278 – AWS Marketplace Unlocked: The AI Agent & Tools Strategy You Need to Win

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AI agents are your next customers.

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In this critical discussion, Mike Levy from AWS and Jon Yoo from Sugar sit down with Vince Menzione to explore the seismic shifts occurring within the AWS Marketplace, focusing heavily on the recent launch of AI Agents and Tools. Mike Levy details AWS’s comprehensive strategy to provide not just off-the-shelf agents, but the foundational ‘ingredients’—like security, guardrails, and knowledge bases—via the marketplace to help enterprises become “agentic.” Jon Yoo provides the partner perspective, highlighting the immense but often misunderstood role of channel partners in marketplace revenue, and provocatively challenges the current state of AI ‘features,’ emphasizing that the future requires agents to truly understand a business’s tribal knowledge and processes, not just rules-based workflows. The conversation culminates with the two sharing best practices, including the AWS COSS (Characteristics of Successful Sellers) framework, to help ISVs and partners accelerate their growth and effectively monetize in this new, AI-driven cloud economy.

Key Takeaways

• The AWS Marketplace is now offering a comprehensive suite of AI agents and tools, including agent development platforms and essential security ingredients.
• AWS is working across the AI stack, from underlying hardware like Inferentia chips to foundational services like Bedrock for accessing LLMs.
• The Marketplace organization at AWS is strategically integrated within the Partner Organization to build go-to-market channels and procurement systems.
• The growth of the private offer business and the inclusion of Channel Partner Private Offers (CPPOs) is fundamental to the Marketplace’s future strategy.
• Successful sellers on AWS Marketplace are guided by the COSS (Characteristics of Successful Sellers) framework, which has been shown to accelerate growth by 31 times.
• Partners new to the Marketplace should “start narrow” by proving their motion manually before investing in automation, focusing on a clear, simple value proposition.

If you’re ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins.

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Key Tags

AWSMarketplace, AIagents, Bedrock, ISVstrategy, ChannelPartner, COSSframework, CloudMonetization, Sugarplatform, AmazonQ, AgentCore, PrivateOffers, LLMs, GenerativeAI, GoToMarket, CloudEcosystem

Ultimate Partner is the independent community for technology leaders navigating the tectonic shifts in cloud, AI, marketplaces, and co-selling. Through live events, UPX membership, advisory, and the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® podcast, we help organizations align with hyperscalers, accelerate growth, and achieve their greatest results through successful partnering.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Michael Levy: Uh, if we just double click on, you know, what it, what is an AI agent? ’cause it’s probably important, then we kind of have a shared understanding of what that is. Um, there’s a number of, uh, call it ingredients to the recipe of an AI agent.

[00:00:15] Vince Menzione: Welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi, your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you.

[00:00:22] Vince Menzione: Achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. We just came off Ultimate Partner live at Caresoft Training Center in Reston, Virginia. Over two days, we gathered top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room, this episode brings you right to the edge of what’s next.

[00:00:43] Vince Menzione: Let’s dive in. So I am thrilled to welcome. So the first time as a sponsor of Ultimate Partner, and also to be up on stage with me, an organization that I also had a, you know, I was at Microsoft, you have to realize the lineage of how these organizations all work together. Uh, this little company that was a, they were like a bookseller company, a little company.

[00:01:10] Vince Menzione: And then they, uh, decided that they were gonna, they had all this computing horsepower and never, but wasn’t being used consistently. And what if we just like, share, you know, sell some, swipe a credit card and we’ll share some timeshare on it. Uh, this little company called AWS incredible and so I’m really privileged to have AWS join us as a sponsor this year.

[00:01:32] Vince Menzione: Um, and just I think it gives the world a much more well-rounded view of what we’re seeing in our world of ecosystems as well. And I would love to invite to join me up on stage. Mike Levy from AWS Mike is nearby somewhere. Here he comes. Uh, so, so great to have you, Mike. Join us. Thank you so much for joining us.

[00:01:54] Vince Menzione: Absolutely. Um, and then also we’re gonna have, we’re gonna have some really good conversation today. So I want to, you have the distinction of being the very first AWS guest and an ultimate partner event. Hopefully not the last It’s an honor.

[00:02:05] Michael Levy: Yeah. First, uh, first of many, hopefully.

[00:02:07] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Well, great to have you.

[00:02:08] Vince Menzione: Uh, we got to meet recently and we’re, and, and we’re also gonna be joined by a partner, uh, in a little bit here. So, uh, John Yo is a good friend of ours and he is also gonna be up on, on with this as well. But I thought we’d spend a few minutes because you are up on stage this summer, in fact, and really carrying the message.

[00:02:26] Vince Menzione: We be, we talk about marketplaces and it’s incredible world, world of mar marketplaces and AWS really led the, the fold on this, right? Because coming from the pedigree of retail and all the automation that AWS had. You were the first to market with marketplace, and you’ve also been an incredible innovator.

[00:02:43] Vince Menzione: So I thought we spent a little time, I wanna give you a little time to talk about that, if you don’t mind.

[00:02:47] Jon Yoo: Absolutely.

[00:02:47] Vince Menzione: And I can stay up here with you or give you a couple minutes alone if you like. Yeah, we can have a seat. That’s fine. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let’s,

[00:02:52] Michael Levy: let’s

[00:02:52] Vince Menzione: sit down and talk.

[00:02:53] Michael Levy: Happy to. Um, so yeah, so for those who don’t know me, Mike Levy from the AWS Marketplace Team, um, and as Vince was referring to this summer, we launched, uh, an extension of AWS marketplace.

[00:03:04] Michael Levy: Which is AI agents and tools in marketplace. So first I wanna say thank you to, to Vince for having us as a sponsor, uh, and to the incredible community that you built here. It’s, thank you. It’s really super impressive. Thank you. And we’re very glad to be a part of it now. Um, and second, I want to thank all the partners in the room, a number of which were part of that launch of AI agents and tools in marketplace.

[00:03:24] Michael Levy: And I think the big thing for us and importantly for our mutual customers is really launching a comprehensive strategy when we say AI agents and tools. We really mean AI agents and tools, because I think we all know in this market, many of our enterprise customers or even startup customers, you’re not just buying an a w you know, you’re not buying an AI agent off the shelf and just setting it free in your production environment.

[00:03:47] Michael Levy: Um, and so it’s really the, the tools aspect that’s an important part of the launch for us, um, and really a comprehensive offering. Of kind of, regardless of where a company is on their Ag agent AI journey, the idea is that there’s something for them in marketplace that they can procure and use in, in their own business.

[00:04:04] Vince Menzione: So tell us more about that. Take, take us down another level or, or step within that conversation. Yeah, so we’ll

[00:04:09] Michael Levy: double click. So the, the launch was big and we’ve seen a lot of momentum since then. Uh, but we had over 900 listings in marketplace. Uh, and that really runs the gamut. So there are off the shelf AI agents that you can take.

[00:04:22] Michael Levy: Procure, uh, and deploy through marketplace and through AWS. And there’s, uh, things in between, like agent development platforms, think Salesforce agent force, uh, LR writer, some of these newer companies that are really focusing on this space and how to help enterprises really transform and become agentic, um, or develop their own ai.

[00:04:42] Michael Levy: And tons of services partners as well. So obviously tying it all together, really honing, you know, what is the agent strategy for your enterprise is really part and parcel with what a lot, a lot of our services partners are helping customers with. And so the listings that we have in marketplace, uh, and the solutions that we have and the partners that we’ve worked, been working with really kind of run the gamut.

[00:05:03] Michael Levy: Um, and then tools. When I say tools, uh, if we just double click on, you know, what it, what is an AI agent? ’cause it’s probably important, then we kind of have a. Shared understanding of what that is. Um, there’s a number of, uh, call it ingredients to the recipe of an AI agent. Things like memory, things like security, things like observability, um, guardrails is a part of it.

[00:05:25] Michael Levy: Um, MCP servers, if we’re, if we’re familiar with MCP. Uh, we can double click on that. That’s really just, it’s a common protocol of, uh, basically calling various tools. So an agent is nothing, uh, if it doesn’t have the right data sources, like a knowledge base, if it doesn’t have the right tools, the right capabilities to call and actually implement a, a plan.

[00:05:48] Michael Levy: And so we have MCP servers, we have knowledge bases, we have guardrails, um, sort of. Wholly built AI agents and then all the ingredients to the recipe as well. If you’re an enterprise that’s looking to build your own AI agents as well.

[00:06:00] Vince Menzione: So you’re working with partners that are building these agents. Is AWS building any of the agents as well, or are you enabling any Yeah,

[00:06:06] Michael Levy: I, I think from, uh, from an agent perspective, AWS is kind of operating across the stack.

[00:06:11] Michael Levy: Yeah. So we have AI agents, uh, like Kiro is a coding agent, Amazon Q you might be familiar with. Um, and then underlying infrastructure as well. Everything down to to, to the, you know, the hardware and traum chips. Um, to things like Bedrock, which is really the fundamental way that customers access multiple, uh, LLMs through Amazon.

