IMPORTANCE OF CLOUD FOR THE C-SUITE

The role of Mark Schwartz at AWS is to work with enterprise customers at the senior executive levels, to help them with non-technical challenges in transformation. Excerpts of the discussion with Arun Shankar, previously Editor with GEC Media Group.

[BT] As an evangelist at AWS, what is your primary role?

[Schwartz] I am part of a small team, we call it Enterprise Strategy, of people who were C-suite executives before they joined AWS. All of us were leaders at large enterprises. We all did digital transformation, move to the cloud, and we learned some of the challenges, the things that often get in the way when an organisation is trying to do a big change like that.

The role at AWS is to work with large customers, the enterprise customers, generally at the senior executive levels, to help them with what are usually the non-technical challenges in a big transformation. Things like cultural change, organisational structure, governance models, investment strategies, change leadership, all of those kinds of things that often get in the way.

Each of us meets with about 150 customers a year. I have been doing this for about five and a half years now. We have a pretty good sense of what executives are thinking, what kinds of things are hard for them, and our job is really just to be there for support and to see if we can make our customers more successful. That is my perspective. When we talk and when I try to answer your questions, I am coming from that kind of deep interaction with customer executives and thinking about how we can help them get the most business advantage out of working with the cloud. And, I work with both public-sector customers and commercial.

[BT] How do you marry the role of the CIO through the C-Suite and connect them with the AWS offering?

[Schwartz] I hope we do speak the language of the business. That is my job, largely. I am often working with the entire C-suite, sometimes meeting with CFOs, sometimes CEOs, sometimes boards of directors or the public sector equivalents. Our point of view is always to start from the business needs or the mission needs of the organisation and work backwards from there to the technology solutions.