>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >> Hello and welcome to theCUBE virtual and our coverage at AWS re:Invent 2020, with special coverage of the APN Partner Experience. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Rachel Rose. She is the head of global AWS programs. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Rachel >> Thanks, Rebecca. So excited to be here. >> Well, we're delighted to have you so we just heard Sandy's keynote address, and we know that AWS has announced a number of new partner programs, including AWS competencies and service validations. Why don't you start by telling our viewers a little bit more about these? >> Sure. It couldn't be more of an exciting time for our partner community. We've made a number of key global announcements today. What you just heard from Sandy. So that includes the launch of two new AWS competency programs. We have the travel and hospitality competency, as well as the public safety and disaster response competency. Additionally, we announced changes to our top performing service delivery program, the Amazon RDS service delivery. >> So tell us exactly what is an AWS competency? What is it? What does it bring to partners and customers? >> Yes, of course. The competency program is designed to highlight and promote our top partners, based on their proven technical and customer success in key specialized areas. We focus on industries, workloads, as well as key use cases. It benefits our customers by providing them with a short list of highly vetted and trusted partners to work with based on whatever their needs may be. So for example, if you're a customer looking for a HIPAA compliant partner out of Japan, the competency program can help you. It's all about saving time for our customers. No more searching for partners for hours on end, we do all that work for you. And one additional note I'll make on competencies is that, Rebecca, this isn't a new program for us at AWS. We've been designing and iterating on these programs for years. Adding new designations, new use cases, as well as evolving our existing programs, all based on customer feedback. We're thrilled to announce these new programs today and hope you'll check out the travel and hospitality, as well as the public safety and disaster response competency. >> So we're going to dig into those a little bit later, but tell our viewers a little bit more about the two competencies that were launched today. >> Yes, Rebecca, and as I mentioned, we've launched two new competencies. We have first, the travel and hospitality competency, which launched today with 27 of our top global ISVs and consulting partners. These partners are experts at helping our customers accelerate their modernization and innovation journeys to building a resilient business for the long run. Everything from the behind the scenes, operational efficiencies, as well as guest facing customer experiences. And then the public safety and disaster response competency, which highlights our top ISV partners that build products on AWS to help our customers prepare, respond and recover from these natural and man-made disasters. We launched today with 16 top global ISVs today. >> So I want to ask you a little bit about why now. Put this into context for our viewers. We know that the world is gripped by the devastating COVID-19 pandemic. Why launch these two competencies now? >> Great question. For travel and hospitality, there's really very few industries that face a technology environment as complex and mission critical, especially given the state of the world that we're in right now with the pandemic. It's an ongoing challenge for us to hire and retain that domain expertise in-house, leading a growing demand for experienced on demand resources. Our partner community has responded so quickly here, working with our joint customers to charter a smart digital way forward. It's why the majority of our Fortune 500 companies, and over 90% of our Fortune 100 already utilize AWS Partner Solutions and Services. For public safety and disaster response, it's a direct response to the economic law caused by these natural and man-made disasters. 2020 was an unprecedented year for so many reasons, but especially in terms of disaster and public safety event. And at AWS, we're committed to helping our first responders, our public safety agencies, and our disaster response organizations by mitigating the impact affected by these communities. Through this competency, we can differentiate our top most highly vetted partners giving our customers an easy way to find businesses that offer trusted and specialized services, tailored to meet their mission critical needs. >> Well, it certainly sounds like something the world needs now, Rachel. You've also mentioned updates to one of your service validation programs. Can you tell our viewers a little bit more about that? >> Yes. Based on customer feedback, we've made significant updates to the Amazon RDS service delivery program. This program is designed to highlight our top partners that implement and migrate customers to Amazon RDS. Based on the increased demand we've seen for purpose-built databases, we've made changes to the Amazon RDS delivery program by adding in validation that's actually based on that individual engine type, like Amazon Aurora MySQL or Amazon RDS for Oracle. This allows our customers to identify an Amazon RDS partner with demonstrated success delivering Amazon RDS solutions for specific database engine. >> What were some of the partners that were announced today? >> Our partner capability ranges across the board, and we feel really honored to work with such interesting partners that are delivering on behalf of our customers every single day. You know, one example, OneBlood, which is the third largest blood bank, engaged our public safety and disaster response competency launch partner, Solodev to help evolve the digital customer experience for their donors. By leveraging AWS auto-scaling technologies, OneBlood was able to rapidly provision additional servers to meet the high demand in the face of a massive national emergency. As a result, their website never went down and willing donors were able to connect with the right information just in time. Another really interesting partner story is thanks to Elenium Automation. They're a travel and hospitality competency launch partner, they're based out of Australia, and they helped Etihad Airways become the first airline to trial contactless technology, which helps monitor the temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate of any person using any airport and touch points. I mean, how cool is that? >> It's very cool. So if there are partners who are watching this who are interested in learning more, what should they do? Where should they go? >> Yeah, there's so many great resources. So I'll start with our customers. Our customers that are looking for these highly vetted, trusted partners can go to our AWS Partner Solutions Finder, filter by expertise, and you can find the right partner that you need at any time. For our partners that want to learn more about how to engage with these programs, they can visit our APN webpage or our competency webpage. >> So finally, I want you to close this out here and look into your crystal ball and think about the next 12 to 24 months. What would you say to your partners? You are the head of partner experience. Can you talk a little bit about a sneak peek for what partners can experience in the next year and the year after? >> We've been collecting mountains of customer feedback, and it's really what's critical in order for us to build out what that roadmap looks like for us in 2021. So some of the top requests that we continue to see from our customers are revolved around energy. So I think you can expect to see an energy competent (mumbles) in 2021, as well as adding a mainframe category to our migration competency. We're also going to continue to evolve our service validation program. So you've heard me talk a little bit about RDS earlier. We're going to continue to evolve that program as well by adding business applications as a new category. So I think that's just a tiny little sneak peek onto what the team's working on, but we're definitely focused on collecting customer feedback in order to ensure we have the right roadmap ahead of us. >> Exciting times ahead. Thank you so much, Rachel Rose, the head of global AWS Partner Programs. Thanks so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you, Rebecca. Appreciate the time. >> And thank you for tuning in to theCUBE virtuals coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned. (soft music)