Somehow I was lucky enough to get front-center seating.

This was an exclusive partner-only presentation so most of my notes will stay in the drawer … but … some immaterial snippets anyhow:

Terry Wise (Partner Development Chief) ran the presentation, he’s got some good stage presence although his warm-up joke telling bored partners to go ahead and take advantage of cyber-tuesday deals on amazon.com using their laptops or mobile devices didn’t get any laughs (out loud). About 15 minutes later however I almost doubled over when the guy two chairs over was doing exactly that!

Terry introduced Adam Selipsky first (VP Sales / Marketing / Support ) — yah, interesting combination that support and marketing mix. Between the two of them we got a nice “where things are at and here’s the direction we are headed overview”.

Some interesting players missing from this chart, but overall agree. Amazon is way out in front.
I can’t claim to be an expert in cloud, but I’ve spent hundreds of hours researching vendor offering this year and noone else has a compelling OpEx value-sell.

Tiffany Bova — VP of Gartner Research indirect channels took the stage next. Insightful thoughts, especially liked seeing Gartner’s thoughts on CIO priorities and the current hype cycle of the industry.

Gartner’s CIO big initiatives survey rates Mobile, Cloud, Social, and Big Data as top of the list right now. It was good seeing that inked on page, sorta gels things for you.

Also I knew it was material, but apparently Gartner thinks 35-40% of IT spend is outside of CIO control these days. Marketing is big (eg, sales force and analytics) — but other business units are equally elusive when it comes to avoiding IT control. Later in her breakout she makes it clear that maximum lead conversion can only be had by engaging both IT and business units together. I know this makes sense, but I’ve certainly seen a lot of underhanded pitches by vendors trying to work around IT or the users.

Andy Jassy got up but didn’t have much to say beyond why he thinks AWS is so great, the rest of his team were tasked with interesting announcements so that wasn’t unexpected.

AWS launched their Premier Partners level for the most successful companies working in the ecosystem — a nice badge of pride but certainly makes my “Standard” level look even more inconsequential. I better go get to selling!

ps.

Veg. Lunch on-demand