Andy Jassy

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy told a room full of its cloud partners and consultants to fully commit to AWS if they want the cloud giant to point customers their way.

Jassy’s remarks were delivered to partners during the first day of the AWS re:invent conference in Las Vegas, according to a report from ZDNet.

In Jassy’s opinion, it is too hard to become a specialist in multiple cloud platforms, and customers will be better served by deep expertise in AWS features and capabilities.

“The reality is, we are going to direct business to our partners who are committed and who really understand the platform because our customers want partners who understand the details of our platform,” said Jassy, according to the ZDNet report. “I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t have other partners, that you should dump your other partnerships, but I am saying that I think a strategy of hedging is the wrong one for this time.”

Presumably Jassy wants its technology partners to focus on Amazon Web Services over rivals Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform. That seems like an unrealistic request for technology consultants working with large enterprises who demand support for their heterogeneous environments and existing technology investments.

His comments also contrast with Microsoft cloud chief Scott Guthrie’s comments at their Worldwide Partner Conference this summer. “As customers make the journey to use the cloud one of the things that they’ll grapple with is figuring out how to manage it, especially when it’s running in multiple cloud environments and a lot of customers use both Azure and AWS,” said Guthrie. “A lot of customers are using both Hyper-V as well as VMware and OpenStack on premises.  And with the Microsoft Operations Management and Security product, or OMS for short, we provide a great management solution that enables customers and partners to manage their VMs and servers in this multi-cloud world.”

Jassy is scheduled to deliver the AWS re:invent keynote Wednesday morning at 8:00AM. You can view the livestream here.

Like what you're reading? Subscribe to GeekWire's free newsletters to catch every headline

Job Listings on GeekWork

Find more jobs on GeekWork. Employers, post a job here.