highly-skilled experts work in a cocreation mindset with customers to develop the cloud adoption that allows this transformation, including large migration projects on AWS.
AWS Data and Analytics Partner of the Year – France
Lucy in the Cloud by Micropole has served customers for over 35 years in the successful implementation of their data and analytics projects. Micropole started partnering with AWS in 2015, creating a strong AWS expertise around big data and machine learning. In 2020, a dedicated AWS entity was created called “Lucy in the Cloud,” transversal to Micropole Group, and awarded the AWS Data and Analytics Competency.
Created in 1999, Teamwork is specialized in consulting, integrating, and outsourcing of SAP solutions, business consulting, data and analytics, and technology platforms. In 2017, they acquired Corexpert, an AWS pure player focused on building cloud-native applications, migrating existing applications to AWS, and operating as a next-gen AWS MSP. This unique complementarity allowed Teamwork to strengthen its position in the cloud computing market mainly in France and Europe. It supports both major international accounts and SMEs and is located in 17 international locations.
Snowflake has reinvented the data warehouse, building a new enterprise-class SQL data warehouse designed from the ground up for the cloud and today’s data. Snowflake’s patent-pending architecture delivers on-demand elasticity, scalability, and flexibility to AWS customers that makes it possible to bring together all data, workloads, and users in one system. Built on AWS, driven on AWS, Snowflake delivers the data cloud on AWS, taking customers to new frontiers.
With a turnover of € 413 million and over 3,200 employees, NRB Group is one of the main Belgian players in the ICT sector with a European vocation. NRB’s mission is to provide end-to-end IT solutions and services through a close and long-term partnership with public and private sector clients to simplify technological, economic, and digital transformation. Throughout 2021, NRB has aligned their strategy to building an AWS partnership and invested in a strong footprint with AWS in Belgium, achieving Solution Provider Program status, starting migration engagements, hosting sales and industry enablement and Immersion Days, and launching the first joint customer reference AWS-NRB-Ethias.
AWS Consulting Partner of the Year – Benelux AWS (MAP) Migration Partner of the Year – Benelux
Oblivion provides services to implement, accelerate, and manage your AWS Cloud strategy. As a Premier Consulting Partner, Oblivion delivers high-quality consultancy for migrations, workloads, security, automation, and cost management for AWS services. They offer training and support for companies who wish to adopt the AWS Cloud or simply need a pragmatic partner for their complex cloud challenges.
AWS Well-Architected Review Partner of the Year – Benelux
HeleCloud is a cloud-native AWS Premier Consulting Partner, founded in 2016 in the UK. HeleCloud develops high-performance, resilient, secure, compliant, and cost-effective solutions for customers using a variety of cloud services from AWS. HeleCloud has led an exponential growth in 2021 in developing their partnership with AWS in Benelux. A key focus with AWS SMB and Greenfield in Benelux in 2021 has been to leverage the Well-Architected Framework in target prospects, while setting up an innovative concept with AWS as a Well-Architected Review PoC.
Managed services and full cloud adoption. Whether you’re looking for a lightning-quick launch into the cloud with managed services, or aim to fully implement cloud management principles into your own organization, Sentia is your partner of choice.
Cambrian Technologies supports and drives digital transformation for customers, creating value to customers by driving change, consulting, and implementing AWS services. Cambrian’s experienced team provides a unique view on the capabilities of AWS and challenges of customers.
Arηs Group are a group of 13 entities with a differentiation model in delivery approach: fixed service pricing, professional services, cloud migration services, custom application development, managed service provider, and systems integration. With aa presence in Belgium, Luxembourg, Greece, Italy, and Portugal, Arηs has showcased an exponential growth in 2021 with AWS in the areas of managed services, big data and analytics, batch processing, business intelligence, and more. Arηs Group has grown in both public sector and commercial segments, achieving the Well-Architected designation and Migration Competency.
Atea is a leading provider of IT infrastructure solutions in the Nordic and Baltic region, with NOK 37 billion in revenue and more than 7,500 employees. Atea is present in 85 cities in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
As an AWS MSP, Migration, DevOps, and Well-Architected Partner, Knowit helps design and implement your cloud journey in an efficient and flexible manner. Their skilled and AWS-Certified cloud experts take care of your AWS workloads. Knowit’s solutions cover the whole cloud journey, from business transformation and migrations to cloud-native DevOps teams and 24/7 managed cloud apps operations.
Snowflake has reinvented the data warehouse, building a new enterprise-class SQL data warehouse designed from the ground up for the cloud and today’s data. Snowflake’s patent-pending architecture delivers on-demand elasticity, scalability, and flexibility to AWS customers that makes it possible to bring together all data, workloads, and users in one system. Built on AWS, driven on AWS, Snowflake delivers the data cloud on AWS, taking customers to new frontiers.
Nordcloud is a European leader in cloud application modernisation, development, migration, managed services, and training. Clients say working with Nordcloud is like having a compass for their cloud journey–you have cloud-native experts guiding best practice, pre-empting pitfalls, providing essential technical support, and helping you achieve better, faster results.
Pearl is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with 10+ years of SAP consulting expertise. As an AWS SAP Competency Partner, Pearl has demonstrated technical proficiency and proven success in SAP implementation, migration, and innovation. No matter what SAP system you run or strategy you’d like to adopt, they have the experience, methods, and best practices to streamline your migration or transformation.
With years of vast professional experience, Terasky’s professionals assist to modernize and optimize customers’ computing environment and securing their business investments by designing, deploying, and supporting complex IT legacy and cloud architectures and solutions. Terasky is a leader in DevOps activities, planning, design, implementation, and migration of systems, from monolith structures to microservices.
CloudZone is a leading AWS solution provider in Israel. With 9+ years of experience with AWS, CloudZone provides customers with end-to-end solutions including qualified DevOps engineers and 24/7 managed services. As a Premier Consulting Partner, CloudZone is committed that customers will adopt the most advanced technologies focusing on innovation on one hand and cost reduction on the other.
As an AWS Premier Consulting and audited MSP Partner, AllCloud accelerates innovation and helps organizations fully unlock the value received from cloud technology. Supported by a robust ecosystem of technology partners, proven methodologies, and well-documented best practices, AllCloud elevates its customers by achieving operational excellence on the cloud, at every milestone of their journey.
