Mumbai: Channel partners are always on the lookout for new and emerging business prospects to differentiate themselves in the market. Partners who are eager to taste new waters, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and voice recognition might be the might be the area to explore the potentials. Amazon Web Services (AWS) who has announced big growth plans in the AI, IoT and voice recognition space is looking to incorporate its channel deeply to head the next big growth plans.
The company has recently announced the launch of a new program around its Alexa virtual assistant. With the new program, AWS is trying to further grow the partner ecosystem around its voice recognition solution. The new program is aimed at helping service providers and software vendors integrate its capabilities with their products and services.
According to the company, the Alexa Service Delivery Program for partners will give companies access to tools, training, solution blueprints, and support for the assistant, which is best known for helping customers using Amazon’s Echo line of connected speakers. Right now, there are more than 3,000 “skills” available for Alexa, which give specific, focused capabilities to the virtual assistant. The new partner program is aimed at bolstering that number, especially for business-focused applications and services.
AWS head of channels and alliances, Terry Wise, told ARN that this was an area he saw as having enormous growth potential for the partner community, as it would allow them to fundamentally change the way their customers interacted with consumers and employees. (Click here to read full article)
“When you start to extend that [concept] into Alexa and some of the machine learning behind it, you can begin to realize that IHG will be able to predict the experience a consumer may have prior to getting to one of their properties and develop automated personalization of an experience,” he said.
“From a partner’s point of view, it is not just the technology creation, there is a lot of work to be done there. But if you think about all the different scenarios of how they can integrate all these capabilities to enrich the customer experience, it is a unique time and opportunity”, he added.
The cloud provider at its re:Invent conference 2016 held in Las Vegas recently, announced a suite of updates to its partner programs. The updates are focused on helping customers get increased use of Amazon’s cloud services and getting partners to invest further in AWS.
The company announced a new AWS service to help customers more easily find a partner that can help them with a particular problem. Customers can search the Partner Solutions Finder to get a list of companies that Amazon works with based on keyword, company name, and what Amazon service they work with.
Customers can also filter the list based on use case, industry, and AWS product, so they can find companies with expertise in areas like life sciences DevOps.
AWS also announced the new VMware Cloud on AWS Partner Program to help help service providers and other AWS channel partners take advantage of the forthcoming service. The company has re branded its Government Partner Program as the AWS Public Sector Partner Program, which will help partner companies reach government organizations as well as schools and nonprofit organizations. AWS also announced a new set of Business Builder tools that help companies build markets and deliver services.
To help accelerate the growth of AWS in IoT and financial services applications, Amazon launched a pair of certifications for partners. The IoT Competency will help customers find partners that help enable the use of the internet of things, including software and hardware providers.