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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - AWS Global Startup Program: Open source commercial strategy with AWS (PEX105)
In this video, Serge Shevchenko from the AWS Global Startup Program explains how open source startups can commercialize their projects with AWS. He discusses that 95% of enterprises use open source, and covers the journey from open source to managed offerings, emphasizing the balance between community engagement and commercialization. Key topics include making solutions simple, stable, and secure through managed services, leveraging Amazon Bedrock AgentCore for AI-enhanced capabilities, and AWS's comprehensive go-to-market support including technical validation, joint workshops, marketplace integration, and the ISV Accelerate program. Success factors highlighted include preserving community trust, defining clear use cases, and coordinating both practitioner and executive-level sales motions.
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Main Part
The Open Source Opportunity: Why Enterprises Need Managed Services and How AWS Supports Commercialization
All right. Hi guys, how are we doing today? Good to see some familiar faces in the back. Did you know that today about 95% of enterprises use open source? My team specifically spent the last 10 years or so helping open source startups go to market with AWS, and I'm really excited today to actually walk you through tactically how you can do that today as well with AWS and really take lessons and key insights and takeaways from what we've learned over the course of the last decade or so.
So my name is Serge Shevchenko. I have the honor and privilege of leading the North America startup infrastructure partner teams. I actually started as a partner manager myself here at AWS, and over the course of the last couple of years I've moved into more of a management role, and my team also owns onboarding, so we have the long tail partners as well. So many of these are early stage startups, and our job is to really help them go to market with AWS. And as I mentioned earlier, a large portion of these startups are actually open source founders, and I'm super excited to walk you through the process of going to market with these partners.
So today we're going to start with a high level overview of what building your open source strategy with AWS looks like, why open source matters, and how to actually commercialize your open source on AWS and make it really simple, stable, and secure on AWS. We're going to talk about what managing an open source looks like on AWS and then activating and accelerating your go to market with AWS through the AWS Global Startup Program. There are a couple of key success factors that you could take away, jot down some notes, and then we can follow up after with Q&A, and I'm happy to stay after to walk through some of the more perhaps nuanced examples of go to market with open source startups.
So the path from open source to a managed offering is probably one of the most complicated and challenging journeys in technology today. While proprietary software companies can commercialize their code, open source founders really have to master a delicate balance of building and engaging their open source community and actually commercializing a cloud managed version and earning trust with both of those parties, which at times can be a very daunting and challenging task. But before we dive into really how to do that, I want to kind of at a high level talk through why open source is needed today in the commercial environment.
So as I mentioned earlier, open source is the backbone of modern enterprise technology today. And as I mentioned earlier, about 95% of enterprise organizations use open source technology today, and actually about a third of them are increasing their usage, so it's continuing to increase. As many of you know, AWS deeply embeds open source in our DNA. We are actively participating in well over 50 foundations and contributing to critical projects like Kubernetes, Rust, and some of our most popular services like EKS, RDS, and MSK are actually built on open source foundations.
The picture is pretty clear though. Open source delivers superior code quality through community review and offers flexibility and customization, really preventing vendor lock-in from, let's say, a specific licensed software out the gate. So it attracts a lot of talent and a lot of consumption from customers, so it makes it a natural fit without that vendor lock-in for enterprise adoption. And while open source provides a lot of that value through community adoption, through community driven innovation and transparency, there's a gap between free software and enterprise ready solutions. And this gap, as you see in the slide here, actually really creates an opportunity for startups to add value through managed services, agentic capabilities, or both.
So today we're going to focus a little bit more on how do startups add that value through managed service or agentic capabilities, which in my opinion is the future of open source software through agentic AI. So let's kind of explore how AWS can help these solutions become enterprise ready and make them more simple, stable, and secure on AWS.
So open source projects, as I mentioned earlier, offer a variety of commercialization paths like managed offerings, enterprise features, support plans, and more. Again, many of the other offerings are also evolving through agentic capabilities, but I'm going to try to stay focused on managed services and agentic offerings. One of the biggest misconceptions in software today or in open source is that it's free software and that free software means free solution. But as many of you guys know, if you're deploying an open source software, especially in an enterprise environment, it requires a complex amount of deep knowledge about the project maintainers, and you also have to learn how to scale it effectively, and of course there are some security implications there as well.
To address some of these challenges at an enterprise level, enterprises have to actually build teams to manage these open source software that are deployed into production in their enterprise environments. But to address some of these challenges so that the enterprise customers don't have to do it, as you all know, open source founders often build businesses around them. Of course, they're creating solutions that make software more simple, stable, and secure, and we've noticed that most startups who want to target enterprise customers often start with things like enterprise features, self-cloud hosted so that the enterprise customer doesn't have to host the open source in their environment, and so on.