Automat-IT is “the DevOps company” and a leading provider of DevOps and cloud services with dozens of customers in various fields such as finance, insurance, and technology. Their customers are able to plan and execute DevOps best practices of automation and self-service, implement and manage Kubernetes, save on budgets, overcome IT complexity, and deliver on time to market.
Comm-IT provides customers a one-stop-shop with end-to-end solutions and services. Their unique advantage provide a totally integrated solution from a single development house. Comm-IT leads cloud solutions so customers can spend more time working on strategic initiatives to increase the bottom line.
NOS is the biggest communications and entertainment group in Portugal. It offers latest generation fixed and mobile phone, television, Internet, voice, and data solutions for all market segments. NOS is a leader in Pay TV, new generation broadband services, and in-cinema distribution. In the business segment, NOS is a sustainable alternative offering a broad portfolio of products and services with tailor-made solutions for each sector and for businesses of different sizes.
NTT DATA is your innovation partner anywhere around the world. Headquartered in Tokyo, with business operations in 42 countries, they put emphasis on long-term commitment and combine global reach and local intimacy to provide premier professional services, from consulting and system development to business IT outsourcing.
OutSystems makes it exceedingly easy for IT organizations to build, deploy, and manage enterprise-class web and mobile applications, helping IT deliver innovative business solutions fast. OutSystems is a platform-as-a-service solution that combines high-productivity application development, and change management for cloud, on-premises, or hybrid development and deployment.
With over 10,000 AWS accredited professionals, DXC understands the complexities of migrating workloads to AWS in large-scale environments, and the skills needed for success. DXC bridges the gap in migrating applications across traditional, private cloud, and AWS environments. They have established AWS-tailored roadmaps and processes for migration and for cloud-native apps for digital transformation.
Magic Beans delivers professional services to support companies in their digital transformation journey. They are totally focused on offering the best options and alternatives available in the global cloud services ecosystem. Because going to the cloud is more than adopting new technology, Magic Beans provides a wide range of expertise to set up and implement a digital transformation agenda for each business process. Their goal is to accelerate cloud adoption and maximize the benefits of the cloud paradigm shift for your business.
Hostersi is a long-standing AWS Consulting Partner and trusted advisor to customers in all matters of cloud computing. Hostersi specializes in IT services such as server solutions architecting, cloud computing implementation, DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, containers, and server management. Their expertise helps customers increase data security and operational capacities while significantly reducing cost and time of project implementation.
AWS Rising Star of the Year – CEE AWS Public Sector Partner of the Year – CEE
Altkom Software & Consulting is a group of skilled and certified AWS professionals who provide application development services and IT consulting to support clients in their business growth. Altkom team have helped clients design, develop, implement, and maintain software for many industries including insurance, banking, and telecommunication for over 20 years.
Blazeclan is amongst the world’s leading providers of public cloud services with a proven history of helping enterprises unlock the value of cloud computing. They provide customers across the globe with cloud advisory services, cloud migration, DevOps and automation, big data and analytics, cloud-native application development, and cloud managed services.
CloudHero is a growing team of certified cloud experts that help organisations strategize, develop, deploy, and manage their cloud infrastructure in order to accelerate companies’ digital transformation. CloudHero helps organisations break away from technical legacy and debt through Kubernetes development and support, development productivity consultancy, cloud-native architecture design, application deployment, and migration.
Blue Guava provides integrated technologies and digital frameworks that enable your content to seamlessly reach the right audience. Their years of experience in media streaming have revolutionized the way people view content at home, on the go, or at the office.
AWS Consulting Partner of the Year – MENA AWS Migration Partner of the Year – MENA
Zero&One is a flexible and dynamic group of experts in the fields of IT and cloud computing. The strength of their team lies in the expertise honed by over 15 years of technology success. Sharing their passion for the tech world along with expertise and dependable performance, Zero&One hopes to reach new frontiers while taking you forward because they believe that “Every Bit Counts!”
Bespin Global is a cloud-focused managed service provider that helps mid to large corporations adopt cloud IT. Bespin is organized in three groups: Professional Services provides cloud migration and consulting services; Managed Services offers 24×7 monitoring and ongoing optimization services; and Bespin Services Platform provides hybrid-cloud management SaaS product.
FORTE CLOUD offers the most important and trending technologies, starting from cloud computing and IoT to big data, analytics, and robotics solutions to cover the market needs and contribute to building the future of IT to customers and society.
Computer World has provided comprehensive end-to-end infrastructure, cloud, and business productivity solutions and services to organizations in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia for more than 36 years. They help organizations transform into dynamic businesses by value creation, inspiring and equipping individuals—everywhere they engage.
Deloitte is one of the largest professional services firms in the world and a leader in digital transformation strategy. Through a network of more than 330,000 professionals, industry specialists, and an ecosystem of alliances, Deloitte assists clients in turning complex business issues into opportunities for growth. Their market-leading teams help organizations transform in the digital era.
By using AWS from Vodacom, your business can benefit from access to state-of-the-art cloud expertise, as well as a single point of contact and billing from a world-class technology provider.
As South Africa’s first AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, Synthesis cloud transformation initiatives assist enterprises to become cloud-ready, successfully execute mass migrations, harness the benefits of big data analytics, and extract the cost savings and regulatory benefits of compliance. Synthesis is an independent, wholly-owned subsidiary of JSE-listed company, Capital Appreciation.
Lemongrass is a software-enabled services provider, synonymous with SAP on AWS, focused on delivering superior, highly automated operate services, accelerating growth, and profitability with robust, reusable migration pattern assets. Lemongrass specializes in the implementation, migration, operation, innovation, and automation of SAP on AWS. The company is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner.
BBD’s 900+ experienced IT professionals leverage world-class skills and in-depth domain knowledge to deliver the true power of cloud, drawing on DevOps and microservice principles to modernise environments on the cloud. BBD has offices in India, Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK.
Silicon Overdrive offers extensive AWS program knowledge and experience in driving customers’ environments, with a focus on achieving and maintaining data security safeguards and compliance. They are a registered Channel Reseller, accredited as AWS Consulting and AWS Public Sector Partners, and are able to assist with AWS funding and benefits.
Accenture is a leading, global professional services company that provides an end-to-end solution to migrate to and manage operations on AWS. As a committed AWS Partner for over 14 years, Accenture has more than 25,000 AWS Cloud technologists, holds more than 17,000 AWS Certifications, and has a dedicated AWS Centre of Excellence.
