A Partner’s Path to accelerating AWS opportunities

How Partners can leverage Comms-care to accelerate their AWS opportunities

 

In this blog post, we explore the advantages that cloud partners, regardless of their maturity levels, can experience by utilising the AWS services and capabilities offered by Comms-care, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ingram Micro that prioritises channel partnerships.
Staying current with AWS services, enhancing skills, and accessing funding programs can pose challenges for partners. Fortunately, Comms-care, as the leading channel-focused IT services provider in the UK, is exceptionally well-positioned to provide assistance.

With extensive expertise spanning AWS, VMware, Cisco, and Microsoft, and having been a part of the Ingram Micro family since 2016, Comms-care empowers channel partners to achieve greater success. Some partners may require support in areas like sales enablement, marketing, or the development of bundled services. Others might seek assistance with pre-sales activities, bid preparation, AWS funding initiatives, or the delivery and management of customer environments.

Comms-care offers comprehensive support across these domains, covering the entire deal cycle from lead generation to final delivery. Alternatively, they can simply complement partner capabilities as needed.

As a Services division of Ingram Micro, Comms-care enjoys numerous AWS competencies, including its status as an AWS Premier Tier services partner.

Of particular significance is the Migration competency, which grants access to the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) for our partners. This program comes with substantial funding allowances aimed at facilitating a seamless transition for end customers into the cloud. Partners have the flexibility to leverage MAP, with Comms-care managing either the entire end-to-end process or specific segments of it. This approach enables partners to maintain their competitiveness and relevance to their end customers.

 

 

The complete range of Comms-care’s AWS services is accessible for partners to offer, and as a partner-centric organisation, you can rest assured that Comms-care will collaborate with you rather than engaging in competition against you.

The end-customer journey to AWS and beyond

Comms-care has a tried and tested migration methodology to get end-customers’ workloads to the cloud and then evolve and improve:

Assessment Services

Comms-care’s comprehensive assessment services include programmes, tools, expertise and experience to assess the end-customer’s viability of migrating to AWS and define the future state.

Optimisation and Licensing Assessment

For end-customers with previous investments in licenses, or significant Microsoft workloads Comms-care recommends an Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA):

Rightsizing resources

With a tool-based discovery approach, Comms-care can optimise resources in AWS by rightsizing the new environment.  The tooling bases the new AWS environment on the actual usage profile and helps to identify the best Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), or VMware Cloud on AWS instance size and type for each workload.

Overlayed with Comm-care’s knowledge and expertise of AWS commercial and deployment options, such as on-demand and spot instances, Bring your Own Licenses (BYOL) and license-included instances, as well as dedicated hosts and savings plans means the end-customer is getting high-quality and relevant cost information about their future state.

Reducing costs

Optimising the cloud infrastructure is critical to reducing costs, and reducing over-provisioning of licenses is part of the solution.  The elasticity of AWS combined with Comms-care’s expertise can drive down license costs by using techniques such as consolidation of workloads onto larger instance types, licensing models for re-use of existing licenses and moving to newer supported operating systems if necessary.

Licensing flexibility

Model licensing scenarios, including license-included (AWS provided and managed) or BYOL instances, for flexibility in managing seasonal workloads. An AWS OLA models both dedicated and license-included environments, letting you pay for what you use to maximise your cloud compute and licensing investments.

Migration Acceleration Program

The Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Assess phase sets the foundations for cloud migration, creates a compelling business case and provides a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for the migration project.  A migration readiness assessment helps identify gaps along the six dimensions of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework – business, process, people, platform, operations, and security.

Deployment Services

Getting started with AWS should not be daunting for a partner and Comms-care can help with AWS Quickstart designs and deployments, which are customisable if necessary.

For the MAP Mobilise phase Comms-care ensures that the end-customer is prepared for migration by performing a deeper discovery, building a more detailed business case and migration plan together with a deployed Landing Zone ready for a pilot migration.  Comms-care also designs the environment with the security and compliance requirements covered, builds out the Operating Model for the end-customer and considers the skills needed to operate the cloud environment or interface with managed services.  If our partner has deep experience in any of these areas, Comms-care can co-deliver during the engagement.

Migration Services

Migrating end-customers’ applications, databases and storage to AWS is the main activity of the MAP Migrate and Modernise phase, which executes the plan developed in the prior phases of Assess and Mobilise.  Comms-care can either own the delivery end-to-end or can co-deliver with partners that have the necessary expertise and experience.

Should an end-customer only need assistance with the migration having completed the assessment and mobilisation activities themselves, Comms-care can help with this phase (Migrate and Modernise), as a standard part of the MAP methodology.

Optimisation Services

If an end-customer has already deployed a workload into AWS, perhaps testing a concept or being agile and innovative, they may not have followed AWS best practices fully during the implementation and may have some pain-points around costs, security, reliability, operational excellence and performance.  Comms-care are authorised to deliver Well Architected reviews which cover the areas above, in addition to sustainability.  Well Architected reviews can be customised to concentrate on one or more topic if needed.  These reviews are an excellent service for AWS Partners to build trust and credibility with their end-customers and show immediate value.

Managed Services

The Comms-care AWS Managed Services offering encompasses a suite of critical services, including a Service Desk, Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management and Monitoring.

The Service Desk serves as the primary point of contact for end-customers, offering responsive and knowledgeable assistance for any AWS-related queries or issues.

Incident Management swiftly addresses and resolves unexpected disruptions in service, ensuring minimal downtime and disruptions.

Problem Management goes a step further by identifying and addressing the root causes of recurring incidents, enhancing long-term system reliability.

Meanwhile, Change Management ensures that planned modifications to the AWS environment are executed seamlessly and with minimal disruption to ongoing operations.

Managed Services provide organisations with peace of mind, enabling them to focus on their core business objectives while AWS experts handle the intricacies of cloud infrastructure management and support.

Summary

Partners at various stages of maturity, whether well-established or in the process of growth, can take advantage of Comms-care to provide their end customers with an extensive range of AWS services, all without the need for significant investments in resources and time. Access to funding programs, expertise, and services is readily accessible through this partnership.

For further information please contact your Ingram Micro or Comms-care sales representative, or enquiries@comms-care.com