[00:06:32] Vince Menzione: Very cool. Yeah. And you sit in the market, so explain the organization for those who don’t know it. Right. I’m, you’re our first guest here from AWS and I think it kind of helps you sit in the marketplace organization, which is foundational to marketplace success, obviously. Yes. And it’s been a, i I mentioned this earlier, like you were fir first footed on marketplace in a big way.

[00:06:51] Vince Menzione: So it’s a pretty significant size organization.

[00:06:54] Michael Levy: Definitely. And, and just for context, so the marketplace organization, both product engineering, business development, we all sit within the partner organization.

[00:07:02] Vince Menzione: Nice. That’s very, which is super important.

[00:07:04] Michael Levy: And when I say partners, I mean ISVs and technology partners.

[00:07:07] Michael Levy: I mean services partners, migration partners, consulting partners, everything, channel partners, resellers, et cetera. So we’re all part of one overall organization. Right. Um, which is really important because if we think of marketplace as building procurement. Systems for our customers. It’s also building go to market channels for our partners.

[00:07:24] Vince Menzione: Yes.

[00:07:24] Michael Levy: Um, so I work very closely with our product team who’s building the feature roadmap, um, for our partners that are going to market on marketplace. And importantly for our customers that are using Marketplace really is their primary procurement vehicle. Um, for, for partner solutions, be they services, software data or AI agents.

[00:07:42] Michael Levy: Yeah.

[00:07:43] Vince Menzione: And that changed a couple years, maybe two years ago. Right. Because wasn’t it an engineering function marketplace? So, so

[00:07:50] Michael Levy: there was a, I think one of many reorgs Yeah. Like 2, 3, 4 reorgs ago. Yeah. We all lose, lose track in a large organization. Um, but yes, it was intentional that marketplace was moved into the partner organization.

[00:08:02] Michael Levy: Um, and the partner organization now is led, led by uba. Borno, if you’re familiar with her. Um, she leads partners and specialists. So, so specialists associated with our, our AWS service teams marketplace being one of them.

[00:08:12] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So then, then those, those resources are available to support those partners in interacting with the marketplace organization as well as developing their own ip.

[00:08:21] Vince Menzione: Yeah. So you

[00:08:22] Michael Levy: can think of the partner organization as kind of the one entry point for, for you as a partner of AWS, um, whether that’s your partner manager, whether that’s the folks that are developing. Uh, you know, the super important programs like go to market funding, co-sell, co build, co-market. All the programming associated with each, um, is all within the partner organization.

[00:08:41] Michael Levy: Very cool. Very cool. Anything

[00:08:43] Vince Menzione: else about the announcements you’d like to share?

[00:08:45] Michael Levy: Yeah, I think, uh, I’m interested to hear from a lot of the partners in this room, so I’m excited for this opportunity of you bringing the, the community together because we’ve been talking with a number of partners, both ISVs services partners, trying to get a feel for where they are in their age agent journey.

[00:09:00] Michael Levy: Mm-hmm. I think what we’ve seen a lot of is some of the newer, maybe startup partners that are born and bred in the ag agentic space. Yeah. Have AI agents that are off the shelves, but then we have ISVs that. Have a SaaS platform and have for decades. And how are they sort of thinking about reinventing themselves?

[00:09:18] Michael Levy: Yes. Um, you know, maybe they built an AI agent as a feature of the SaaS platform and I think that’s where we see it. We’re seeing it starting. Um, but how it evolves is how we’re, what we’re really curious about. Um, you know, is it sort of just a trial balloon where you’re putting ’em an ai AI agent ’cause everyone needs an AI agent?

[00:09:35] Michael Levy: Or are you sort of fundamentally rethinking how you deploy your software, how you do your commercials? Um, things like that we’re, we’re really interested to, to talk through.

[00:09:45] Vince Menzione: Yeah, I think we’re gonna be joined by somebody in a moment here. Absolutely. Who also knows a little bit about marketplace I’ve been told.

[00:09:52] Vince Menzione: Yes.

[00:09:53] Michael Levy: Uh, just a minute on, on, on Sugar and John in particular. I think he’s really on the leading edge of, uh, partners that work with our partners to help them go to market in cloud marketplaces. Um, and the features that they’re developing together with our product team are really just making a, a really complete experience for our partners that go to Market on Marketplace.

[00:10:13] Vince Menzione: So, uh, without further ado, then we won’t keep ’em long. Yeah. Hopefully he won’t mic up over there. So, John. John. Yo, how are you? Is it like

[00:10:21] Michael Levy: a talk

[00:10:22] Vince Menzione: show where I move over one seat or is that Um, I think, well, no, we’re gonna put John on the other side, I think, but also an incredible friend of mine as well, John.