Sufle is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner that specializes in cloud, DevOps, DevSecOps, software development, and compliance services. They help businesses of all scales adapt, implement, and embrace next-gen tech practices through customized solution offerings, managed services, and trainings at every building block. Sufle brings years of experience and best practices together to enhance businesses.
Best Cloud For Me is an organization with the purpose of developing cloud-native technology. They operates globally in three separate verticals as professional service, artificial intelligence, and education/academy. Best Cloud For Me is and AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and provides services globally 24/7.
Etiya is a leading ISV providing customer experience-focused and AI-driven digital transformation with its product portfolio. Etiya aims to provide competitive advantage to customers by bringing agility and flexibility into their business.
Commencis helps leading brands grow and scale in digital, powered by big data, analytics, and cloud services. Commencis enable cloud transformation through aligning IT infrastructure to the business objectives. They provide end-to-end cloud services using extensive knowledge and more than 10 years of cloud transformation experience.
Runibex specialises in cloud migration and managed services. They are experts in full cloud and hybrid solutions, going beyond standard MSP services by building their own innovative solutions. Runibex’s SAP Hybris-based ticketing solution is featured in an AWS video and eBook, while their ecommerce platform is used by a major department store. Runibex works directly with customers and by collaborating with partners.
Kloia is a cloud and DevOps consultancy company with a focus on the digital transformation of the legacy infrastructures and practices. Their aim is always to be in the frontline, following up new practices and applying them wherever brings value.
LimonHost provides turn-key designs, solutions, applications, management, and maintenance services by following developing cloud technologies. Microsoft and Linux expert LimonHost staff offers 7/24 monitoring, support, and management services to valued customers.
Triangu helps organizations large and small transform and scale their business. From process improvements to creating new infrastructure, they are building the foundation for organizations to scale for success.
Softline offers a diverse portfolio of cloud computing services such as IaaS, SaaS, virtualization, collaboration, security, mobility through a choice of public cloud, private cloud, and hybrid cloud based on customers’ needs. They also offer licensing for a full range of software products. In addition, Softline provide services such as ITAM, consulting, outsourcing, technical support and others.
Digital workflows are disrupting each industry and define the future. With each organization having an ever-growing need for digital workflows, Creatio is excited to create a world where companies can own their automation with no-code and maximum degree of freedom.
SOFTPROM provides solutions for auto scaling websites and mobile applications, migration of CRM/ERP (1C/SAP) and office software (MeDoc, Jira). They also offer backup and disaster recovery, CI/CD and containers, desktop-as-a-service (VDI), IoT, and personalization.
Accelerate Your Mainframe-to-Cloud Journey with the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service and AWS Partners
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By Madhuri Susarla, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS By Paulo Coutinho, Sr. PSA GSI, Mainframe Modernization – AWS By Phil de Valence, Principal Product Manager for AWS Mainframe Modernization service
Increasingly, customers want to migrate their workloads off mainframe systems. By moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS), they can reduce technical debt and benefit from agility, elasticity, and nearly 75% cost savings.
With AWS, customers can modernize their mainframe applications to adopt new technology and move towards service-based architectures. This helps enterprises attract new talent with skills that are more available in the market.
Enterprises may lack the in-house expertise to design a cloud solution for mainframe workloads, however, which can result in risky, slow-moving projects always on the bleeding edge. To solve this problem, enterprises partner with Systems Integrators (SIs) that have experience in mainframe migration and modernization projects.
SIs use homegrown or third-party migration tools, or go completely manual. These approaches are fraught with complexities such as multiple tools that aren’t fully fit-for-purpose and can lead to significant custom development. Additionally, heavy-lifting such as designing for high availability, scalability, DevOps, and monitoring is undifferentiating and adds costs to the project.
All of this adds to the time and effort required for mainframe migration and modernization projects. Customers and SIs that are part of our AWS Partner Network (APN) have voiced this feedback and we listened.
We are excited to launch the AWS Mainframe Modernization service, a unique platform for mainframe migration and modernization allowing customers and partners to plan, migrate, modernize, and run their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed development and execution environment on AWS.
Introducing the AWS Mainframe Modernization Service
The AWS Mainframe Modernization service has the goal of mitigating the risks and accelerating mainframe-to-cloud projects. It enables two proven and popular patterns: replatforming and automated refactoring.
The service provides an integrated platform combining the appropriate tool-chains for each pattern. It offers Blu Age for those who want to adopt automated refactoring, and Micro Focus for replatforming. Both have a proven track record in mainframe migration and modernization, with the experience of numerous successful migrations in the past.
Customers and partners will have the ability of using the AWS Mainframe Modernization service during all phases of migration, from assessment and discovery to the development, build, and test phases. Once tested, the transformed mainframe workloads can be deployed to the service’s managed runtime environment.
The runtime environment is designed to be secure, highly-available, scalable, and managed by AWS. With the AWS Mainframe Modernization service, we offer an end-to-end path to mainframe migrations for SIs, starting with business case development.
AWS Partners can access the AWS Migration Portfolio Assessment for a rough order-of-magnitude assessment of costs for mainframe workloads on AWS.
Customers will benefit from the AWS Mainframe Modernization service’s pricing model because it enables pay-as-you-go, can stand-up environments in minutes, and implements DevOps with a CI/CD pipeline and AWS CloudWatch monitoring. This opens up endless possibilities for customers in how they can innovate using existing applications, and to SIs in how they serve customers with differentiating solutions.
AWS Partner Offerings
Using the AWS Mainframe Modernization service, partners developed solutions that offer accelerated cloud journeys to mainframe customers, beginning with discovery and assessment. These solutions offer industry-specific, prescriptive guidance on the use cases that can be adopted at different levels of maturity in a customer’s cloud journey.
Combined with the AWS Migration Acceleration Program for Mainframe (MAP), these solutions offer a proven, cost-effective, and tool-based mechanism to move mainframe workloads to the AWS Cloud.
“AWS Mainframe Modernization service helps to simplify moving and managing mainframe applications. Combining AWS Mainframe Modernization with Accenture’s extensive experience in mainframe application modernization and managing mainframe applications now provides a compelling package for clients to realize the agility, elasticity, and cost efficiency of AWS sooner.”