If you look at setting up a traditional open source database, it might be pretty straightforward as an enterprise customer, but configuring it again for high availability and access requires proper replication, backups, updates, and deep expertise in the project. For example, if you take AWS RDS as a use case here, it exemplifies successful commercialization by packaging the specialized knowledge into a managed service, freeing users to focus on their core business rather than database administration. With the introduction of Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, I know there were some really awesome announcements earlier this week, these managed services can actually now become building blocks or rather primitives for AI agents, which is huge.
Amazon Bedrock AgentCore can transform managed services into AI-accessible building blocks through the gateway interface, and by converting APIs into MCP composable tools, it really enables AI agents to discover and utilize services securely with authorized boundaries. The shift from human-operated to agent-assisted services opens a new commercialization path for open source projects or with open source founders as well, really taking that as a path to commercialization. So I want to expand on what commercializing the managed service with AWS looks like and more specifically through the AWS Global Startup Program, which my team owns and operates.
AWS Global Startup Program: Technical Validation, Go-to-Market Support, and Converting Community Users to Enterprise Customers
As you begin building that service, we're ready through the AWS Global Startup Program to really help support a variety of your go-to-market approaches, but I also want to emphasize we're here to support all startup types. So whether that's infrastructure, you have a storage, compute, networking solution, perhaps you're an agentic platform or you're offering a database or a security solution, we're here to support all startup types. On the screen here, actually some of these are very near and dear to my heart. I was actually the PDM for some of these partners years ago, but these are some examples of open source projects, the projects beneath dbt Labs, ASTRONOMER, sysdig with Falco, and Cribl.
We've actually helped a lot of these startups commercialize their open source projects on AWS, not just through helping or supporting the development of the solution, but actually go-to-market. How do we convert open source users to paid customers through the AWS relationship? The AWS Global Startup Program in and of itself and with the partner teams offers also technical validation through the FTR, Well-Architected Reviews, and some of the other things I mentioned earlier. We can really transform, especially in the AI era, using some of these Amazon Bedrock AgentCore capabilities to help modernize the open source project but also the managed service, using it as a primitive to build AI-enhanced services, really from prototype to production. That's going to be a big focus for us next year.
We provide these dedicated technical managers, and oftentimes they're called Partner Solution Architects, to really connect startups directly with service teams, enabling valuable customer feedback loops on which features should we actually develop in the managed offering that customers want and need on top of the open source projects. Then we have other programs that actually can validate the solutions, like the competency programs, service delivery, and more. The idea there is how do we identify the right project, help develop and commercialize the solution on AWS, and then how do we validate it to make sure that customers feel comfortable to deploy these managed services either in their cloud or in a BYOL model within the enterprise environment instead of managing the open source on their own.
From a go-to-market perspective, now that we've addressed how we can help commercialize technically and help build the managed open source service, as I mentioned in the beginning of the conversation, for a lot of open source founders, commercializing and going from a community focus to enterprise sales is really challenging. Enterprise sales cycles are complex. They involve multiple stakeholders, they can take time, extensive reviews, lengthy procurement cycles. It's a completely different experience.
To help address this gap, especially for our early stage founders, we provide resources for comprehensive go-to-market support starting with really identifying the open source community, not just outside of AWS but inside of AWS. Are there open source contributors that we can establish relationships with? The goal here is really to enable and amplify the presence through joint developer marketing.
So we'll do things like joint hands-on workshops and immersion days. We'll actually execute workshops through our AWS lofts in San Francisco and in New York. The idea there is how do we establish a presence together to enable the community with the startup founders, with the startup community, and AWS's presence. And the idea there is how do we incorporate and establish trust with these prospect customers and help convert them to paid users down the road.
And as we develop the workshops, we actually try to incorporate the marketplace in there as well so that through the workshop we're actually getting developers to subscribe to the solution, at least the cloud-hosted version, let's say a free tier. And the goal there is now as we've generated, let's say, a handful of prospect practitioners that are using the solution, they're deploying it through the marketplace, now we can actually address a top-down sales motion. The goal here is to say we see a pattern of customers that are using the open source project now have moved over to the free offer through the marketplace. Let's go target their executive decision makers through the existing relationships that we have with our customers.
So we'll do a variety of activation events in the field for top-down, so things like executive dinners. We'll do events and really try to bridge the gap between open source or free tier users and potential executive decision makers that we have an existing relationship with, considering the size of our customer base. And then what we do is actually super interesting here. We use programs like ISV Accelerate to then incentivize the AWS rep to promote your solution, the commercial offer, to the enterprise decision maker, ultimately helping them close the deal through the marketplace.
So now we just kind of walked through we're helping open source founders commercialize their open source offer, build a managed service on AWS, help the free users on open source or the open source users convert to free users on the paid cloud model. And then at the same time we're burning the candle from both ends and now targeting the executive and enterprise decision makers and bridging the gap and helping close enterprise licenses for our startups with our shared customers.
So I just want to walk through a couple of quotes. This is one of our friends at Plumi. He quoted that joint workshops with the AWS Global Startup Program have been indispensable for onboarding new users and helping practitioners succeed with both Plumi and AWS, yielding significantly faster conversions than other channels. So with this partner we did, I think it was about 12 workshops in a year. That year we also trained about 50,000 practitioners on our startup solutions that are built on AWS. This is just after COVID when really the approach to community marketing changed, and we had to do the same.
Another quote here from one of our friends over at Cube Cost. Actually their booth is just behind us. Cube Cost got acquired by IBM in the last year, and they said that the AWS Global Startup Program helped us reach not only AWS customers but developers as well, which is pivotal to the growth of our AWS partnership and overall business. Growing our AWS customer base was one of the many important variables that led to our acquisition, our recent acquisition by IBM.
Key Success Factors and Next Steps for Building Your Open Source Business on AWS
So I'm going to give you guys just a couple of key success factors. Obviously preserving community trust while building a path to monetization is super important. Keeping that balance is difficult but highly critical in this process of commercializing the project. I've seen many projects and many commercialization attempts fail because of their inability to balance both community trust and the commercialization approach.
So of course, the next piece is ensuring that we have technical excellence and scalability through the relationships with AWS, which we are happy to help provide, making sure that as you build your managed open source or your commercial offer that it has the path to scalability and security, of course, through programs like the Well-Architected Review. And this next piece we actually kind of struggle with oftentimes with our startups is you've now built a managed open source, you're commercializing it, you're going to market, but you have dozens of features, many of them customers you may have only one or two customers using.
And so we oftentimes find ourselves having to really distill and boil down what is our beachhead use case, what do we do really well, and how do we define that messaging in clear articulate terms externally to the customers, but also internally to the AWS community. Because AWS reps are often speaking in business outcomes and less specific technical bits and bytes with the customer, that is oftentimes led to our specialist sales organization, our solution architecture teams.
Of course, defining the better together stories is highly critical, not just externally but internally at AWS as well, and some of us like to call it partner market fit. Then, of course, a key success factor here as we try to commercialize these projects is making sure that if we're targeting both the practitioners and the executive or enterprise buyers, that we're doing it together. We need to have a cohesive plan and strategy to go from top of funnel, middle funnel, and bottom of funnel conversion for both titles, creating a triage between adoption at the customer side and helping the executive decision makers make the decision to procure the enterprise license. This helps create a flywheel of value for the end customer building on top of AWS. Last but not least, we're here not just to be a cloud provider. We want to be a force multiplier for our startups.
Just a couple of quick next steps to walk away, and I alluded to some of this before. Before you commercialize on AWS, make sure you audit your open source readiness. Are you ready to truly commercialize and build this into a formal business? Some of the ideas that we've actually been talking about with a lot of our open source founders is prior to commercialization, starting to set yourself up for success, for example, embedding telemetry data in your open source projects. That way, when you are commercializing, you're deeply understanding what features are actually in demand and what issues are happening through the software development life cycle that need to be evolved so that the open source project can be properly monetized and supported for customer needs. Startups that fail to create effective telemetry early on in the open source projects really struggle to maintain and preserve that balance between open source and a paid offer.
Of course, the next step after that is selecting your monetization path and oftentimes working backwards from the customer need and demand. Engage with the AWS startup partner team and AWS Global Startup Program for support. I would advise doing that sooner rather than later, and then we can help curate a path forward as we build our businesses together. Then with AWS, design your managed open source and potentially pull in agentic features, plan to go to market with AWS, and then execute.
So that's it. Before you head out, I'd love to hear your feedback. Please take a moment to complete the survey here in the QR code, and your input helps myself and the rest of our team improve our future presentations to deliver content. I'll stick around. I know there's probably a ton of questions, and you can always find more information on our website. You can also find more information about AWS startup programs at startups.AWS. So thank you guys.
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