[00:10:30] Vince Menzione: So great to have. Wanna give you a hug for those? Uh, we do. So John has been, uh, he’s been a guest on a podcast. He’s been at our studios in Boca. We did a live stream together and a winter retreat event together. So great to see you again. Thank you for making the trip out from San Fran.

[00:10:47] Jon Yoo: Thanks for having me.

[00:10:48] Vince Menzione: Are you mic

[00:10:48] Jon Yoo: there? Ah, there you go. It, it’s working now. All right.

[00:10:51] Vince Menzione: So maybe a little introduction, uh, for those of that don’t know you, John.

[00:10:55] Jon Yoo: Yeah. Uh, hello everyone. I’m John, co-founder, CEO of Sugar. Uh, you know, we automate workflows to help companies. Let’s transact and co-sell across cloud marketplaces. So we work super closely with AWS Microsoft as well.

[00:11:09] Jon Yoo: Sorry. And, uh, we, you know, I think there’s a lot of interesting things around ai agent marketplaces, especially around. How it’s deployed, some of the adoption that’s happening. So excited to talk about that.

[00:11:19] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Good. Well, I, we, we thought having you in the room as well, because a lot of what partners face in terms of implementation, getting onboarded and all those things, I think is a really great perspective here to have both of you up on stage and having, having a conversation.

[00:11:34] Vince Menzione: So, um, it’s really evolved over the last couple years, Mike, right? I mean, incredibly, um. What is the strategy today versus what it was when it got started? I think it was 2016. That marketplace really just got started.

[00:11:47] Michael Levy: It was more like 2012, was it that far back? Geez. Um, I think we’ve been part of probably many different, as you said, tectonic shifts.

[00:11:56] Michael Levy: Yeah. Like the shift away from, you know, AMS and usage base where you can just sort of spin up a workload to now, you know, fully SaaS, uh, you know, software. The private offer business has also been a big evolution. Um, I think the evolution is really changing. Like where, where marketplace started was, you know, it workloads that you can spin up, um, almost like shadow it where, you know, developers could easily spin up a workload and it was very self-service focused.

[00:12:26] Michael Levy: And then we really developed, uh, at, at the necessity of our customers and partners, this private offer business. So this negotiation at an enterprise level. For SAS software in particular, and that’s really exploded. And then from, uh, developed channel partner private offers as well. Um, and that, I think if we look at the strategy going forward, incorporating channel partners, uh, as you said, the multiple seats around the table.

[00:12:49] Michael Levy: Yeah, that’s really a fundamental partner of the part of the marketplace strategy going forward is how are we talking to channel partners, dis IES resellers, et cetera, um, really to help serve our mutual customers through marketplace.

[00:13:03] Vince Menzione: And John, you came to being as an organization just a few years ago. I feel like I met you when you just got started, but probably you were already at it for a couple years and fast

[00:13:12] Michael Levy: accelerating.

[00:13:13] Michael Levy: Well, fast

[00:13:13] Vince Menzione: accelerating. Take us through what you find because I, I think it, organizations still struggle here. Like how do I, how do I become transactable? Right? Remember when this all started, it felt like brochureware originally, right? I mean, it wasn’t, but it was in many respects. And then how do I then.

[00:13:31] Vince Menzione: Fulfill or actualize where I need to be to really support your organization. What do you, what do you see John, on your side?

[00:13:36] Jon Yoo: Yeah, I mean, I think there’s two, uh, interesting thing that I, that I, I didn’t quite foresee when, when starting the company was like, uh, one, just the amount of PLG, you know, self-serve signup flows that go through.

[00:13:50] Jon Yoo: Um, so some of our customers are like Snowflake and five Tran and a lot of people just spin up a cluster, for example. Um, and. That was very interesting for me to see of like, can we actually bring a consumer experience to B2B sales where, you know, the same way that I can go, uh, look at Egyptian cotton threat counts for my bedsheets and be able to one click purchase.

[00:14:12] Jon Yoo: Yeah. Uh, you know, you start to see a lot of that. And the second piece of it is just how many channel partners are involved. Um, I mean, I’m from San Francisco. I live in the. Silicon Valley SaaS bubble. Yeah. I, I don’t know the channel world and you know, I know a lot of folks in this room are from the channel world, and it’s just been so like surprising just how prevalent it is in the enterprise software space.

[00:14:36] Jon Yoo: Yes. And for marketplaces, like we have certain customers who are doing hundreds of millions of dollars and marketplace volume, and its majority channel partner driven. And I think that’s only gonna be, you know, there, there’s always a concern or kind of thought of, uh, Hey, is Marketplace going to Disin intermediate channel partners?