~ Chris Wegmann, Global Technology and Practice Lead at Accenture’s AWS Business Group
“AWS Mainframe Modernization service demonstrates the urgency for businesses to modernize mission-critical legacy applications to the cloud. As a founding member of the AWS Mainframe Migration Competency program, Advanced is excited to align its managed modernization services to this new platform, continuing our vital role in delivering successful modernization projects around AWS for our customers.”
~ Gordon Wilson, CEO at Advanced
Here is the offering from Advanced that’s based on the AWS Mainframe Modernization service.
“We are excited to be a part of the AWS Mainframe Modernization service launch. This initiative gives customers the ideal platform of choice when moving mainframe workloads to AWS. Astadia’s unique factory delivery model complements the AWS Mainframe Modernization service by enabling clients to migrate to AWS in unprecedented timeframes.”
~ Scott Silk, CEO at Astadia
Here is the offering from Astadia that’s based on the AWS Mainframe Modernization service.
“AWS Mainframe Modernization service enables Atos to adopt a cloud migration strategy that is tailored to meet customers’ business needs and modernization goals. These tailored strategies leverage AWS Cloud services to increase agility, lower costs, and accelerate mainframe modernization for our customers. Together, Atos and AWS are well equipped to plan, assess, build, and migrate mainframe workloads at scale.”
“To move at the speed required by business today, most of our mainframe-dependent customers have begun the path of modernization to the cloud. To help demystify this migration, there is a pressing need for a plug-and-play platform like AWS Mainframe Modernization.
“AWS with its marketplace potential, augmented by migration tool vendors and System Integrators like Capgemini, with its vast mainframe modernization execution expertise and customers’ application knowledge, gives customers a truly seamless migration toolchain straight out of the box. This has a huge potential to revolutionize the modernization industry, and we at Capgemini are pleased to be an AWS Mainframe Modernization launch partner at this important junction.”
~ Dhinakar Jacob Selwyn, VP, Global Head – Foundational Technologies ADM & Revitalization Practice at Capgemini
“AWS Mainframe Modernization service enables Cognizant, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, to adopt an application-specific cloud migration approach for its clients depending on their desired business outcomes and cloud modernization goals.
“By leveraging the broad services offered by AWS Mainframe Modernization service, its partner tools, in combination with our own technology and industry expertise, Cognizant significantly reduces time and complexities typically associated with such mainframe migrations to cloud, setting our mutual clients on successful modernization paths forward.”
~ Narasi, Sr. Director, Legacy Application Modernization at Cognizant
“Deloitte is very excited to be a part of the AWS Mainframe Modernization service launch, which offers an integrated platform optimized for mainframe workloads, making it easier and reducing the risk of modernizing and transforming applications to run in the cloud.
“Due to experience with similar modernizations, Deloitte is perfectly suited to help clients globally continue transforming their business as they migrate complex, critical workloads to AWS leveraging AWS Mainframe Modernization.”
~ Bjoern Langmack, Global App Modernization and Migration Leader, and Principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP
DXC Technology delivers rapid transformation of mainframe and legacy applications to distributed and cloud environments, supported by an end-to-end framework for planning and execution. DXC is pleased to expand its partnership with AWS by adding new capabilities leveraging AWS Mainframe Modernization to enable successful mainframe transformations on AWS Cloud.
“Organizations of today are modernizing their mainframe environments to enable workload optimization and innovation while bringing substantial savings in IT infrastructure costs. HCL’s long-standing relationship with AWS offers our customers customized mainframe modernization roadmaps for enterprises to a scalable, secure, and high-performing platform.
“By leveraging AWS Mainframe Modernization service, HCL ensures least risk transformation, while managing the change that impacts business value chains, people, and organization policies. HCL, being an AWS Mainframe Migration Competency Partner, has a track record of successful mainframe workload migrations having demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success.”
~ Kalyan Kumar, CTO & Head – Ecosystems at HCL Technologies
“When it comes to mainframe modernization, despite all the technological advancements, the uncertainty and fear of failure remain common for enterprises. With the AWS Mainframe Modernization service and Infosys Zero Disruption Modernization approach, such risk factors can be alleviated to a large extent.
“AWS Mainframe Modernization is a unique platform that allows enterprises to easily migrate on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed runtime environment on AWS. Complemented with Infosys Modernization Suite, part of Infosys Cobalt, it accelerates the overall migration of mainframe workloads. Infosys Zero Disruption Modernization approach further ensures a zero disruption roll-out to production.”
~ Gautam Khanna, Vice President and Global Head, Modernization Practice at Infosys
“TCS has been helping leading global enterprises modernize legacy applications to be more digital, agile, and lean. Our partnership with AWS in the AWS Mainframe Modernization platform focuses on creating repeatable processes that can accelerate IT modernization, reduce risks, and enable transition to cloud.
“Our Assessment and Migration Factory for AWS Mainframe Modernization leverages our industry-specific contextual knowledge and rich experience in mainframe modernization to help our customers accelerate their journey to the cloud with certainty.”
~ Krishna Mohan, Global Head, AWS Business Unit, Tata Consultancy Services
“AWS Mainframe Modernization is an exciting technology with a range of applications and the potential to bring unprecedented agility to the platforms that many businesses rely on. Wipro views the cloud as integral to the future of business, and recently expanded our cloud capabilities with the launch of Wipro Fullstride Cloud Services.
“AWS Mainframe Modernization service is another welcome addition, and this new solution will also pair nicely with Wipro ModerniZ, establishing synergy that will transform the mainframe modernization space and bring exciting new benefits to our customers. We look forward to working closely with AWS to simplify the complex process of migrating and modernizing mainframe workloads.”
~ Arun Kumar Melkote, VP & Practice Head, iDEAS-App Engineering and Modernization at Wipro Limited .
Get Started
The AWS Mainframe Modernization service is a unique platform for mainframe migration and modernization. It allows customers and partners to plan, migrate, modernize, and run their on-premises mainframe workloads to a managed development and execution environment on AWS.
Leveraging the Power of Esri’s ArcGIS Enterprise Through Amazon Redshift
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By Sid Singh, Tech BD, WWPS Partner Service Integration and Sales – AWS By Jeff Demuth, Sr. Solutions Architect – AWS By Abhishek Ram, Head WWPS Partner Service Integration – AWS By Nemanja Boric, Sr. Development Engineer, DBS Redshift – AWS
Esri
Esri‘s geographic information system (GIS) solutions create, manage, analyze, and map various types of geospatial data. Their flagship GIS mapping software, ArcGIS, is a powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology.
