Ep#104 Technology Adoption Amongst SMBs with Anna Green

Host: Jon

All right, you ready? I'm ready. Three, two. I had to do this traditionally. 3, 2, 1. All right. Two, one. Folks, I cannot believe it. We are here in Las Vegas for AWS Reinvent 2022. Yes, I am saying 2022 the entire time, because you never know when you're going to watch this podcast. And I haven't planned a podcast anymore this year, but I've got a special one that I'm working on because I can't say this has been improv, this has been a planning session, but it's going to be a surprise one that we wanted to do. Joining me in the studio is Anna Green, head of SMB for Asia, Pacific, and Japan for AWS Amazon Web Services. Anna, thank you so much for joining me in person!

Guest: Anna

Jon, I am so excited to be here. I am so excited to be at Re:invent and it is brilliant that my very first engagement here is talking to you in person after I think, what is it, almost two years of connecting with you on voicemail, on chat, and being able to see you in person. It's just such a pleasure and it's just pleasure working with you Jon. You're a lovely guy and I love talking to you about cloud I love talking to you about AWS so it's great to do it in person.

Host: Jon

Anna, we planned to do something back in, I think it was June. June or July I was going to come out. You were in Seattle. That didn't work out. You've been on my podcast several times. I think about three times. You are a reoccurring guest. I hope you don't mind that I say that eventually, you're going to be on again and hopefully in person again because I think this is going to be pretty cool.

Guest: Anna

Yeah, and as I said to you, I think as we're here at Re:invent, we're starting to see more events like this happening again. It's so exciting the conversation that's still going on and just growing around what's going on with the cloud and in particular the innovations we're seeing with AWS and our services. So I'm super excited to be here and as I said, I will enjoy doing this today, but more importantly, continuing the conversation for the future.

Host: Jon

So yeah, we are at reinvent. It is day one and in the traditional sense of Amazon-style sessions have kicked in or are underway. Keynotes are happening the rest of the week from Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. But we are doing a podcast all week and bringing in guests and people to give us their perspectives on what's happening at Reinvent. And you're no exception to that because you're going to give us your perspective on reinventing and how excited you are to be here, any sessions and stuff that you're doing. And then I've got some questions specifically for you that I'd like to ask in true Amazon style. We're going to kick things off with those shortly. But first, let's talk about AWS re:invent. What are you looking to get out of this event?

Guest: Anna

For me, the customer segment that I am building is across APJ and its worldwide as well as a smaller medium business. Now, what does that mean for us? That means all of those businesses out there who are building and growing and it's the ones who are, they're not an enterprise-level engagement. So the technology discussion that you are having with them is naturally going to be happening not necessarily with massive C T O type engagements with thousands of technology executives. It's going to be with what I like to think of as the, I guess grassroots of what's happening in technology. All those people out there who are trying to figure out how to use cloud technology to help their businesses to grow, to save money all of those essential things that we're seeing businesses every day large and small trying to face in what is a changing macroeconomic landscape. So I'm here to represent all of those businesses out there who are trying to get their heads around what comes next for us in our cloud journey.

Host: Jon

So S M Bs have been your sole focus around and we've had a lot of conversations in our previous podcast about all the things that some of your SMBs are doing throughout their community, throughout the engagements, and then what AWS is doing with them. And it's more of a collaboration and the customer obsession that's happening on both sides of the story. I like that you're here for those who are the grassroots is pretty good because it defines how everything gets started from SMBs. Everything starts small, nobody jumps into being a large enterprise company, they start small and they grow from there and you help them, taking them through the journey and you're growing with them.

Guest: Anna

Absolutely. And again, there are so many personas in S and b, which is why it's such an exciting part of our business because we find within that s and b cohort, we've got customers who are going onto the AWS console and spinning up a server for the first time. Those are our kind of digitally native interested businesses. Then we've got traditional legacy businesses who have all of their stack on-premises, they've maybe only got one IT guy in their team. They do a lot of stuff through partners. How are they thinking about using cloud technology? What are they doing? How can we help them with their service proposition? Because the cloud is really about the democratization of IT services. It's not just for large enterprises, it's for everyone. So for me, the value of this conversation, the value of reinventing is meeting those people out there who are interested in how I use the cloud to help me as a business. How do I use the cloud to help me save money? And these are the things that we'll talk about later, but the things that keep happening keep coming up for businesses, save money, and need to upskill my teams. How am I thinking about managing risk for the future? All these things are just basic issues that all businesses have to tackle every day, these are the ways that the cloud, not technology can and should be helping businesses grow.

Host: Jon

So cloud is not unobtainable. If you think about some of the large enterprises some of the name brands that were virtualized, it was the small businesses that can afford the licensing or the hardware and the stuff. Cloud has unlocked a limited unlimited amount of potential for these small businesses to grow at a, and I'm just going to say I want to say from Amazon's culture of spitting out a number, but I don't have an exact number. So I'm going to say that like 50% they are growing so fast that it used to take years for them to get up to enterprise level and which are now taking months for them to be able to save their costs, get innovated, utilize advanced services that were once unreachable by small businesses.

