- Good morning.
Thank you to the three of you to join the AWS Studio today.
- Thank you for having us. - Thank you for having us.
- Thank you.
- Let's start with a round of intros,
maybe starting with you, Eyal.
- Oh, thank you.
So, my name is Eyal Ullert.
I'm working for Voipfuture in Germany in Hamburg.
And I'm doing the business development.
That's part of my main role in the company.
And on top of it, we are doing voice service assurance,
looking on the service provider network
for voice quality issues that they may have,
especially on new technology, VoIP, VoLTE,
VoNR, this is what we do.
- Wonderful, thanks for joining us.
And let's turn it over to our fellow Amazonians,
starting with Aymen, and then over to you Gorsel.
- Hey, hi.
I'm Aymen Saidi,
I'm a principal solution architect within the EC2 Edge team.
Mainly focusing on everything 5G,
5G new initiative and automation as well as OSS application.
- Wonderful.
- Hey, my name is Gorsel, Gorsel Baksi,
and I work as senior partner development manager
inside our industry vertical partner management organization
focusing with our telco ISV partners.
- Thank you all for the warm intros.
Of course, we're here today to talk about how AWS partners
are enabling innovation for end customers.
So I think we need to understand
that partner journey a little bit better.
And so starting with you, Eyal,
tell me about your cloud journey?
And first, what were you hearing from your customers
that really kicked off that cloud journey to begin with?
- Actually with us was really spot on.
So our customer took us to the journey.
So they said, okay, we have some new project coming
on AWS and we would like you to help us
migrate some of your solutions also to the cloud.
So, we've been reaching out to all available cloud vendors.
Immediately we got a good pickup from AWS.
Aymen, was I think after few days
when we started the journey
was taking over the technical leadership.
Technical leadership is the most critical part
on the journey of any ISV towards AWS
or any other cloud vendors.
You need to really understand the technical behind it.
What does it mean to migrate software
to make it more cloud native?
And in that journey,
basically we were involving all company,
I will say functions, like, for example, R & D,
which is one of the key leader in this journey.
And then of course the business development
to see what will be your main offering in the cloud.
So this was the journey for us.
- So technical proficiency clearly being a key prerequisite
for earning trust with you to build that solution.
What else do you value most in cloud partners?
- The speed of how things are done.
So, from the moment we took the journey
until the moment we become an ISV partner
and even an ISV Accelerate partner,
it took really several months.
So this was completely amazing and more on top of it,
we managed to acquire customers within the journey,
moving some of our, let's say,
existing customer but also new customer.
This was really exciting.
- I can already tell by the smiles in the room,
this clearly isn't the first time
the three of you have been in a room together.
It's wonderful.
So let's, starting with you, Gorsel,
talk to me about the strategy of engaging partners.
How did you earn trust with the partner?
- I think the key to that, Robert,
is about finding the same language.
I think this is what we are now in AWS
getting much better because we are building
these domain expertise in our partner team.
So, I worked in similar organizations
like Eyal does for pretty much all my career.
So the ideal piece is about how do we speak
the same language with our partners
that are focusing in this telco industry?
So we have a small team that are actually experts
in the domain and also knows about the challenges
companies like Eyal's company face,
so it makes us easy to understand each other.
We speak the same language,
we know the issues, we know the challenges.
And really the idea here is, you know,
we'd like to help build growing profitable businesses
on AWS and help solve our customers challenges
in the telco industry, help them move to the next level.
And this is where I think we try to help them
on the go-to-market, but before go-to-market,
we really have to focus on the get-to-market.
And get-to-market is a piece where I think Eyal,
for example, excels at.
He actually did the whole journey,
as he explained, in so crisp fashion.
We help them, we guide them how to get-to-market with AWS,
but at the end of the day, you know, it takes two to tango
and Eyal does a great job in tangoing with us as well.
- You're just rolling with sound bites here.
I love it.
(all laughing)
Get-to-market before you go-to-market.
So maybe in the spirit of getting to market,
turning it back over to you, Aymen,
as we work through the technical solutioning,
you're hearing about these challenges.
What was the playbook?
- I mean playbook is quite simple, right?
So, first we have really to show the case
that we have competence within AWS telco team, right?
So, we know our stuff, we know the cloud,
but we also know telco.
So we're able to manage both the cloud
and the telco challenges, right?
We also start with our customers, right?
So by knowing the industry,
by knowing what our customer looking for,
by learning the challenges of our customer,
we're actually able to earn trust from our partners
and then guide them into modernizing
the architecture so they can get the agility,
the efficiency, the cost optimization.
So ultimately having a solution
that is better with the customer.
So we ultimately always start with the customer.
We look at their challenges,
we look at the challenge of the customer
and then we apply the competence that we have in-house.
It's all the teams that we have,
all the organization efficiency that we have,
and we bring that to the partnership.