Starting with ArcGIS Pro, customers now have the ability to directly connect from ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise 10.9.1 to an Amazon Redshift cluster.
Customers can access and store their geospatial data using Amazon Redshift and seamlessly interoperate with ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise. This new capability enables higher performance and support for big datasets, allowing customers to easily analyze their GIS data and cloud-native databases together.
“As the global leader in GIS, Esri is proud to partner with Amazon to deliver a powerful new generation of geospatial infrastructure that is designed for enterprises, cloud-native, based on microservices, and fully orchestrated within Amazon EKS,” says Jay Theodore, CTO, Enterprise and Artificial Intelligence at Esri.
“This cloud-native deployment of enterprise GIS now expands its reach to support various cloud warehouses, including Amazon Redshift, for geospatial analysis, mapping, and visualization,” adds Jay.
Esri is an AWS Public Sector Partner with the AWS Public Safety and Disaster Response Competency. Inspiring positive change in industry and society through mapping and geospatial analytics is at the heart of their business. Esri provides powerful GIS solutions to more than 350,000 clients in more than 150 countries.
Case for Connecting Amazon Redshift with ArcGIS
With continuous growth in the size of datasets and declining cost of storage, it’s becoming more common to use a data warehouse like Amazon Redshift for geospatial datasets. Customers can unlock more value from their data by connecting Amazon Redshift to ArcGIS Pro to geospatially analyze petabyte datasets.
With the increase in frequency of data and their attributes being collected, it’s also getting increasingly difficult to manage large datasets in traditional databases. When analyzing large datasets like NYC Trip Data, using a data warehouse with geospatial support like Amazon Redshift is a natural fit for the best performance.
Another example of vast and dynamic data can be found in this Formula 1 case study, where it’s noted that each car has 120 sensors generating three GB of data each second. Use cases like these will continue to expand as sensors and sensor data become easier to work with.
Spatial data plays a critical role in business analytics, reporting, and forecasting. Spatial data contains fields used to represent geographic features. Examples of this type of data include weather reports, map directions, tweets with geographic positions, store locations, and airline routes.
Geography Data Type in Amazon Redshift
Amazon Redshift is a petabyte-scale data warehouse capable of querying and filtering billions of rows. To get started, let’s create a table in Amazon Redshift using the new Geography data type, and then we can connect it to ArcGIS Pro.
The Geography data type is used in queries requiring higher precision results for spatial data with geographic features that can be represented with a spheroid model of the Earth, and referenced using latitude and longitude as the spatial coordinate system.
To create a table with the new Geography data type, navigate to the Amazon Redshift console, then:
We will import the data from Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) into a table. Next, we’ll select a subset of fields including latitude and longitude. We will use ST_MakePoint and insert the data into a new table with the Geography data type.
Figure 1 – Amazon Redshift Query Editor V2 table creation and data prep.
To start connecting ArcGIS Pro to Amazon Redshift, right-click on Databases from the Catalog menu in ArcGIS Pro and select New Database Connection from the context menu.
Figure 2 – Connecting ArcGIS Pro to database connection (Amazon Redshift).
This will open up the new connection prompt to enter cluster details.
Figure 3 – Database connection details.
After creating the connection, you will see your Amazon Redshift database show up in your catalog.
To add some points to the map, simply drag your table with your coordinates in the form of Geometry or Geography onto the map.
Figure 4 – Amazon Redshift table information.
After dragging the table to the map, ArcGIS Pro will auto-detect the column with the coordinates and map the respective locations.
Figure 5 – New query layer definition.
Here, you can see we have added around 100,000 points from Amazon Redshift table showing various events around the world.
Figure 6 – ArcGIS Pro with imported data points from Amazon Redshift.
There are Amazon Redshift SQL functions that support a variety of representations of spatial data including:
GeoJSON
Well-known text (WKT)
Extended well-known text (EWKT)
Well-known binary (WKB)
Extended well-known binary (EWKB)
Conclusion
Amazon Redshift is a fully managed enterprise-grade data warehouse that provides many SQL functions to query spatial data. Customers can now analyze petabyte-scale datasets in Amazon Redshift and bring that data into ArcGIS Pro and ArcGIS Enterprise for additional mapping and analysis.
This new capability provides support for maximizing usage of larger datasets, thereby allowing customers to analyze their GIS data using ArcGIS and cloud-native data warehouses together.
In this post, we created a table in Amazon Redshift with the new Geography data type, inserted 100,000 points into our table, and connected ArcGIS Pro to our Amazon Redshift cluster to display those points on a map.
Users can benefit from the advanced features in Amazon Redshift such as Spectrum, Data Sharing, Automatic Workload Management, Concurrency Scaling, AQUA, RA3 instances, and Redshift Serverless to evaluate how geospatial workloads can benefit from these features today.
Reach out to your AWS and Esri account teams for details around the launched features and to understand how they can help solve your business needs.
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Esri – AWS Partner Spotlight
Esriis an AWS Competency Partner whose GIS solutions create, manage, analyze, and map various types of geospatial data. Their flagship GIS mapping software, ArcGIS, is a powerful mapping and spatial analytics technology.
*To review an AWS Partner, you must be a customer that has worked with them directly on a project.
Enabling Digital Automation in Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) for Public Sector Partners and Customers Using AWS AI
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By Sid Singh, Tech BD, WWPS Partner Service Integration and Sales – AWS By Nithin Reddy Cheruku, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS By Abhishek Ram, Head WWPS Partner Service Integration – AWS
Government and public sector agencies often communicate and conduct operations with citizens using paper documents. This is primarily driven by accessibility, regulatory compliance, and legacy reasons.
Due to this, various public sector units are not only overloaded with high volume of processing physical documents but also face a delayed response in fulfilling citizens’ requests. The situation is further exacerbated with manual processing burdened by understaffed organizations that struggle with competing priorities.
These documents can be in a wide variety of forms like PDFs, scanned images, emails, and text messages consisting of different layouts with structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data. The traditional rules-based automation quickly falls off when handling diversified formats and layouts.
Extracting data from unstructured or semi-structured handwritten documents continues to be time-consuming, error-prone, expensive, and difficult to scale. Manual effort is required in traditional data entry, and simple optical character recognition (OCR) technology and rules-based automation is hard to maintain with dynamic data precision.