Guest: Anna

That's absolutely the basis on which AWS has built its infrastructure. So it's available to everyone. And what it means is that things like prior security are our priority. What businesses can benefit from moving to AWS cloud is that they will get the same level of native security using AWS cloud services as military organizations, as banks that are regulated all of those really large organizations that require the most, that the highest level of security within their infrastructure, that level of security is AVI available to everyone, anyone who builds on the AWS platform. And that's why it is such a compelling and interesting conversation for businesses to be having, especially now as we're seeing material changes in the environment around security and around information technology and the way that it's being dealt with across no governments across the industry. These are things that are coming and are starting to become very pivotal conversation points for any business, any business. Not just a large bank, not just an insurance broker who might store a whole bunch of data. It's relevant for anyone who's got customer data. So you want to have the best security and it is what can be enabled using an AWS platform. It just is. That's why we've built it.

Host: Jon

I love it. So I'm going to jump into a couple of the questions. I've put together some questions specifically for you to make the most of your time and stay on the point. All right. So let me ask you one of the first questions and our past conversations for small businesses. We discuss technology as a great equalizer for a small business and we're talking about that right now and how small businesses can now actually run side by side with enterprises in particular the role of the cloud. Can we start this conversation with some more of those big shifts in technology adoption that you've seen from small businesses and including in the past two years during the pandemic?

Guest: Anna

Yeah, look, I think the first and most important point is that SMBs have been hit much harder in a lot of instances than enterprises because it had an immediate impact on their bottom line. They didn't necessarily have a whole bunch of staff and resources that they could call on during those challenging times. So it had a real impact on businesses and what we found was that businesses that started leaning into a conversation about modernizing their technology stack were the ones that were coming out in a much better situation from a business perspective. And what we've heard and seen is that Covid was seen as a challenging time for SMBs but that they are now looking to grow in the future. So they're seeing the upside of what's happened during Covid for them. And I wanted to go in-depth a little bit more today about how we're seeing different SMBs sort of benefit from what's happened during Covid.

Guest: Anna

We've talked a bit about the pivot into or what we've seen Covid in terms of changing and accelerating digitization for businesses. We've seen that and I've got a couple of really cool examples from the region in which I work, which is the Asia-Pacific region of how we're seeing businesses see the upside of technology during this period of covid but now for the future. So we've got one cool example in Singapore, which is a platform that has worked swiftly to develop the virtualization of events. So they created events for customers and over covid they had to change their business model what they were able to do was develop in six months a platform that generated personalized recommendations every 15 minutes and they were able to completely change how they engaged their customer base. And as a result, recently were able to create events including the Singapore FinTech Festival bringing together about 60,000 people.

Guest: Anna

So personalization of messaging is one of the things that we're seeing that has come out of covid with businesses, businesses using that as a tool to go to market. Then we've got another cool platform from Thailand Future Ready. So they are an insurance broker, an online insurance broker that allows individuals and businesses to compare about 500 different insurance policies and processes before they purchase them. And what they did was move to AWS in 2019. What they found was that they were able to gain uptime, a 99% increase in uptime and they were, which allowed them to close their deals 50% faster and reduce their costs. So as we were talking really for businesses it's about a reduction in costs, right? 35% reduction in costs for them by thinking differently about using AWS as a cloud platform. So really interesting uses of technology there. And then finally we've got a great customer in Australia called Lavi and are consumer jewelry chain.

Guest: Anna

They run a whole bunch of e-commerce platforms as well as having retail stores and they were challenged around how they were going to build out their global reach by using AWS as a platform, not only were they able to actually and indeed work with one of our partners, Fitzroy. So another really big thing about working with AWS is partners. They worked with a great partner to completely really think and rethink how their architecture works. So that they did a multi-faced plan to migrate 30 of their servers across 22 countries to AWS. Now that meant that they were able to increase their data processing time by 65%, which for any e-commerce platform is material. So we're seeing these three business cases or business use cases are pretty good examples of how businesses have used what's happened during covid to think differently about their business models and use cloud technology in interesting ways.

Host: Jon

So two of the things you mentioned, reduction in costs for small business is very key. One of the things that small businesses run into is they don't have the huge budgets that enterprises have. So they have to lean on everything and then speed. The other thing is the reduction of cost but also being faster doesn't essentially equate to it because sometimes I need more infrastructure, I need more resources to do it, but if I can reduce my cost, my speed to get out there as quickly as possible but also to serve my customers. You said 68% faster for the e-commerce sites, which is huge because now you can turn these around and your customer's happy customers are what you're looking for. So you're already working with it and they've already done that with delivering to them and actually getting much quicker at it but also reducing their cost at the same time.

