Amazon Web Services is calling on its partners to help expand the cloud compute giant further into the enterprise with a massive expansion of the AWS Marketplace.

The cloud giant today rolled out a handful of new back-end features and options at its virtual re:Invent event, all aimed at letting third parties offer new subscription and management offers to its business customers, particularly large enterprises looking to wield massive software deployments.

Leading the charge will be a new option for Marketplace: services. Customers will now be able to use the AWS market to sign up for training, assessments, tech support and the like for third-party software.

Dave McCann, AWS’ vice president for migration, marketplace and control services, told SiliconANGLE in an interview that the aim of the push is to take the cloud platform into a full-fledged software supply chain outfit, letting companies get their software, licenses and now training and management services from a single source. In the process, AWS keeps everyone under its big tent and running on its cloud platform.

“We’re the first cloud infrastructure marketplace to offer quotation and contracting of professional services,” McCann said. “We’re modernizing the supply chain of software.”

Of particular interest to Amazon, said McCann, are the specialized service providers that offer tailored services for companies in particular industries and markets, such as Presidio Inc., Computacenter plc, Rackspace Technology Inc. and Trend Micro. These services fill the gaps for things such as industry-specific security services or identity management that aren’t covered by the large generalized service providers such Deloitte or Accenture, which are focused on large software deployment such as from SAP SE.

“Having the right tools for the right job matters,” said Doug Yeum, head of the AWS Global Partner Organization. “Our customers have always told us that the No. 1 reason they move to the cloud is the speed and agility it provides them. We want to make sure our customers and partners have access to the deepest set of services.”

Services will not be the only new additions to the AWS partner program. Providers will also be armed with a new set of APIs that will allow them to manage the licenses on their private marketplace portals without having to work directly through the AWS Management console.

For customers, that means that buying third-party software and services over the private markets will be easier, while providers will be better able to get those options and services operating in harmony with their internal policies and requirements. An additional new service, Managed Entitlements, will also allow large businesses to manage and track their licenses from Marketplace.

All of this dovetails nicely into the overall theme of this year’s re:Invent show and Amazon’s larger strategy for getting customers to see it as not just a hosted cloud provider, but as a full-scale business computing platform.

Chief Executive Andy Jassy has already declared that getting AWS into the hybrid cloud operations customers are operating already is a top priority for Amazon in 2021 and beyond. The hope is that with the growth of edge computing setups, businesses will look to AWS and its partners as a way to link up their on-premise data centers with their cloud setups — ultimately providing a wider onramp to the cloud, AWS Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr said in an interview.

“Customers want us to distribute AWS to those various edge nodes where they can use it in a way where it’s the same APIs, the same control plane, the same tools, the same hardware, and use it consistently,” Jassy told SiliconANGLE in an exclusive interview ahead of the conference.

The partners also provide AWS with a way to better compete with primary cloud rivals such as Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud, which have all positioned their respective software, middleware and management services as a more complete alternative to what has traditionally been seen as a more bare-bones cloud platform in AWS.

Jassy, meanwhile, sees a mutually beneficial relationship in it for the companies that choose to partner with Amazon to fill out its services lineup.

“There is room for multiple companies to be successful, and that is what is happening,” he said during re:Invent. “We have always believed and will always operate in a way that we will work as hard as we can to make sure our partners are just as successful on top of our platform.”

With reporting from Robert Hof

Photo: Christian Purdie