And ultimately that's what we did with Voipfuture.
- So, let's take it one level deeper.
From a technical perspective
what did we actually build and how do we do it?
- So, Voipfuture, do you want to speak a little bit
about the Voipfuture solution
and then we take the use case-
- Yeah, sure. - That is quite interesting?
- So I think what we bring also to the AWS environment
is quite unique and very interesting
for the service providers domain.
So we bring user experience.
So you're now opening up new services,
run them on the cloud,
you are entering to a bigger platform,
and then the service itself
become the most important for the service providers.
You are now providing new services and you want to make sure
that all your customers are always getting the right level
of service that you envision.
So, this is basically what we do.
And we are looking on the voice traffic
and we are able to generate the right information
to the service provider, but also to any, let's say,
service operations, the reporting that they need to do.
And then they can take action based on that.
And this is really basically
what we are doing, essentially.
- Data gravity has been a huge theme
that we've been talking a lot about.
Again, that seems to align with exactly what you're saying.
Data when the operators need it.
Talk to me about some other business impacts
that your team experienced?
- So the most interesting business impact
was that one of our existing customers
had the idea to deploy a new service in the AWS.
It was actually a technical endeavor
not a commercial endeavor.
And this was really fantastic.
We love technical challenge and we all immediately,
yes, let's do a new service in the cloud.
And everybody was interested.
And then in a point of time I was like,
"Okay, maybe let's have a joint team."
So tier one service operator,
I'm talking about really one of the large
international voice platform in the world
that is one of our key customer.
And I asked for a meeting with the product owner
and the AWS leadership team in that time.
So we all met and sat in the room.
I was enjoying the conversation because in that time
that tier one one service provider
was talking directly to the AWS.
And I think it took them maybe 20 minutes of conversation,
and then the product owner from the customer
was saying to the AWS guy,
"Really, you're telling me now that my typical connection
of a customer is eight, nine months?
Now I can do it in days?"
And in that point I understood the conversation is over.
That's it.
- And if I may add actually for this one,
that's why I love this partnership, right?
So, ultimately it's to innovate with the customer.
So this is not their core business,
but it's also nothing that we thought of, right?
So, ultimately, customer has a problem,
it's not ultimately what Voipfuture does,
and we don't necessarily have that in our radar.
But with that strong partnership,
that trust that we're able to earn,
we're able to talk with the customer
and really have a meaningful conversation,
so we can set workshops and then set the motion
to create something that is completely new
and that is really helping that tier one operator
to deliver a service, right?
Or an old service that they have following the old way,
in a much faster way.
And that's why, like, I value these type of partnerships.
You can innovate for the customer so quickly.
- So it's this cross-functional workshops,
it's what gets us to market.
But from a go-to-market perspective,
starting with you, Gorsel,
what were some of the tactics and techniques
that we leveraged?
- Right, I think as I mentioned,
one of the key things that Eyal did perfectly
was to ensure that we earned trust with the customer
by making sure we we have a well architected solution
that is optimized for deployment on AWS.
They immediately, very quickly on,
earned their foundational technical review,
which is actually a critical part of the tactics
in terms of going to market
and ensuring earning trust with the customers.
And the next thing we have done,
and we're working on as well, currently,
is to get to join up that whole commercial model
with AWS Marketplace.
So Eyal will shortly be on AWS Marketplace
offering his offering on AWS Marketplace
that gives customers a a better mechanism
to acquire site software, find that site software
that exists and then deploy in a very agile manner
and to meet their demands and needs.
I think that's part of the key part
in terms of our joint go-to-market.
ISV Accelerate is another key program
Eyal is leveraging now.
So yeah, in terms of addressing a joint go-to-market,
I think these are the key areas, you know,
earning FTR, becoming ISV Accelerate partner,
getting onto Marketplace,
I think these are the three key motions
that we expect our partners to work with us
and help them in that go-to-market story.
- I want to dive a little deeper
into the Marketplace story here, but before that,
as we think about that go-to-market motion,
it seems to me that this more B2B or B2B-to-X.
Does Eyal's journey align with our broader strategy
for some of these newer enterprise solutions
and B2B-to-X models?
- I believe so because what Eyal's offering
quite interesting is it actually helps
telecom operators to offer better quality voice services.
Another key part of that is as well
that he offers a very interesting solution to call centers.
Now, the telco industry and call center industry
are also merging as well.
Telcos are offering call centers as a service.
And this is where Eyal's offering will be,
I think in an elevated manner,
will become more important for telcos,
especially when they offer these call centers
as service offerings to B enterprises.
Hence, I think that's where the interesting, you know,
one plus one equals three equation comes in,
where Eyal's offering will be significantly more valuable
for telcos not only for their B2C customer base,
but also for their B2B and B2B-to-X business.