[00:14:54] Jon Yoo: Um, or are they gonna be along for the ride? And I think is very clear that they’re gonna be along for the ride. Uh, there’s, you know, channel partner, private offers, but also in the age of AI where you need like a really. Tight knit implementation, understand tribal knowledge because intelligence is getting commoditized.

[00:15:13] Jon Yoo: That channel partners are only gonna be way more prevalent than they’ve ever been. So pretty excited to, to lean into this space. Well, it feels

[00:15:19] Vince Menzione: like AWS saw this early, right? In terms of enabling the channel partners to work with the ISVs you brought that, you brought that. Capabilities. Yeah,

[00:15:27] Michael Levy: definitely. I think it was, it’s always been part of our partner business, obviously from A GSI migration strategy, all of that.

[00:15:33] Michael Levy: But now it’s becoming fundamental to the marketplace business, which is really the default path to market for AWS partners, uh, and more and more how our customers are looking to, to procure, whether it’s the consumer experience that, that John was talking about, be able to kind of point and click. Um, but also the implementation after that is hugely important.

[00:15:51] Michael Levy: Um, I would say before and after that.

[00:15:54] Vince Menzione: What are you seeing? I’m, I’m kind of curious on the agentic piece too, because you have organizations that are traditional ISVs, but then they’re also building a agentic or, or agents like you talked about Salesforce. I can think of rattle of hundreds of names that are in this room or around, or community.

[00:16:10] Vince Menzione: Do they, do they treat them? Do they bifurcate it and treat it separately? They do it together. How do they think through that process of, since you have a separate agent, AI. Capability.

[00:16:20] Michael Levy: Yes. Uh, I think we’re seeing a mix. So I think we’re seeing some ISVs that are thinking about ag agentic as like a feature of their overall platform.

[00:16:30] Michael Levy: And then we have others that are really kind of thinking big, as we say at Amazon on how they redevelop their entire platform. Yeah. So not just re-architecting some features on the roadmap, but how are they actually transforming their business? And what that looks like starts to change, especially when you think about commercials.

[00:16:48] Michael Levy: Before it was, you know, usage based on-prem software, then it was SaaS based seat license. Now everybody’s talking about outcome-based pricing and how do you do that, um, from an agentic perspective. And so we have partners that are thinking about all aspects of that. And from a marketplace perspective, we want to be flexible enough.

[00:17:06] Michael Levy: Um, both commercially so you can charge your customers the right way and the way that works for your business and then deploying, right? Yeah. We wanna get your software in the hands of customers more easily, more quickly, and reduce that time to value. What,

[00:17:19] Vince Menzione: what are you finding from the monetization process?

[00:17:21] Vince Menzione: ’cause you brought up a really interesting point ’cause people are still trying to figure through that. Right?

[00:17:25] Michael Levy: I think they’re still trying to figure through that. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I think we’ve had some that are building and launching ag agentic listings. Like you can do an API based or an MCP server on marketplace and you can have that be contract based.

[00:17:38] Michael Levy: Uh, well we just released now that you can have container offerings that are, uh, ag agentic and integrated with, uh, Amazon Bedrock Agent Core, and those are contract based or usage based. And so I think we’re seeing combinations of both of those things. Uh, in order to figure out how to reinvent the commercial model,

[00:17:56] Vince Menzione: what are you seeing from your side, John, from your clients?

[00:18:02] Jon Yoo: I, I’ll be a little bit, uh, maybe provocative is, is the best way. Put it, you know, some big

[00:18:05] Vince Menzione: clients we won’t mention, by the way, I’m not

[00:18:07] Jon Yoo: talking about our customer. Like when it customer, it snows outside one of your clients’ names starts to come to, but what, what, what I’m seeing in this space is, uh, I, I actually think a lot of these AI features or agents or whatever the heck you wanna call it from a marketing perspective.

[00:18:21] Jon Yoo: Are a lot of crap out there. Um, there’s not a lot of differentiation. I think there’s, uh, it’s just a series of prompts and there’s some sort of return output, or they are like messaging workflows or like RP alike functionalities as, you know, agentic workflows when in fact it’s like really deterministic and rules-based, but they just put agent on top because it’s, yeah.

[00:18:44] Jon Yoo: This agent is taking a bunch of actions. Oh, I mean, we, we used to do that. Earlier on, like two years ago before, you know, we actually started to develop these AI native functionalities. And I, I think what will be a telling, uh, kind of development is right now when you deploy an agent, you have to con configure the agent.

[00:19:03] Jon Yoo: So specifically, uh, to, to set guardrails, to, to feed it the, the context, like the tribal knowledge of a, of a, of a business that may not be codified. But I think what will open the door on this piece is, um. The, the same way that a user can like look at a decision or like make a trade off decision. And a lot of it is based on what they know about those internal processes and teams and make that decision.

