Amazon Web Services Inc. Chief Executive Adam Selipsky, who took the reins earlier this year as former AWS CEO Andy Jassy stepped up to head all of Amazon.com Inc., rejoined the company at a pivotal time.

In this, the first of a four-part interview with me and Wikibon Chief Analyst Dave Vellante ahead of the company’s re:Invent conference running this week in Las Vegas — the cloud industry’s biggest — Selipsky charts out AWS’ and Amazon’s increasingly prominent role in the outside world.

Despite the appearance that Amazon’s cloud computing unit is a juggernaut that can do just fine on its own, it has long cultivated an ecosystem of partners such as software and hardware makers and systems integrators to help it provide the ancillary products and services crucial to companies using the cloud to transform their operations. Today AWS has a Partner Summit intended to rally those partners and highlight their critical role — and keep them at least satisfied even as AWS comes out with countless new services that could compete with them.

“Our partner ecosystem system has been a fundamental plank of AWS strategy since day one and it remains so,” Selipsky says. “If you put aside all the worry and the fear-mongering, if you look at the actual partners who have been significantly hurt by things AWS has done, I think you’re hard-pressed to find almost any literally in the history of AWS.”

You can get the big picture from Selipsky’s entire interview here, and don’t miss the next three installments of the full interview in coming days. Also, check out wall-to-wall coverage of re:Invent by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, and SiliconANGLE all this week and beyond for exclusive interviews with AWS executives and others in the AWS ecosystem. If you’re at re:Invent, stop by theCUBE’s studio in the exhibit hall.

This interview was edited for clarity. (* Disclosure: SiliconANGLE and theCUBE are paid media partners at AWS re:Invent. AWS and other sponsors have no editorial control over content on SiliconANGLE or theCUBE.)

Return to re:Invent

Furrier: What’s going to be the keynote vibe at re:Invent? 

One message is we are a community. We’re all in this together. There’s AWS, there are our partners and all of our customers and we together are the ones who are all trying to find new paths and new solutions. I think a lot of companies are like, hey, I’m the vendor and I’m the technology provider and I’m just providing solutions. And we’ve always done this, but more and more want people to understand that we’re part of this community and we’re doing this together and in collaboration.

You’ll see a continued message from us that we get that just raw performance and basic capabilities remain as critical as they ever were. We can’t take our eye off of that ball and just look at the next shiny object. You will continue to see us innovating in raw compute and in silicon and those types of capabilities. We will continue to talk a lot about data and the importance of that, of our building capabilities that help with that entire journey that data needs to traverse. 

And you’ll see us continuing to stress that customers want us to continue to build out these horizontal use cases, as well as industry-vertical, purpose-built solutions and we’ll continue to really accelerate our efforts in those areas.

Furrier: What about Amazon’s and AWS’ larger role in the community and the world, given their success has put them in the public spotlight?

One more theme that you’ll see from us, and one about which I’m personally very passionate, is around Amazon’s role and AWS’ role in the world, both as an employer and as a citizen of our various communities. Amazon is somewhat well-known for having these very deeply held leadership principles. There’s 14 leadership principles or LPs as they’re often called. And they’re very powerful. They’re very effective. I often liken them to the central nervous system of the company. And earlier this year we added two new leadership principles.

One was to strive to be Earth’s best employer. And the other is that success and scale bring broad responsibility. These are topics that Amazon has cared about for years, but having just come back after being gone for four and a half years, I’m particularly passionate about those. I really want to put my shoulder to the wheel and be one voice within the company which really helps to innovate and push the envelope on both of those. We want to be really good, local citizens, really good citizens of our local geographic communities. We want to be great citizens of our national communities, and we want to be a great global citizen.

So we’re working on everything from homelessness and Mary’s Place, which is a homeless shelter in that building I can point to right down there. [There’s also] our efforts around sustainability and we’ve been very public in saying that Amazon is already the largest purchaser of renewable energy in the world. We will be 100% renewable energy by 2025. We accelerated that from our original 2030 goal. And we still are committed to our climate pledge, which is for all of Amazon to be a net carbon zero by 2040, 10 years ahead of the Paris Accord.

Furrier: Leadership on skills gaps is a big focus for Amazon too, right?

There’s just an exploding need for digital skills and for cloud skills, in particular. Particularly with the pandemic, there’s been so much disruption to jobs and such underemployment and unemployment problems. We’ve committed to train 29 million people by the year 2025 with cloud skills. We’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars to do it. And we’re doing that in a variety of ways where we have this program called AWS Restart, which is an intensive, full-time 12-week program, with a focus particularly on unemployed and underemployed people.

