Enterprise communications vendors are placing increasing value on interoperability, recognizing the depth of tools they must connect with to support customer experiences.
After all, no single vendor can do it all. Even those building towards that – such as Microsoft – are striving to become platform businesses, allowing partners to build on their technology and push their innovation further.
Yet, perhaps no tech provider has built a partner roster like AWS. As Liz Miller, VP & Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, recently told CX Today: “Can we think of anyone who isn’t partnering with AWS?
At Constellation Research, we have an awards program, and we have this “best partnership” category. Everybody put forward their partnership with AWS.
“It became impossible to decide between all these entries, so we eventually gave the award to AWS and everybody.”
In line with this tale, many more prominent vendors have teamed up with the cloud pioneer over the past couple of weeks alone.
Here are a few examples that may catch the eye, alongside a rundown of the goals of each link-up.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth will tap AWS’s Chime SDK to expand its Communications Cloud, thanks to the strengthened partnership.
The Chime SDK includes components developers can harness to inject audio, video, and screen-sharing features into their applications.
By harnessing this for its real-time interaction capabilities, Bandwidth can channel its time and resources into innovation instead of maintaining a communications infrastructure.
Yet, Karl Perkins, Chief Innovation Officer at Bandwidth, highlights additional benefits. He stated:
The Amazon Chime SDK will be a key toolkit as we expand our Bandwidth Communications Cloud into a next-level intelligent network platform with key functionality already built in–whether it’s AI and machine learning, advanced data and insights, or pre-integrations with leading vendors.
As for AWS, it may extend enterprise access to its latest machine learning and sentiment recognition tools for worldwide voice interactions.
Snowflake
Snowflake announced a multi-year expansion of its AWS partnership, aiming to stretch “customer-focused innovation” across sales, marketing, industry solutions, and more.
The vendors will also invest in deeper product integrations to draw more value in their machine learning and AI, data governance, and streaming data capabilities.
It is also a co-innovation deal, with both vendors striving to provide industry-specific solutions across financial services, healthcare, retail, and many more sectors.
Over the past three years, Snowflake and AWS have quickly created what we believe may be one of the most successful technologies co-sell partnerships in cloud computing… with a single-minded focus on what’s best for our customers.
Such success is evident in the vendors expanding their co-selling goals by five times since 2020, now sharing six thousand customers – including Fortune 500 companies.
Cognigy
Cognigy is now part of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, a co-selling venture for selected partners that have robust integrations with AWS or run on its cloud.
With this, the conversational AI vendor may work more closely with AWS to design and deliver solutions that harness the combined set of AWS and Cognigy offerings.
The AWS portfolio includes Amazon Connect, Lex, Polly, Lamda, and Transcribe, which may appeal to Cognigy customers.
Aligning its technology with these popular solutions is a significant coup for Cognigy, one of the first vendors certified by AWS for its conversational AI competency.
“Achieving the AWS ISV Accelerate membership so closely after earning our AWS Conversational AI Competency distinction is a clear validation of the power of our combined solutions to transform customer service,” added Hardy Myers, SVP of Business Development and Strategy at Cognigy.
It is truly an honor to collaborate with such a talented team of enterprise experts at AWS to build the next generation of AI-powered customer service solutions.
With the new agreement, Cognigy also receives co-selling support, reduced listing fees on the AWS marketplace, and access to further sales enablement resources.
RingCentral
From a CX perspective, this deal is perhaps the biggest of the bunch, opening up RingCentral’s UCaaS platform to Amazon Connect customers.
After all, the most common reason Connect customers leave the platform is they want to use a single integrated platform for both UC and the contact center – according to Metrigy.
By opening up a simpler integration with RingCentral for UCaaS, AWS may better support these customers and bolster its retention rates.
Yet, there are many more facets to this deal. To learn more about it, read our article: The AWS-RingCentral Partnership Is a Big Win for Amazon Connect