This post provides an overview of the AWS AI services stack for government agencies and partners to develop intelligent automation solutions to extract information from digitalized paper documents.
Use Case for Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) in Public Sector
Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is a solution that enables extraction and processing of specific data elements from documents using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) techniques.
Building an IDP solution requires more than just traditional OCR. The AWS IDP stack provides several services related to classification, extraction, human augmentation, and enterprise search with pre-trained deep learning models readily available to be integrated into your IDP solution.
Amazon Textract uses cutting edge ML to instantly “read” virtually any type of document to accurately extract text and data with better accuracy, reducing the need for heavy manual effort or custom code. Public sector customers have specific requirements around security, compliance, and objection handling. Amazon Textract is designed to meet and exceed these with a PCI DSS certified, HIPPA eligible, FedRAMP high compliant service. .
Amazon Comprehend is a natural language processing (NLP) service that uses machine learning to perform classification, extract relevant entities, and find other meaningful insights in text. IT provides several pre-trained models to classify and extract text, and can be customized to fit specific data needs for document processing. .
Amazon A2I is a service that makes it easy to build the workflows required for human review of ML predictions with low confidence thresholds, ensuring the results are correct. Leveraging Amazon A2I workflows as part of the document processing pipeline helps alleviate risk by asserting from humans when needed. .
Amazon Kendra is a highly accurate and easy-to-use enterprise search service that’s powered by machine learning. It uses ML algorithms to understand the context and return the most relevant results, whether that be a precise answer or an entire document.
King County, Washington, is a leader in digital innovation and uses Amazon Textract in the King County Assessor’s Office to unlock data and information from paper documents and electronic files.
According to Tanya Hannah, King County’s Chief Information Officer and ORBIE’s 2021 Public Sector CIO of the Year: “Leveraging AWS’ IDP technology to reduce data entry, eliminate data errors, and improve data timeliness will allow King County employees to focus on higher value, more satisfying work, and ultimately help the County realize its vision for connected communities, connected data, and connected government.”
The potential for Intelligent Document Processing is wide-ranging across government organizations and sub-industries, especially where documents represent key decision points.
Criminal justice and public safety are another set of verticals where IDP services will have impressive and immediate impacts. Police departments and sheriff’s offices, for example, receive handwritten statements which include incident reports, witness statements, supplemental reports, crime scene logs, and forensic reports.
They can convert the handwriting to text for entry into the Law Enforcement Agency’s (LEA) Records Management System (RMS), assign the statement to police staff, and automatically attach the digital document to the file, with human review configured as desired.
The ability to process massive amounts of data from documents and emails such as incident reports, court orders, and warrants will deliver enormous benefits throughout the justice and public safety ecosystem. A single document such as a court order may be processed by multiple partners, including the court, prosecutor, LEA, public defender, probation, and community corrections.
The benefits to automating the dissemination of such documents and their embedded information will be far-reaching.
Sample Workflow for Automating Document Processing
Following is an example workflow to automate end-to-end processing of reporting for LEA. These steps can be easily customized to meet specific requirements for agencies such as human intervention, reporting, and security.
Figure 1 – Sample architecture for extracting information from incident reports using AWS IDP stack.
Users can upload incident reports, witness statements, and other supporting documents into the law enforcement public portal. The portal then ingests all of the documents securely into an Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket.
Uploaded documents are put in a Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) queue. As messages related to incidents appear, they are processed in batches by AWS Lambda.
Lambda kick starts an AWS Step Function workflow which orchestrates the process of classification of various reports and extraction of relevant data.
The first step of the AWS Step Functions workflow triggers Lambda, which initiates an Amazon Textract job. The job retrieves the first page of the document.
The next step calls the Lambda function that initiates an Amazon Comprehend job that uses a pre-trained custom classifier to classify the documents such as incident reports, witness statement, and supplemental evidence reports.
Lambda initiates Amazon Textract jobs to extract content based on the document type.
Lambda initiates Amazon Comprehend jobs that perform additional analysis, such as extracting relevant custom entities entities related to incident reports, redacting personally identifiable information (PII) data, and detecting sentiment.
Amazon A2I workflow begins for all of the predictions that have low confidence thresholds the system couldn’t understand and needs confirmation by a human.
The next step for all of the extracted results with higher confidence is sent as a message to an SQS queue to be loaded into downstream applications and saved data in Amazon DynamoDB.
The A2I workflow events, after reviewed by the personnel, will be sent as an Amazon CloudWatch event to be recorded back in the downstream application.
A Lambda batch processes the messages received into SQS and loads the records into LEA’s Records Management System. Lambda also sends a notification to the assigned staff about the incident report with details for further analysis.
Staff personnel uses Amazon Kendra to intelligently search using natural language queries against raw content and extracted data by Amazon Textract and stored in S3 buckets, and then updates case-related details to LEA’s Records Management System.
Microservices built using Lambda and exposed using Amazon API Gateway will help citizens get retrieve details on demand by logging into the portal.
As portrayed above, Amazon Textract, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Augmented AI do the heavy lifting with pre-trained and customized machine learning models to build an Intelligent Document Processing workflow.
This helps avoid building and hosting customized models from scratch, hiring data science teams, and can eventually lead to lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Conclusion
Public sector partners and customers face rather unique challenges in terms of limited budget, people, resources, and elevated security requirements.
The AWS Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) stack offers government institutions productivity gains by extracting and linking content from various documents, and improves citizens’ experiences with faster decision making and improved constituent services.
According to Gretchen Peri, Slalom’s Managing Director for US State, Local, and Education (SLED): “AWS’ latest advances in IDP are bringing new ways of thinking to age-old challenges—from processing internal documents to sharing data and files across agencies. IDP also allows for more elegant ways of solving new challenges that emerge from legislation or court decisions, and can help agencies that are already understaffed and overloaded best fulfill their missions.”
Customers and partners interested in learning more about Amazon Textract and IDP solutions should reach out to wwps-serviceintegration@amazon.com.
Announcing the AWS Partner Network’s Regional U.S. 2021 Partners of the Year
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Each year, we honor members of the AWS Partner Network (APN) who are leaders in the channel and play key roles in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
AWS Partners are dedicated to helping customers build, market, and sell their offerings so they can grow successful cloud businesses.
AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of born-in-the-cloud and traditional consulting and ISV partners whose business models have embraced specialization and collaboration.
