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AWS Partnering with Humber College
In Oct. 2019, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Humber College announced a partnership. This aligns with AWS’s focus on education and partnership as part of its marketing and service strategies.
The partnership involves Humber gaining access to a number of AWS resources to support student learning, such as cloud services and AWS DeepRacer.
Humber will become “an AWS Academy Institution and AWS Certification Testing Centre,” and will also offer “the first comprehensive full-time Cloud Computing Ontario Graduate Certificate in Canada targeted for launch in Fall 2020.”
Our Take
Like AWS’s partnership with the University of British Columbia to form a Cloud Innovation Center, this announcement aligns with AWS’s marketing and service strategies, which aim to establish AWS as a trusted learning partner in order to deepen its relationships with customers and prospects.
For instance, at the opening address of the AWS Summit in Toronto, Eric Gales, the country manager of AWS Canada, said “our biggest contribution we can make is to invest in skills and learning for you,” before announcing the partnership with Humber College.
In that same opening session, Joshua Burgin, technical advisor to the SVP, described the summit as a “learning conference, not a technology and marketing conference.”
Establishing itself as a source of learning and education is fundamental to AWS’s strategy of becoming a trusted partner for its customers, rather than just another vendor. By positioning itself as an educator, AWS is able to obtain a high degree of trust and rapport with customers and prospects.
In addition to this high level of rapport, the education and training demonstrate value to prospects and provide an extra level of value to customers, beyond simply the services themselves.
AWS’s strategy demonstrates its awareness that in a world of commodification of technology, vendors cannot compete based on their product offerings alone.
Instead, vendors that provide the greatest value-adds in terms of useful resources and deepen their relationships with customers to the level of a partnership will set themselves up for greater success in the long run.
Info-Tech expects that AWS will continue to expand its offerings in this area and that other savvy technology vendors and service providers will pursue similar strategies.