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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Migration & Modernization: How AWS Partners help customers transform (PEX109)
In this video, Nic O'Brien discusses how AWS partners help customers with migration and modernization journeys, presenting six key benefits: faster value realization, deep expertise from certified professionals, pre-built solutions, cost mitigation through AWS programs, innovation sources, and early access to new announcements. He shares three compelling case studies: Slalom helping Vector (New Zealand power company) complete infrastructure scanning in half the time using AWS Transform; Calent and an asset licensing partner enabling PDI Technologies to achieve cost-neutral cloud migration within a year; and All cloud helping World Surf League modernize their data systems in six weeks to enhance competitive surfing coverage. With over 140,000 partners available, AWS provides validated competencies across various categories to support customer success.
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Main Part
Six Reasons Why AWS Partners Accelerate Migration and Modernization Success
Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming. My name is Nic O'Brien. I have 20 minutes, and I'm going to spend this time talking about how our partners help our customers on their migration and modernization journey. I'm going to give a little bit of context and then tell some stories, sharing explanations of where we've seen nice examples of how our partners are helping our customers.
Thank you very much. It's really special for me. I've come into this hall so many times over the years and done presentations, but I've never done one in here, and it is a fantastic feeling seeing such a hive of activity. This is probably an emotion and sentiment that many people have had whenever you're embarking on something big.
You're asking the question, looking around, saying, who's with me? Who's going to help me undertake this task? I'd like to think you can count on AWS to support you on that journey, but our customers are often helped as well by our partners. I tried to think about how I could structure the different ways in which they help.
I came up with a structure that gives six reasons why our partners do a great job in helping customers. I'm going to share those and then give you examples and stories where those things have happened in reality.
The first one, which is super important for all of our customers, is how they get to the value, how they get the benefits of these projects, and how they get there quicker. We are a pretty big organization and collect a lot of data. We see customers that go alone and customers that go with partners. We are convinced of the impact that our partners have in helping customers realize their objectives faster. We see it in loads of data and have loads of proof points. It's a recurring theme that they definitely help. Their know-how, ability, tools, and experience all make a massive difference in terms of getting there fast.
The second thing that they bring is the sheer wealth and depth of expertise that they have and the hundreds of thousands of people they've got with certifications. Over the years as we've been doing more migration projects, what we've really seen is skills shortages and lack of understanding that blocks and slows people down. Having access to our partner community that brings real expertise where they can learn from is a pivotal reason why they're used.
The third thing is all of their pre-built and tailored solutions. I've enjoyed my time here talking to partners and listening to their stories. There was one yesterday about a partner that had quite a large customer base in the engineering space. They were building out AI processes to help customers in that market embarking on big projects use AI to help them undertake that work. They're developing innovative ideas that are practical things customers can use. I really recommend exploring that. There are so many clever companies here in this hall that have really good IP that have helped customers. If you haven't been doing that, I would really encourage you to explore it. Concerto, Matilda, Cast, and some of our big partners like Calent have fantastic technology stacks of brilliant things, and it's all available and you can see it here.
The fourth thing which makes a massive difference is the cost of projects. As a fairly large organization, we've said that what will slow a customer down is they might want to make a project, but they have to run their business, they've got a P&L, and they've got a certain budget they have to operate within. We were seeing a lot of times where customers were keen but reticent on the financial side. So we've built out a number of programs that help our partners mitigate some of the costs so our customers don't have to pay. They get the job done, bring it in, we pick up the bill, and they get access to those skills. Some of our partners are really good at understanding how those programs work, and that makes a massive difference. I've got an example where that exact thing happened, and it's something we think is a real value proposition that our partners have.
The last two I'll quickly touch on are sources of innovation. I've got an example which I think is a stunning case of how our partners are bringing something to the table in the discussions they have and ideating about what solutions customers can take on. I think that is getting an external perspective to come in and challenge you as well.
I find that over the course of our projects, that is really good and fruitful stuff for our customers. The last thing, very quickly, is that here we are at re:Invent, where we make so many announcements. Every announcement we make will have a partner dimension to it. We will have early access programs, and we will have partners up and ready. So for those people interested in that, we have an extended community that are dialed in as well. That really does help explain some of these things for customers and extend that reach as well. So that is another thing that makes a massive difference.
Those were the different things I was thinking about in terms of themes, and then I thought, well, I should say before I get into my stories that we have a pretty decent amount of choice as well. We have over 140,000 partners available, a huge number of partners that you can choose from. We have put a lot of effort into developing competencies so that when a partner says they have certain credentials, they have been validated by us. We cover a huge range of different categories, and you can see a sample there of some household names that you are probably familiar with.
Real-World Success Stories: Vector, PDI Technologies, and World Surf League
But to move on, let us talk about these stories, because I think this is really where it brings it to life for me. The first story I have is about a customer called Vector. Is anyone here from New Zealand? Has anyone traveled that far? No, I did not think so. But anyway, they are a power and gas company in New Zealand, and the partner in this case was Slalom. This probably ticked some of the boxes that I just described earlier. One of the things that we do is we have launched AWS Transform as a service that has different components to help bring an agentic approach into how customers embark on big migration and modernization projects. One element of that is for VMware, and this is really very new in terms of how long it has been available. Slalom just took this customer on that journey.
They have the capability to understand how to do it and can see how to do it in the new world. What they were able to do is complete the entire scan of the infrastructure in half the time, being able to understand how you could build planning waves, how you can understand the network topology, and how you can understand what different systems are available. Without Slalom's help, they would not have done it as quickly and they would not have had access to some of our newest technology in this area. So huge credentials towards Slalom in this particular story.
If I move on, I have a couple more stories here. This one, and why I like it so much, is that this is really the financial story. So I will elaborate a little bit more on what I described earlier. PDI Technologies is an ISV that produces software available for gas and petrol, as we would say in the UK. If you go into a store in terms of payment and customer loyalty, those systems that are running are the ones you would see at Pilot, Shell, and big petrol and gas station chains. They have a significant hardware infrastructure and were running across five different data centers. They were encountering some issues in terms of resilience and stability, so there were feelings that they needed to modernize. They were presented with a big cost for tech refresh, so there was going to be a sizeable amount of investment, and they were saying, you know, we would be interested in going to the cloud, but this has to be cost neutral inside the year. So this was a really big project.
We had two partners in this, two for the price of one in this one. We had two partners that stepped up to try and find a way to actually meet the commercial objectives of that project and achieve cost neutrality. Calent was our delivery partner. They did a huge amount of work, and as I talked earlier, they really understand how our programs work and what incentives are available and how we could piece all that together. But despite that very formula-driven approach, it was not quite enough to make it cost neutral. So again, creatively, they then brought another partner in that was an asset licensing company. They did a look at what infrastructure existed in all of these data centers and said we will buy it off you, we will lease it back, we will buy it off you at zero cost and we will pay you a million dollars for that infrastructure, and we will dispose of it at the end as well. If it was not for that, this decision would not have happened. It was simply on the ability of our partners to work together, use all the structures that we have, and then their own creativity to sort of close the gap. That project is now running, and it is literally in the middle of the project as we speak.
It really could not happen without our partners. A customer would not have simply made that decision at all. So that was the second story that I wanted to highlight.
The third story is really talking to creativity. I love this story. If you are not familiar, WSL is the World Surf League. They are the governing body for competitive surfing and have been responsible for that for maybe ten to twelve years. It became an Olympic sport in 2016. I think Tokyo was the first year that they actually had it as a competitive sport. One of the things that they observed is that in order to break into the mainstream of the media industry and coverage, they had to change the way that they surface data about what is going on inside these competitions.
You can imagine that is a very dynamic world that someone is operating in. It is not like a track where you can just measure speed. Wave height is different, speed is different. There is a lot of variability. The one thing I have noticed when I come to America particularly is that the commentary is very data driven. The amount of discussion points, data points, and topics that have come up is very much driven by data. What they wanted to do was revolutionize the way that they actually stored data and then fed that into the commentary systems.
They got really creative in terms of what they did. They have wearable technology pulsing real-time data back into the system. They integrated it with their legacy data and athlete performance data. They were creating all of these new KPIs and saying, right, we are now ready to feed that directly into the commentators who are speaking to the coverage. That is getting more engaging content and driving their success in breaking into that market more. All cloud in this instance, who have a fantastic reputation for modernizing infrastructure, were behind that.
The thing that I have just described sounds like a massive project. I think they did it in six weeks. The speed at which they were actually able to move this system and get it onto the platform and get it up and running was quite remarkable in such a short time. Again, talking to that point about speed to execution, and of course they use these programs that we have as well, so they are minimizing the costs as well.
Hopefully what you are hearing from these examples is that there is a really strong chemistry between what we do and how our partners support our customers on these missions. So anyway, that is my lot. I have been told that if anyone has any questions, I should shuffle off to the side because there is a bit of a tight schedule that we are running to. But thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed that, and if you have any questions, I would love to speak to you separately or at the booth. Thanks a lot.
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