Softchoice Signs AWS Strategic Collaboration Agreement

‘What makes us unique is the breadth and the scale at which we can do this together. We can reach all corners of North America with the hundreds and hundreds of resources that we already have, but also that we’re now going to jointly build some really deep capabilities to help these customers over the next several years.’ says Softchoice COO Andrew Caprara.

Taking Softchoice’s AWS Relationship To A Higher Level

Softchoice Tuesday said it has signed a multiyear strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services, making it the first national-scale service provider operating solely in North America to do so. That new agreement gives Softchoice, ranked No. 32 on the CRN 2021 Solution Provider 500 list, a big step up on the competition when it comes to working with the cloud giant, said Andrew Caprara, COO of Toronto-based Softchoice.

“Amazon’s got a very deep ecosystem of partners and some obviously fantastic services partners,” Caprara told CRN. “But what makes us unique is the breadth and the scale at which we can do this together. We can reach all corners of North America with the hundreds and hundreds of resources that we already have, but also that we’re now going to jointly build some really deep capabilities to help these customers over the next several years.”

With the new strategic collaboration agreement, Softchoice and AWS will work together to help businesses with new ways to launch, migrate, modernize and scale workloads on the AWS cloud, Caprara said.

“This really is a joint go-to-market approach and a plan for which kinds of capabilities we’re going to be building and when we’re going to do that because a lot of this is really built around building new competencies and capabilities in our service delivery organization,” he said. “It’s not just about getting some money to sell more Amazon subscriptions.”

Here’s a look at what how Softchoice came to sign the SCA with AWS and what Caprara believes it means for the solution provider.

So what’s going on between Softchoice and Amazon Web Services?

Amazon has selected Softchoice to be the first national-scale service provider [that operates solely in North America] to participate in a very exclusive strategic collaboration agreement with them. This is an opportunity for us to jointly build a much deeper and stronger service organization that can help customers across that entire hybrid multi-cloud journey by building our Amazon and AWS skills. And the benefit for customers and for Amazon is that they’re bringing in a partner now who’s got the opportunity to help customers across the entire landscape of their hybrid cloud strategy and hybrid cloud journey, and to be able to really do this at scale across both Canada and the United States.

Amazon’s got a very deep ecosystem of partners and some obviously fantastic services partners. But what makes us unique is the breadth and the scale at which we can do this together. We can reach all corners of North America with the hundreds and hundreds of resources that we already have, but also that we’re now going to jointly build some really deep capabilities to help these customers over the next several years. And so, as Amazon’s strategy moves more toward that commercial workload and into the traditional data center, having a partner like us who can help customers with that migration and the adoption of some of the advanced Amazon tools is really what they’re trying to build.

You said Amazon has selected Softchoice to be its first North America-based national service provider to participate in the strategic collaboration agreement.

There are a couple of in Europe that are already part of the program. ... There’s only one that has a presence in North America, but it’s small relative to their European presence.

Given that North America is Amazon’s biggest market, why would there only be one national service provider to sign an SCA with it?

Amazon has classifications of partners. There are the pure-play service provider partners, and some of those would have been in this program already. But there’s none in that national broader solution provider bucket. Think of the folks that you would know within our industry who’ve got that large scale: the CDWs, the Presidios, the SHIs, the Insights of North America. They group us into the NSP category.

What we’re talking about is being able to bring really differentiated sets of capabilities and a go-to-market strategy together with Amazon that is unlike anything from those who bring full solution sets to a customer. There are those service providers, but they’re not able to bring that complete solution. And so part of what we’re doing, for example, is leveraging that really strong base we have with VMware and the fact that pretty much every company in North America has virtual machines in their environment. And so we’ve got great certifications in capabilities from VMware on the VMC [VMware Cloud] on AWS solution. And now we combine that with the strength that we’re building in our AWS practice and jointly going to market with both partners. So we’re able to bring a broader solution set to customers than some of the pure-play Amazon service providers.

When you said AWS selected Softchoice to do this, was this AWS reaching out to Softchoice or Softchoice reaching out to AWS to find out how to be part of this?