We’ve already had a lot of successful outcomes from it. One woman in the U.K. working at a fast-food restaurant was laid off during the pandemic and is now a solutions engineer at a cloud-based company. We’ve got fitness instructors. We have at-home parents, we have transitioning military members.

We’re launching the AWS skills center, which is a full digital suite of over 500 training classes and 16 different languages, so it’s successful anywhere around the world. And we just announced the AWS Skills Center right here in Seattle, which is a physical place where the applications at cloud from gaming to robotics are demonstrated in a free, accessible environment. We’re going to do a lot of training and classes in that center, and also a lot of networking events to hook up potential employers with adults going through those skills training classes. We’re starting here in our hometown in Seattle and hope to expand that over time.

Furrier: What have you learned the most from the pandemic?

Personally, I learned more and more to lead with empathy and to try to be a really great listener. I was fortunate enough at the beginning of the pandemic to have my own home to be in with a door I could close and get work done and a supportive family around me that provide me with companionship, but also without a lot of distraction. I found it incredibly hard, and I was incredibly fortunate with that situation.

We saw so many teammates who were living in such radically different situations. A lot of those were difficult situations ranging from single people living in an apartment by themselves, some of whom had just started their job and moved to a new city and were facing issues around isolation, to parents with young children, retreating to taking meetings in the bathtub, because it was the only quiet place in the house, to young people with four roommates in a two-bedroom apartment, trying to figure out who got the kitchen table. We saw a lot of customers with their industries disrupted in industries like retail, hospitality and travel. Other industries exploded upwards, videoconferencing being a good example, and online retail.

As a company leader, I learned how important it was to really listen and to understand what each person was going through and what they were facing and to try and really bring a very open attitude to how could we help? How can we as teammates help those people? How can we support each other? And I found the answer was not by coming in and saying, “Well, we have a company playbook, and we have a set of answers as to the services we are going to provide to you.” It’s really by understanding it was country-by-country. It was person-by-person.

Furrier: Highly situational?

It’s very situational. And trying to not only come up with broad things that the company could do, which were helpful to a lot of folks, but also to try to find ways to get small individualized, local teams to band together and just to support each other in ways that are very subtle and very local and very personal. There’s no way that the company could accomplish that with a top-down approach. The more that I could bring ears which were open wide and an open-mind attitude to what people need, the more people appreciated what the company is trying to accomplish and the more help we could provide to them as teammates.

Partnering up

Furrier: Partners have been a big focus of AWS from the start, but there has always been the potential and reality that Amazon can compete with the ecosystem. How do you see that situation evolving especially as AWS moves to higher-level services?

Our fundamental strategy around our partners is unchanged. Our partner ecosystem system has been a fundamental plank of AWS strategy since day one and it remains so. The only thing that’s changed is really, we continue to pour more and more resources into enabling the partner ecosystem. From a technical perspective, it’s with things like the AWS partner network APN as well as with people who work directly with our vast network of SI partners, ISV and technology partners, and reseller and distributor partners.

All the way back when we launched in 2006, I got this question. Every year. “Well, are you going to compete with your ecosystem? Are you going to destroy partners in your ecosystem?” And the answer has always been and remains, there are many, many thousands of explosive opportunities for partners in our ecosystem.

As AWS capabilities have grown, the number of partner opportunities similarly has grown exponentially. And if you put aside all the worry and the fear-mongering, if you look at the actual partners who have been significantly hurt by things AWS has done, I think you’re hard-pressed to find almost any literally in the history of AWS.

Why are partners so important?

There are 100,000 successful partners. We continue to try to enable them for a simple reason, which is that’s what our customers want. Our customers want a really strong integrated platform from AWS and want us to work together with partners of their choice, not our choice. We continue to partner with all the global systems integrators. We continue to help every ISV on the planet, build a [integrated] offering and offer that on AWS. And we enable that technically.

And then we go to market with the biggest and most important of them. The way we view it is, we are collectively, with those partners, serving a joint end customer, and the customer doesn’t want to see any divisions between us and that’s got to look seamless. The reason it’s called an ecosystem and why it’s such a perfect metaphor, is an ecosystem is dynamic. It’s not static and any ecosystem, any species, has to evolve or it actually will cease to exist. But all of our partners … continue to build new capabilities for customers.

Tomorrow, check out the second installment of SiliconANGLE’s interview with Adam Selipsky, where he charts out what’s next for cloud computing and talks about more higher-level services to come from AWS.

Photo: AWS