[00:19:29] Jon Yoo: The agent should be able to make that decision without having like these rules based because they’ve, they’re able to, uh, understand all the historical processes and these travel knowledge, like speak, so, you know, so to speak. And so I think once that happens, we’ll be able to see a lot of these agents deployed in enterprise because now.

[00:19:48] Jon Yoo: You’re not having to like configure like these six month POCs and, you know, set up the right evaluation, uh, heuristics almost. But you’re actually able to just like, to your point, like one click deploy this agent and it totally understands your, your tech stack, your, your, you know, SOPs for example, and be able to make these, you know, decisions independently.

[00:20:09] Vince Menzione: We’ve talked about data. I dunno if you were gonna respond to, to John first. So, ’cause you also work with these organizations to make sure they’re enabled properly. How do you, how do you both think through this data conversation too? Because the agent relies on the data that’s resting that to access. Um, how do, how do you help them through that process to make sure that they’re, the data that they’re presenting is correct and, and usable.

[00:20:34] Jon Yoo: Start. No, go for it.

[00:20:38] Michael Levy: Uh, yeah. Yeah. I think it’s a, it’s a big part of data. Architecture’s a big part. Obviously there’s, from an AWS service perspective, making sure they’re architected correctly. And I think partners are a big part of that. Yeah. So whether that’s data transformation partners, data and analytics partners, services partners, that will help kind of prepare you for the next evolution of agentic ai.

[00:20:58] Michael Levy: Like it does start with data. Um, and I think we’ve seen partners that sort of try to skip that stage and, uh, you know, falter or like. You know, you have an ai, it’s one thing to have an AI model hallucinate. It’s another to have an AI agent hallucinate because that thing can actually take action. It can do dangerous things.

[00:21:15] Michael Levy: So it makes the underlying data structure super important. Uh, I think from a marketplace perspective, we also do have data providers in the marketplace. So when it comes to third party data, uh, that’s super important. Um, when you’re building an AI agent, making sure that has access to the right knowledge base.

[00:21:30] Michael Levy: Um, so whether that’s internal knowledge or external knowledge. And then like anything with, like, anything with AWS security and governance is, is paramount. So making sure that it’s respecting all the right, uh, privileges. Um, there’s some building blocks that AWS released recently called Amazon Bedrock.

[00:21:47] Michael Levy: Agent Core. Yes. You can think of that as just a series of. Call it Lego blocks to build and deploy agents, rock Agent Core at Rock, agent Core, that name that. Um, so if you’re building agents, uh, that is a very easy framework for you to use and deploy and go to production and to do so in a very secure and compliant manner, um, including data, data structures as well.

[00:22:07] Michael Levy: I,

[00:22:07] Vince Menzione: I keep thinking about your organization, the fact that the partner organization, the technical resources, and the marketplace, all sit in the same. Organization, do you go across, do you wind up like, I, I need, I need help here. So data, governance, security, all those things. Do you help bring those organizations together?

[00:22:24] Michael Levy: We do, and we have specialists. Uh, so the partner organization is actually the partner and specialist organization. Yep. Um, so the bolt on is really some of the specialists data and I special, uh, like product specialists, uh, that focus on a lot of those, particularly gen ai, particularly agent ai. Um, and data and analytics is a huge focus for us.

[00:22:42] Michael Levy: And so they help our customers and work with our partners to help our mutual customers understand what are the best AWS services to use? How do they get organized from a data perspective in order to then move to more agentic workflows?

[00:22:56] Vince Menzione: So you help broker those conversations. Definitely help broker those relationships.

[00:22:59] Vince Menzione: I always, always wonder if AI is helping with that, that process too. Does it also make recommendations?

[00:23:04] Michael Levy: AI is helping with our partners in general, particularly when it comes to co-sell. Um, so we’re developing tools internally for our sales teams to use to automatically match partners to specific opportunities, uh, which is just a huge benefit to both.

[00:23:18] Michael Levy: I guess all three legs of that, the AWS seller, the end customer, as well as our partners. Nice. Um, so that’s a big focus for us as well.

[00:23:25] Vince Menzione: Also, you, John, on the AI side, you’ve been using AI since I met you. In fact, you were like an early implementer.

[00:23:30] Jon Yoo: Uh, definitely for internal processes. And then we, we’ve been building like our own AI agents, uh, for the past, like year or so.

[00:23:38] Jon Yoo: Um, yeah, I mean, getting access to clean well structured data is definitely very difficult. Um, there’s a lot of concerns around. Hey, what, what do you have access to within our Salesforce? Um, so yeah, I think two themes are emerging. One is there’s like a whole host of startups that are starting to figure out how do I like, kind of help structure the data so that it can be fed into an LLM securely.

