It is difficult to find a tech founder or CEO who is not envious of Amazon’s charge through the cloud market. Some would even say Amazon.com Inc. as approaching monopoly status. Will the larger tech vendor community make a concerted effort to slow Amazon’s takeover? Or will Amazon’s partnering perks keep the peace with smaller companies?

Dorothy Copeland, GM of global partner ecosystem at Amazon Web Services LLC, spoke about how partners can get the most from their AWS relationships. “As customers are looking for ways to adopt AWS services, they need partners to help them deploy it and manage it,” she said. She told Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE*, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, they serve these customers to partners with proven expertise. (*Disclosure below)

“The Aurora PostgreSQL that we announced yesterday, we already have a core group of service delivery partners that we validated as being strong in that area,” she said.

AWS U.

The trick to being let into the fold, is to gain demonstrable expertise in a particular AWS service, Copeland said. She stated that Amazon offers a wealth of training and certification programs to help partners do just that.

The payoff for partners is direct exposure to customers through its Partner Solutions Finder. “We do provide our partners with marketing development funds. We also provide them with funding and AWS credits for things like customer proof of concepts,” Copeland concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (*Disclosure: AWS and other companies sponsor some AWS re:Invent segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither AWS nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo by SiliconANGLE