The AWS Global Partner Summit, the first major keynote to be held at the 2021 Re:Invent, featured some major new services announcements.

On Monday, AWS kicked off the first day of its 2021 Re:Invent event, which this year is a hybrid event, being held live at the Venetian in Las Vegas, as well as streamed online for those who want to continue in that format for now. The main Monday keynote event was the Global Partner Summit. It saw several announcements made, all of which were of major importance to the partner community, but some of which went beyond that to broadly impact customers as well.

“We want to build partnerships that outlast all of us in this room,” said Doug Yeum, Head of WW Channels and Alliances at AWS. “By transforming, you have built and grown successful businesses, but more importantly, you have delivered successful outcomes to your customers.

Yeum gave particular emphasis to the development of joint customer offerings from multiple AWS partners in collaboration, including Lakehouse for Life Sciences, a joint initiative from Accenture and Databricks.

Yeum then turned his attention to the new partner-related announcements, in particular, the expansion of the AWS PartnerPath offerings. The first of these, ISV Path, was introduced in early 2021, and replaced traditional technology and consulting partner type models with an offering type model that provides a  curated journey through partner resources, benefits, and programs.

“We launched our first PartnerPath at the beginning of this year, around software offerings,” Yeum said. “Since the launch, the number of validated software offerings from partners has grown exponentially, including consulting partners. Before PartnerPath, they didn’t have a programmatic way of engaging with AWS around their offerings.”

Now AWS is announcing four new PartnerPath models, which will roll out on January 22, 2022. They are Hardware Path, Training Path, Distribution Path, and Services Path. ISV Path has also been rebranded, as Software Path.

“The launch of these four new PartnerPaths  will not only simplify engagements with AWS, but will provide a tailored experience for partners,” Yeum said.

The different PartnerPath models all provide partners who register in them with access to a dedicated partner portal, training discounts, business and technical enablement content, programs, and benefits relevant to their offerings. While there are no tiers, as partners progress along each Path, they can leverage enablement resources, unlock funding benefits, and tap into a broad set of programs to innovate, expand, and differentiate their customer offerings.

“Along with this, we are also improving AWS Partner Central  to accelerate time to value,” Yeum said. It will provide a better user experience that lets partners navigate through enablement resources, structured content, benefits, and programs to better showcase their expertise.

Yeum then announced that 15 new partners globally have become AWS Premier partners.

“We now have 123 premier tier partners globally today,” he said.

Yeum then announced the new AWS Graviton Ready Program for partners, with software products that support AWS Graviton-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. The program provides AWS vetting of Graviton-enabled software products, including operating systems and platform services, security, monitoring and observability, CI/CD, data and analytics, and cloud devices.

“This validation helps customers to discover Graviton-based partner offerings, and optimizes costs for customers,” Yeum said. “If you have a software offering, I highly encourage you to leverage this.”

Yeum also encouraged partners to utilize the technology it recently acquired with Blu Age, which has been in the AWS Marketplace for some time. They make a portal that automates the transformation from mainframe legacy languages like COBOL.

“I encourage all of you to leverage their technology and their experts who can help accelerate delivery of those products, to drive tech transformation with your customers,” Yeung told his partner audience.

Stephen Orban, General Manager of AWS Marketplaces and Control Services, then took the stage to announce new and enhanced services in his area.

“Our initial launch of AWS Data Exchange made it easy to find, subscribe to and use third party data from hundreds of providers,” he said. “This works best where customers need an entire data set and all of its history. However, some customers want to only query data they needed. Two new capabilities make this possible.”

The first is AWS Data Exchange for Amazon Redshift.

“It lets customers find, subscribe to and query dozens of copies on Redshift without having to ETL,” Orban said.

“Customer also wanted to access data one API call at a time and govern them like their AWS calls, so we are launching AWS Data Exchange for APIs,” he added. “It lets partners bring existing APIs to Data Exchange. This launch removes the need for customers to do any bespoke API integration.”

Orban then announced AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere, which extends AWS Kubernetes support to on-prem environments.

“AWS Marketplace for Containers was launched in 2018, providing hundreds of container listings deployable to AWS managed container services,” he said. “But we also had customers who self-manage their own Kubernetes environment. AWS Marketplace for Containers Anywhere extends support for new Kubernetes offerings, and can be deployed with a few simple commands. It makes AWS Marketplace more of a one-stop shop for customers who want to consume AWS in all kinds of environments.”

Sandy Carter, Vice President, Worldwide Public Sector Partner and Programs at AWS, then gave some program updates. She indicated that the energy competency announced a year ago is now generally available, and that 32 partners have achieved it. She also announced that AWS now has 4x FedRamp authorized partner solutions as any other provider, and that AWS is now leveraging FedRamp’s ATO program to help partners become high authorization IL 5 partners.