The cloud continues to gain steam in the digital transformation space.

As enterprises embark on their cloud journeys, the Amazon Web Services Inc. Marketplace is emerging as an ideal digital channel to solve niche use cases and workloads based on the partner ecosystem and enterprise buying, according to Chris Casey (pictured), director and general manager of industry software and data alliances at AWS.

“Marketplace has been around for 10 years, as well as the AWS Partner organization,” he stated. “We’ve seen more and more customers start to adopt Marketplace, especially for some of their larger applications that they’re trying to transform on the cloud. And that extends into industry verticals, as well as horizontal … business applications.”

Casey spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Savannah Peterson and John Furrier at AWS re:Invent, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed the importance of the AWS Marketplace and ecosystem in the cloud journey. (* Disclosure below.)

Pairing software and data

Since software needs data for processing and analysis purposes, merging the two is fundamental, according to Casey. AWS propels this by integrating partners with solutions provided by field and business development teams.

“Certainly software and and data going together is a really nice combination that many customers are looking for us to solve,” he added.

Since customer centricity is at the heart of the AWS ecosystem, some of the benefits provided include taking undifferentiated heavy lifting away, according to Casey, who said that this is partly achieved through third-party applications and data.

“When customers are looking to make commitments to AWS, we want to make sure they can benefit from that commitment not only from native AWS services, but also third-party data and software applications that they might be procuring through the Marketplace,” he stated. “ You know, 66% of time saving for procurement professionals. When you calculate that in hours, that’s a lot of time on undifferentiated heavy lifting that they can now be doing on value-added activities.”

Through the AWS Marketplace, Ferrari S.p.A. was able to attain its technical transformation objective of upgrading its ERP system by choosing Infor, according to Casey. Infor was selected based on its automotive specific instance, he added.

“Infor is one of our horizontal business application partners and sellers in the AWS Marketplace, and they sell ERP systems, so helping enterprises with resource planning,” he stated. “It’s super exciting that we’re able to play a part in accelerating that digital transformation with Ferrari and also help Infor in terms of getting a really meaningful customer using their software services on AWS.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent:

(* Disclosure: This is an unsponsored editorial segment. However, theCUBE is a paid media partner for AWS re:Invent. Amazon Web Services Inc. and other sponsors of theCUBE’s event coverage have no editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE