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Aws “Advanced Consulting Partner” not professional, what to do?

2 points by oriettaxx ↗ HN
We need an advice. We moved a huge setup from the datacenter of our client, to aws: we needed expertise from aws professionals to do it (due to our internal lack of knowledge in aws) so we did it in partnership with an official Aws "Advanced Consulting Partner". Well, migration is done (it took 2 months: pretty happy on aws tools, but prices a bit high) but we think the partner is unreliable and not professional: we think we are locked to them, too. We are thinking about strategies to solve the situation, probably by moving to another aws "Advanced Consulting Partner"... (the setup is pretty big and we lack of aws-knowledge so cannot everything without the help of aws experts) Any advice? How to choose a good aws-partner? maybe asking an auditing directly to aws on how the partner is doing?

4 comments

[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 21.2 ms ] thread
trout
AWS keeps a list of vetted partners (business requirements, public references, case studies, good AWS relationship, etc) on the competency page.

You can see the different sorts of competencies here, in case your solution has a specific vertical or technology focus: https://aws.amazon.com/partners/competencies/

You would want to focus on the consulting partners for this type of engagement.

If you're not sure, it sounds like it's more of a migration use case and you can get a short list of folks here: https://aws.amazon.com/migration/partner-solutions/

If you know your AWS account team, they'd like to get that feedback. Otherwise my contact information is in my profile and you can email me and I can try to connect you to some AWS folks responsible for the partner as well.

oriettaxx
thanks for your link

yes, with partner at high level (competencies) I read that partner requesting to be partner have to be checked by a 3rd party:

"Once your firm’s application has been submitted through the APN (aws,ndr) Portal, the APN Team will review for compliance, then send to the third party audit firm to coordinate scheduling of the technical review."

so there is somehow a double check on partner competencies.

So, as I see, we made the mistake of choosing a "normal" partner and not one with competencies. Do you think aws care some how to know our "bad" experience to get a better network of partners? or should be expect them to tell us: get a "competent" partner?

trout
Mistake seems like a harsh word here. There are lots of partners that aren't in the competency tier that do perfectly fine work. But we try to highlight the ones we can somehow quantify as 'top tier', which is competency. It's imperfect just like any other subjective rating.

AWS definitely cares about any bad experiences. It's the way we improve things for customers, so let us (or me, or anyone at AWS) know the details.

QuinnyPig
This is a not-uncommon story. It's unfortunate, but it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of vetting that goes into AWS partners, just so long as their checks clear.