- I'm going to challenge Eyal to see
if we can make one plus one equal to four.
And so to that end, as you think about AWS Marketplace
or our broader set of solutions
that we can offer to partners,
what's most attractive to you
about the AWS partner network, more broadly?
- Good question.
I think that here basically what we see
in front of us already, have some examples.
We bought ourself a very interesting new market
that was not open to us, especially not from the speed
and from the broad spectrum of new customers.
I'm talking more to a call center,
but it's not only so it's everybody,
It's enterprise running is voice services
and now they do it in the cloud.
And this is a journey that already all of them been taking.
Now, Marketplace will be a game changer
from Voipfuture's perspective
but also from customer perspective,
and I will give an example.
Not long ago we got an urgent email during weekend
and, yeah, typically we don't work in the weekend.
So I said, "Yeah, I'm home, I will pick up,"
it was American customer so it was a very late night for me.
And we had after a few exchange of emails
a phone call already on Saturday.
By Sunday the application from us was installed.
We needed to do it
because we are not yet Marketplace enabled,
we needed to do it remotely by our team,
but it's quite simple.
And the story from the customer
that he made a new interconnect
and since then it was a week before he contacted us
and none of his operation team are getting any sleep.
Customers are complaining, shouting,
and they have no clue how to identify what is the issue.
Sunday, the product was installed.
Monday, we already told them what's the issue.
And everything, I think, Tuesday we already got the order.
- Rapid pace of innovation.
- This is, like, you know, in our case it's imaginary.
It was never existing before.
- We talk a lot at AWS, the ability to experiment quickly,
try something new and then rapidly permute
on that experiment to find the solution
that's best with customers.
Perfect anecdotal evidence here.
Really appreciate you sharing that anecdote.
From your perspective, Aymen.
- Yep.
- What are other early customer use cases
that you expect from the solution,
particularly as it gets deployed to Marketplace?
- No, absolutely.
So I'll basically pause for a second
just to go back to one of the answers
that we had with one of the tier one,
but also with these use cases
that Eyal has been speaking to.
One of the cool things that we have been doing
is we've been able to build solutions
that really go through the Edge continuum.
So, when you're talking about voice, right?
You're talking a lot about the analysis being done
on cloud in region.
We're also talking about deploying the probes, in essence,
across the network closer to the network
or even further away from the network.
And what we've been able to do with Voipfuture
that has really enabled those those business opportunities,
is we'd be able to build a solution
and specifically with that case
where we had a workshop with that tier one operator,
building a solution that is replicable
not only in region, not only in a VPC for one customer,
but for even including VPC for customer of customers, right?
So that B2B2B, but also to local zone in outpost.
And that unlocked selling to a multitude
of enterprise across really the globe, right?
So for that tier one operator
that has customers all around the globe, right?
So it's a big tier one operator,
we're still able to expand the amount of customers
that can benefit from the Voipfuture solution.
And ultimately that's what the AWS infrastructure,
that AWS Edge continuum enables
and what the AWS services and the partnership
that we have enables our partner
to innovate for our customers.
- Wonderful.
So let's zoom out for a second.
Where's the partnership going, Gorsel, in your view?
- Look, I think this is one of those interesting areas
'cause once we get to the marketplace,
and once Eyal sprinkles
a little bit of that AI/ML sauce into his offerings,
that will actually be a game changer for Eyal's business,
and that will elevate the partnership as well.
I think I see them in the next,
and hopefully when we sit here next year,
I see some of these things,
some of these stories will come alive
with some great lighthouse customer references
and those are the things
that will start turning the flywheel.
And if you look at the three year horizon,
I see this partnership at a whole different level.
- Next level of Voipfuture, Aymen, what are you seeing?
- I mean, we already started talking about the next level
of the partnership and what we can do, right?
The use cases that we can apply.
So we're actually, we're looking at what we can do together
with additional partners of AWS and our customers
to potentially expand beyond the voice, right?
So beyond voice analysis
and improving the voice quality
and identifying where the issue are across the network.
So what I view within that partnership and what we can do,
I think it's to be seen
and hopefully a year from now
we'll have something pretty cool to showcase.
- I want to give the final word to you, Eyal.
Next level of Voipfuture in the partnership with AWS?
- I'm joining the Gorsel with the Aymen story.
I think what the key, what we do for our customer,
basically we are producing a very accurate data
to take them to the next level.
And next level for every service operator
is reducing cost by automating services.
And basically with this partnership, this is what we can do.
This is our vision, this is going forward.
This is something that we want to achieve.
- Fantastic story here today.
Thank you for taking your journey with us.
We can't wait to see what you build.
Thanks for joining us all in the AWS Studio,
and hope you have a chance to connect soon.
- All Right, thank you, Robbie.
Appreciate it. - Thanks.