Please join us in congratulating these leading AWS Partners for their success!
AWS Global System Integrator (GSI) Partner of the Year
Together as the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG), Accenture and AWS have pioneered some of the most advanced and value-creating AWS programs in the world. The companies think 18 months into the future to keep their joint innovations ahead of the evolving marketplace. AABG focuses on migrations, mainframe and application modernization, SAP, data and machine learning, customer care and Amazon Connect, strategic ISVs, and industry solutions. Accenture has earned more than 24,000 AWS Certifications, held by more than 20,000 individuals.
Deloitte is an AWS Premier Partner and strategic Global Systems Integrator (GSI), providing world-class AWS technology, cyber, security, and advisory services to many of the world’s most admired brands. Deloitte is one of the few partners with AWS Competencies in both Consulting and Technical Migration and Mainframe Migration. Deloitte has established a mass migration “factory” focused on helping clients move workloads to the cloud, modify their operations, and enhance their talent to optimize cloud investments. Deloitte has 18 AWS Competencies, over 8,600 AWS-Certified professionals, and a reputation for deep industry expertise.
Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital and consulting services, enabling clients in 46 countries to navigate their digital transformation. Infosys, under their Cobalt business unit, has built an impressive portfolio of business outcome solutions on AWS anchored by Infosys IP. This success is generated from their deep domain and industry expertise covering diverse industries, from retail and manufacturing to banking, healthcare, and telecom. Customers across these verticals leverage Infosys Cobalt on AWS to drive velocity in their business and accelerate innovation.
IBM is a leader in business transformation through an open hybrid cloud platform and AI, serving clients in more than 170 countries worldwide. Today, 47 of the Fortune 50 companies rely on IBM to run their business, and IBM Watson enterprise AI is hard at work in more than 30,000 engagements. IBM partners with leading technology companies, and with 28 years of patent leadership is a responsible innovator and a force for good in the world.
TCS is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner that provides a comprehensive suite of offerings spanning cloud advisory, migration, application and infrastructure modernization, SAP, data and analytics, storage, security, and industry solutions powered with next-generation technologies. The strategic partnership with AWS enables TCS to provide a holistic experience and clear value path to enterprises, delivering full-stack enterprise transformation to the cloud.
AWS National System Integrator (NSI) Partner of the Year
Slalom is a global consulting firm and AWS Premier Consulting Partner focused on strategy, technology, and business transformation. In 41 markets across the U.S. and around the world, Slalom’s teams are backed by regional innovation hubs, a global culture of collaboration, and partnerships with the world’s top technology providers. Founded in 2001 and headquartered in Seattle, Slalom has organically grown to over 11,000 employees.
Virtusa Corporation is a global provider of business and IT transformation services focused on cloud and digital technologies. Virtusa is industry-focused and helps Global 2,000 companies in FSI, HCLS, communications, media, manufacturing, and technology unlock new value through innovation engineering. An AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Virtusa has acquired AWS Competencies in DevOps, Migration, Data and Analytics, SaaS, Digital Workplace, Financial Services, Life Sciences, and Healthcare.
Caylent is an AWS-exclusive, cloud-native services company that helps organizations bring the best out of their people and technology using AWS. Caylent’s core practice areas include DevOps, cloud migration and modernization, cloud security and compliance, cloud data engineering, and cloud-native application development. They partner with technology-enabled businesses to accelerate digital transformation, with clients ranging from high growth startups to global enterprises across sectors including FSI, HCLS, SaaS, retail, and consumer goods.
Softchoice is a software-focused IT solutions provider that equips organizations to be agile and innovative, and for their people to be engaged, connected, and creative at work. That means moving them to the cloud, helping them build the workplace of tomorrow, and enabling them to make smarter decisions about their technology. Softchoice is a multi-cloud certified managed service provider and one of the first AWS MSPs, holding the following AWS Competencies and designations: AWS Nonprofit Competency, AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency, AWS Storage Competency, Amazon EC2 for Windows Server Delivery, and AWS CloudFormation Delivery.
Onica by Rackspace Technology is a leader in cloud-native services and an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with expertise across 15 AWS Competencies with a solution focus on modernization, security, IoT, data, and AI/ML-driven analytics. Rackspace Technology operates globally in 120 countries and holds 2,800 AWS Certifications. They leverage deep expertise and a demonstrated track record in the AWS Cloud, supported by a strong customer experience and differentiated solutions to accelerate growth.
Sumo Logic is a cloud-native SaaS analytics platform that turns machine-generated data—such as logs, metrics, and traces—into continuous intelligence to drive real-time business, security, and IT insights without the headaches of managing traditional IT infrastructure, middleware, software, and data. Serving more than 2,100 customers, Sumo Logic has created a successful business by betting on and going all in on AWS, delivering an average of 171% return on investment to its customers.
Infor is a leading software provider of cloud enterprise business solutions designed to meet industry needs. With more than 65,000 customers worldwide, Infor builds and deploys solutions to help customers overcome market disruptions and accelerate innovation. Infor demonstrates technical proficiency and customer success with AWS Competencies in Healthcare, Government, Industrial Software, Retail, and Travel and Hospitality.
Cribl, an AWS Data and Analytics Competency Partner, is a leader in unlocking observability data across the enterprise and enables customers to centrally manage, configure, monitor, and orchestrate observability infrastructure deployed anywhere in the world. Cribl LogStream on AWS helps customers realize value from their data by reducing costs, routing data, and shaping and enriching data. Customers also have the freedom to choose their own analytics tools and storage destinations, which provides greater scalability and security.
NetApp is a cloud-led, data-centric storage partner that specializes in helping customers get the most out of their data with industry-leading cloud data services, storage systems, and software. NetApp has earned AWS Competencies in Storage and Migration and is a leading AWS Marketplace seller. NetApp is being recognized for collaborating with AWS on launching the Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP service.
SAP NS2 has AWS Competencies in Data and Analytics, Government, and is in the AWS GovCloud (US) Service Delivery program. SAP NS2 offers SAP applications, analytics, database, cyber security, and cloud software solutions with specialized levels of security and support to meet the unique requirements of U.S. federal, defense, aerospace, and critical infrastructure companies. NS2 Secure Cloud provides customers with automated and secure deployment models to provision SAP in the cloud.