It was more of an organic evolution. We have had an Amazon business practice for several years. And over the last 18 months we’ve really invested time to reinvigorate and reinvest ourselves in our Amazon practice. I think what’s happened is, we’ve really proven ourselves as one of the go-to partners for them in this area because of the fact that we both have the strength around that private cloud and that VMware infrastructure. And we have such a depth and strength around the software and the applications that are already sitting in many of these environments. As their strategies move more toward that area as a bit of a next wave of cloud migration, we’ve really, I think, punched above our weight in terms of how we’ve been able to help customers and how we’ve been able to partner with Amazon. And so as we were doing that over the last probably about eight or nine months, the conversation really started about, ‘Well, how do we accelerate this?’ And that’s where Amazon brought up the fact that they have this program, and so we’ve been working over the last six months or so to really understand if this was a good fit--and ultimately it was--and then understand what we would do jointly. ... This really is a joint go-to-market approach and a plan for which kinds of capabilities we’re going to be building and when we’re going to do that, because a lot of this is really built around building new competencies and capabilities in our service delivery organization. It’s not just about getting some money to sell more Amazon subscriptions.

Are these new competences being developed now, or are already developed, and is it specifically for the SCA?

They will be under development now. So as part of this, Amazon is going to be committing some technical resources to Softchoice to help us build those out. So that’s all going to be starting now as we kick this off. We already have some competencies and certifications. We have hundreds of different certifications on staff. But now this is about, how do we really start to double if not more the amount of folks we’ve got on our Amazon business and also building those new competencies?

How long will it take to complete all the current requirements?

The idea is that this is a multiyear kind of transformation. But obviously the first probably 18 to 24 months are much more heavy in the build phase.

Is Softchoice focused primarily on the AWS cloud infrastructure, or do you have similar partnerships with other public cloud vendors?

We certainly do have other relationships. A big part of our go-to-market strategy really is helping customers simplify all of the complexity of having multiple clouds in their environment. And so we’ve got deep, deep, deep capabilities on Microsoft Azure. We’ve been an AWS partner for six years. And we’ve really also invested in our Google practice in the last 18 months. And so we’ve got capabilities across the top three public cloud providers. And on the private cloud and data center side, we’ve got really strong depth in VMware and VMware Cloud Solutions, as well as some of the other traditional data center partners. So really, that hybrid multi-cloud approach and helping customers navigate that and manage all of that complexity is really core to our go-to-market.

So what does the AWS SCA mean to your customers? When your sales staff goes out and talks to customers, what does that mean?

What I would say is if you think about where customers have gone in the last few years, it used to be this idea of building a cloud-first strategy, right? You heard that all the time three years ago, five years ago. And that was good back then when it was a little more simplistic and people were just finding a new place to store their applications or to house some data and you were really just renting storage.

But we’re at the point now where we talk to customers about cloud-right, not cloud-first. And cloud-right means understanding your applications such that you’re using the right infrastructure and platform services to run that application properly. And so now we’re in a world where what we do is we help customers understand application and workload placement so that when it’s housed somewhere, you can leverage the power of the platform that it’s on to build and innovate even faster. So for customers, this depth now allows us to go even deeper when the right answer for them is to put their application on AWS and use the exhaustive set of platform services that Amazon offers a customer. We’re now better able to help customers, not just select AWS as we could have before, but actually to help them down that journey to properly leverage some of the capabilities there. Ultimately, we’ve got the managed service capabilities that help them manage that along with their other cloud environments.

So for customers, it’s about the ability to really get the applications and workloads doing the right thing and innovating even faster by leveraging the right platform. We’re better able to do that now.

When Softchoice is working with customers, does the company ever find cases where maybe they shouldn't have some application or some workload in the cloud?

Yeah, that’s the whole premise behind cloud-right. For example, we had a customer who was doing some heavy data analytics real time in their environment. And what was happening is, they were running this on the cloud and there was about a 10- or 12-minute delay. So by the time the data came back, it was kind of useless. And so for that customer, we actually did move that application back to on-prem, and we modernized the on-prem infrastructure to use faster compute and flash storage, and they got their analytics done even faster.

So that certainly does happen sometimes, and that’s why it’s so important to really understand what you need an application to do and then put it in the right place to do that. And I think with more and more of these hyperscalers opening up new locations, particularly in Canada here where there were only a couple of locations for awhile, that lag is starting to shrink. It’s opening up more opportunity there to do more with the public cloud. But certainly the idea is not everything has to move to the public cloud. The idea is to put the application in the right place for what you need it to do, and then hopefully we can move the customer to a place where they’re starting to think about DevOps and really new ways to modernize that application so we can help them move even faster.