[00:24:02] Jon Yoo: Uh, that’s certainly one. The, the second piece is, uh, you know, I am, I’m sure CISOs are having like constant nightmares these days just at the, the level of surface area where, you know, these threat vectors can be. Can be introduced, but um, yeah, the quality of the data and how much of it I think is so important even for, as we think about our own agent, how do we feed it not just like, you know, CRM data or like NetSuite data for it to be able to take certain actions or for user to, to query the answer that our user ultimately wants.

[00:24:35] Jon Yoo: But, uh, how can we actually read it, uh, internal processes, like if someone has questions around, Hey, at, at my company, right? This is the steps that you should take to create a private offer or here’s the governance. Um, and we want to be able to answer that specific by specific, um, because every company’s quite different.

[00:24:55] Jon Yoo: Uh, and so, but, but, but the other piece of it is like, there, there seems to be this, uh, like platform wars, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does feel like that. Something, yeah. Like Gle, gleans a customer. They are, they have a kick butt product that everyone just loves using. You know, they integrate very deeply into a company’s ecosystem or like, of data and whatever.

[00:25:18] Jon Yoo: And you know, there, there’s a big announcement about how Salesforce and, and Slack kind of cut off their access and now open AI starting to enter this like knowledge base and you know, kind of generalized agent. And so it’ll be really interesting to see who does the data belong to the customer or like this, you know, Salesforce for example, have the right to cut off access.

[00:25:37] Jon Yoo: Yeah. Um, or is that ultimately up to. The, the company.

[00:25:43] Vince Menzione: It’s funny ’cause that was part of the conversation earlier about CRM solutions, right? And people have legacy data platforms that are out there. The data’s there. Yeah. I don’t need that structured approach on my screen all the time and try and searching through it.

[00:25:55] Vince Menzione: Right. The AI can do it for me. That’s a really interesting point. Do you have a perspective on that, Michael?

[00:26:00] Michael Levy: No, I think, uh, I like the earlier point that Erwin made about, uh, you know, are you thinking about your SaaS platform in terms of like the next UI feature? Yeah. Or are you thinking about how to make your SaaS platform accessible to AI agents?

[00:26:13] Michael Levy: Right. So if it’s AI agents that are going to be doing some of these workflows, some of these like more manual tasks. Is it, are the, is your platform able to communicate with them? Is your next buyer an AI agent? Or is your next buyer, you know, a a procurement human that’s sitting in a, in a, in a line of business?

[00:26:30] Michael Levy: Yeah. Um, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a really good question. Good. I think a lot of ISVs have to try to answer that.

[00:26:35] Vince Menzione: Yeah. It’s gonna be interesting.

[00:26:36] Jon Yoo: I mean, the, the next conference is gonna be AI agents sitting up here, right? Yeah. Just a panel. Pretty much. I’ll, I’ll be

[00:26:41] Vince Menzione: replaced. I’ll be on more break time, by the way.

[00:26:43] Vince Menzione: Get that team more break time. Um. So I’d love Agents don’t need breaks. No, I know. That’s why if we have agents, I don’t have to be up here. We could just have little, little facsimile of me. So we’ve got it like three minutes left. So I think that like what I would wanna know if I’m sitting out in the audience.

[00:27:01] Vince Menzione: It is like, how do what? Do the best do better? ’cause that’s what I want be, I wanna be the best. Right? So what are the best organizations that work with AWS’s Marketplace do better? And I, and having both of you here on stage is really great ’cause I have the vendor perspective and I have the company that helps hold these companies, get to the marketplace here.

[00:27:21] Vince Menzione: I’d love to get both of your perspectives on this.

[00:27:23] Michael Levy: Yeah, I, I think I can start. So what, what we’ve done is we’ve tried to distill some of, ’cause we get that question a lot. What does good look like? How do we, yeah. How do we do better? What does great look

[00:27:31] Vince Menzione: like? Right? Yeah. What does great

[00:27:32] Michael Levy: look like? And we distilled it into a model that we call cost or characteristics of successful sellers.

[00:27:38] Michael Levy: Nice. Um, and there’s six pillars to cost and you can look them up. And I think what’s important is we kind of created a rubric for what it looks like to be good on marketplace and how to reach success. And we are, we’re mil, we like to say, we’re like minting. There’s a billionaires club. Of people who are doing over a billion dollars on, on marketplace, and I know we all wanna be there.

[00:27:56] Michael Levy: Um, this isn’t like the keys to the castle, but it’s, it’s the next best thing. Um, and so we use that model to work with our partners. So if you’re, if you’re a partner of AWS or interested in becoming a partner, a of AWS to work with your partner manager on that model, um, and it’s, it’s fairly simple. Some of it’s very simple.