AWS Public Sector Partner of the Year (Consulting)
Leidos is a technology, engineering, and science solutions and services leader working to solve the world’s toughest challenges in the defense, intelligence, civil, and health markets. Extensive capabilities in digital modernization, cybersecurity, mission software, integrated systems, mission operations, and enabling technologies such as AI/ML demonstrates their AWS Premier Consulting Partner expertise. With five AWS Competencies, Leidos’s mission is to make the world safer, healthier, and more efficient.
New AWS GameDay Benefits Help Partners Build Cloud Skills and Engage with AWS Experts
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By Kathryn Martini, Sr. Product Manager, Benefits – AWS By Marie Shimansky, Global Manager, Partner Solutions Architecture – AWS
We are excited to introduce new AWS GameDay partner benefits for AWS Partners in several of our differentiation programs: AWS Service Delivery, AWS Service Ready, AWS Competency, and AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP).
AWS GameDay is a collaborative learning exercise that tests skills in implementing Amazon Web Services (AWS) solutions to solve real-world problems in a gamified, risk-free environment. It’s a completely hands-on opportunity for technical professionals to explore AWS services, architecture patterns, best practices, and group cooperation.
Partners can now choose the AWS GameDay League, AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK), or both, as benefits of their differentiation program achievements:
AWS GameDay League is made up of teams from global partner companies who compete against each other in hands-on technical challenges to build new cloud skills capabilities and have fun while doing so. .
AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK) gives partners the ability to integrate their products with real-world scenarios to be leveraged as repeatable, lead-generating events with customers. This unique sales tool overcomes traditional barriers like subscription trials and building test scenarios in sandbox accounts.
Elevated levels of technical enablement, direct connections with AWS experts, and quality leads are the top benefit asks of AWS Partners participating in differentiation programs. These new AWS GameDay benefits deliver all three!
AWS GameDay League Benefits
AWS GameDay League provides gamified, risk-free technical upskilling. Participants join through the AWS GameDay event interface and work together to track progress while tackling challenges using the AWS Management Console at minimal cost (time to participate). An AWS account is provided for the event.
Additionally, 99% of GameDay League participants report improving their skills on AWS. One GameDay participant shared with us: “Our team had an absolute blast. It was a great learning experience. Tutorials and labs are great, but they only take you so far. GameDay was learning on a whole new level.”
AWS GameDay League for partners provides events unique from other AWS GameDays, offering multiple partner companies a chance to compete against each other. Each tournament allows partner teams to focus on a specific set of tooling such as migration and modernization, security, or sustainability.
“GameDays show our technical teams that AWS values and recognizes them for their hard work educating customers on AWS merits and executing projects, and for increasing customer consumption of AWS services,” said Tesfalem Gebremariam, Sr. Cloud Solutions Architect at Presidio.
Through AWS GameDay League, participants solve problems in a time-bound, real-world scenario. The competitive aspect ignites innovation, and the risk-free environment lets them fail fast and iterate to solve problems and win prizes. League champions receive AWS promotion, and all participants leave with new ideas for future customer solutions.
“GameDay League put us up against other companies, which was more fun (than a GameDay among our own team) as it makes it that much more competitive and challenging to compare our strengths and weaknesses against other teams,” said Alfred Macaraeg, Sr. Systems Engineer at DOMA Technologies. “As a result of participating in the League, we identified new growth areas and increased our expertise on AWS.”
AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK) Benefits
AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit (QDK) is a new go-to-market opportunity for AWS Partners with a clear “better together” story around their software offering and a cloud-oriented toolkit that gets customers into the AWS console.
AWS GameDay QDK allows partners to create a customized module within an overall GameDay event scenario, highlighting their product alongside AWS services. Once a Quest is built, partners can integrate their Quest into existing GameDay content to provide customers with an interactive and hands-on experience with their product.
Customers who participate in GameDays that incorporate partner Quests built with the QDK report how helpful it is to use the software offering in a real-world scenario. They say it’s kind of like shopping in-store instead of online; you can put a partner offering to the test and truly understand the value prop.
For example, a customer that was looking for a product to monitor their cloud application performance was initially hesitant to use a partner’s software solution until they participated in an AWS GameDay event where the software was highlighted through a partner-developed Quest. Once they had time to use the product, the customer was delighted.
With GameDay Quests, partner offerings are put in the hands of engineers and architects so they can see it in action.
AMD has been collaborating with AWS since 2018 and had this to say of their AWS GameDay QDK experience: “The GameDay Quest platform offers AWS Partners an opportunity to experience AMD EPYC processor’s capabilities to take on massive compute-heavy workloads in a real-life scenario, where chaos might be happening, and deal with requests from mock customers,” said Lax Sakalkale, Director of Cloud Solutions Engineering, Cloud Business Unit at AMD.
“Using AWS GameDay Quest Developer Kit, our team and AWS Partners also have a repeatable tool to allow customers to experience AMD-powered Amazon EC2 instances, AMD Radeon ProRender 2.0, our rendering engine, and more in action, and see what they could do for their own cloud infrastructure in AWS,” added Lax.
Once a partner uses the AWS GameDay QDK, they’ll have a Quest that can be run with customers as an interactive, on-demand sales motion to showcase their product alongside AWS services. Running a custom Quest within a GameDay is a unique sales tool that overcomes traditional barriers like subscription trials and allows customers to build test scenarios in sandbox accounts.
“Building New Relic’s GameDay Quest with the AWS GameDay Quests Developer Kit has been a great learning experience. I was able to rapidly develop, test, and iterate to improve our user experience and get better on AWS,” said Jemiah Sius, Sr. Manager, Product Management at New Relic.
“Demos and walkthroughs are great, but the key to adoption is getting hands-on. Now that we can run AWS GameDay around New Relic’s Quest, we can better support the developer community and have fun in the process,” added Jemiah.
Getting Started
These new AWS GameDay partner benefits are available globally to all AWS Partners who are validated through the following APN differentiation programs: AWS Service Delivery, AWS Service Ready, AWS Competency, and AWS MSP.
If you are already differentiated via one of these programs, our GameDay League scouts will email tournament invitations to your alliance lead and technical staff. You can also subscribe to the AWS GameDay Twitch channel and follow the AWS GameDay Twitter.
If you have a validated software offering, we invite you to submit your products to the AWS GameDay Quests Developer team by emailing awsgamedaybenefits@amazon.com. Please include a link to your software product listing and short statement about your “better together” story. The AWS team will respond within three (3) business days with next steps.