[00:28:14] Michael Levy: It’s about sales alignment, it’s about sales enablement on marketplace. It’s about putting your best foot forward as far as product selection on marketplace, things like that. We should probably add a seventh pillar, which is maybe working with folks like John and Sugar and the team, um, to get to go to marketplace.

[00:28:27] Michael Levy: But that’s really, uh, what we talk about. And I think the benefit there is we did an IDC study that folks that implement this cost framework, uh, basically accelerate 31 times faster than AWS sellers on marketplace that aren’t using the cost framework. So you’re talking about accelerating business and talking about doing more business and what good looks like.

[00:28:45] Michael Levy: That’s really what we’re. What we’re focused on.

[00:28:47] Vince Menzione: And so if people wanna find that study,

[00:28:49] Michael Levy: honestly I did it to make sure it was out there. There’s blog posts. You Google AWS marketplace and cost, and you’ll see cost. KOSS, uh, C, oss CS characteristics

[00:28:57] Vince Menzione: C say characteristics. Okay. Very good.

[00:28:59] Jon Yoo: John? Um, my, my only like kind of top thing around working with AWS is uh, like start narrow.

[00:29:07] Jon Yoo: I think everyone tries to over automate and they try to run before they’ve even proved that some motion works. Uh, within a small subset, you know, so do something manually at the beginning. Figure out what’s the right messaging that actually sticks and works. ’cause you probably got 20 other competitors that’s trying to pitch AWS and other hyperscalers the same thing.

[00:29:27] Jon Yoo: And so providing a unique messaging that is very simple to understand. Kind of like a, if X then me, if y then, you know, whatever else I, I think is a type of simple heuristic. Makes it easy for AWS to partner with you. Um. And then three, once you have that you know, piece kind of really figured out, then automate right then, you know, you can kind of drive sales adoption and, uh.

[00:29:51] Jon Yoo: You know, have your deal desk and rev ops and finance all align on the same piece. But until that, until that point when you have the engine working, start small, get that flywheel going. Yeah. All

[00:30:01] Vince Menzione: set. Yeah. Billion dollar club, you mentioned it earlier. That was a big, that was a big announcement last year and Jay McBain, you know, is gonna be your tomorrow to talk to, talks about that.

[00:30:10] Vince Menzione: There were five companies last year, five ISVs. Some announced it publicly, some didn’t. I think one of ’em is actually in the room that was not public about it. We won’t mention any names. Uh, and then there was a services partner, I think it was Presidio. I think they made an announcement. So where are we at?

[00:30:25] Vince Menzione: Where are we now with the billion Do billion dollar club?

[00:30:28] Michael Levy: We’re, we’re trying our hardest to mint new ones every day. Yeah. Yeah. As best as we can. But how

[00:30:31] Vince Menzione: many, how many are we up to

[00:30:33] Michael Levy: now? I don’t, I don’t know the number, especially those that are public. I think Salesforce maybe went public that they’re in the $2 billion club.

[00:30:38] Michael Levy: Yeah. Um, it’s also, uh, I think the goal is driving as much revenue and we’ve seen so many of our partners. Implementing costs as a seller, but more importantly, just working with marketplaces in general to help drive sort of more deal, win more deals, bigger deals, faster deals, is kind of the goal. Um, and we’ve seen that, uh, work not just in kind of the traditional infrastructure space, but you think about.

[00:31:03] Michael Levy: Uh, folks like Salesforce in the business application space, even industry vertical ISVs is really the next frontier. I work with many of them very directly, um, to help just crack, crack open the, the co-sell system. Fantastic.

[00:31:14] Vince Menzione: So good to have you on stage. Thanks. And John, also so great to have you. Uh, one point I’ll say it’s, it is really great to see marketplace take this front and center.

[00:31:23] Vince Menzione: Uh, I remember just, it was only a few short years ago where I would talk to some big ISVs, and I won’t mention some of ’em are actually in the room. And they’re like, why do, why do we need to do a marketplace? We have a channel or we have something else that we’re doing. We don’t need it. Right. And I think people miss the big point at that, that level.

[00:31:40] Vince Menzione: So it’s great to see the Absolutely. The transformation. Michael, so good to have you. So great to have AWS John, you and Sugar, great friends of ours. Great and incredible organization. Uh, these guys will be around hopefully for the rest of the day, and if you want to grab them. Uh, some incredible insights today.

[00:31:56] Vince Menzione: I appreciate you spending time with us. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for having us. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. We’re bringing these episodes to you to help you level up your strategy. If you haven’t yet, now’s the time to take action and think about joining our community.

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