Guest: Anna

Absolutely and we keep hearing that as our use case examples are that initially SMBs will come through us and say, I mean I need to save money, I've gotta keep my bottom line going, how can I do that? So they're working with their partners to look at things like a migration opportunity, but what they find is once they migrate, there's also all of the upsides of being able to innovate so they can create customer experiences that they never knew that they could have done before just by having access to cloud technology. Because once you're on AWS, you have access to over 200 services, and specialist services including data and machine learning, including analytics. These are things that are very material and can very quickly create a completely new business model once you understand the use cases. So yes, we are talking about agility, we're talking about speed to market, we're talking about saving money and we're talking about doing it by quite a specific cloud technology and it's not something that customers were doing before with the same degree of pace and with the same degree of enthusiasm.

Host: Jon

SMBs that are looking to make that move, what are some of the key steps that they should immediately take to realize that journey, that realize that this is possible?

Guest: Anna

Yeah, I've been so fortunate in being able to speak to what I, again, grassroots business leaders, I love these people. They are out there in the trenches thinking about how to build these businesses from scratch and it's so inspiring the first thing that I would say is you have to have a top-down message. So you need the leadership team of the organization to be on board and to understand the upside of moving to the cloud. And all of these CEOs and CTOs that I've been speaking to in SMBS over this course of the last two years, they've all got that kind of key pivotal person in the business who is making sure that everybody understands the upside of the move to the cloud, both from an expenses perspective but also from a business growth perspective and importantly from a customer perspective as well.

Guest: Anna

These are smart people who are understanding the future of my business is not necessarily going to look like it did, it's going to look like what our customers and our consumers want for the future. So there is that pivotal kind of top-down leadership support discussions that are being had. As soon as that business is starting to think about the cloud journey, then you have a culture of innovation. So to foster a culture of innovation, not only do you have to have the people at the top talking about it, but you also have to bring in a mindset across the organization that change is good and that innovation is good. And that's a really hard thing for a lot of people who are entrenched in their jobs to embrace because they know how to do the job as it is now. Asking them to go on a journey to change their mindset and learn new skills is challenging.

Guest: Anna

So you must foster a culture of innovation and then KPIs. So again, anyone who's that a business understands that what gets measured gets done. So what you need is KPIs that are measurable as you implement that strategy for change. So you've gotta say keep ourselves accountable. We said that we get this done by x time, where is it at now? What do we need to do? What are the blockers? How do we get through those to the next stage? And then obviously your employees are you pivotal to this? And when you're in a small business, even more so because you're not necessarily going to have an army of tech executives or engineers to help you. So you have to help them by giving them the skills that they need to be effective in whatever that transformation journey looks like. And then finally for all SMBs, it is pivotal for them to find the right partners because as I said to you before, and I will keep saying SMBs don't necessarily have that army of people around them to support them, but there is an amazing, amazing organization and ecosystem of people within our partner organization and within organizations like AWS who are there specifically to help our business customers as they go through this journey.

Host: Jon

All right, you had five things and I wrote down all your five things and I want to go through a couple of those. One is and these are in no particular order by the way because I think they're all key and they go hand in hand. Finding the right partner is not more important than the skills or vice versa. I think all five of them are key to being successful in this journey. The partners, I think there's a huge AWS ecosystem of partners that genuinely want to help. They're not there to say, all right, we got you we're out the door. And I think that's key because in the last couple of years AWS has doubled down on their partners and invested heavily into them because they're key to everything. After all, happy customers are happy and they want to make sure, one of the things I like about AWS is that the partner that they're working with, wants to know the customer experience all the way through.

Host: Jon

They want to know that they're being successful from start to finish, that you're delivering whatever service you're delivering, what is it for the customer, not what for you as the partner of like there's a huge benefit making sure this customer has that experience skills. I think skills are really important because, with SMBs, the same person who is writing the code or deployment is probably the same person who's managing it. You don't have the ops versus the DevOps, you know have the guy or girl multi hats managing this entire environment. So you have to make sure you have the right skills to make this journey successful. And then the other one is that the culture and the top down, I think they go hand in hand so close because your CEOs and your CTOs of a small business are the same people who are both hats. And if they are truly innovated and they're not saying, yeah, we're going to cloud, we're going to get that there. Well, what does that look like? I don't know, we just gotta do it. That culture, that innovation for them that succeed for the cloud journey will come down to their employees and they will be successful. And key measurements, I think these are great top fives, I don't think I could add another one that would capture everything.

Guest: Anna

And it's almost like as at AWS we love a flywheel and it is almost like a virtuous flywheel. If you're investing in your people there will invest in you and if you are transparent and clear with them about the journey. And I think again to speak to that, the earlier point around some SMBs are already there, they're already building, others are like, how do I do it now? I don't even know what to do here. I've got X amount of dollars to spend on it. I've got a partner whom I know and trust, why would I change that? Right? And therefore that particular journey is going to look very different to the guys who are already building on the cloud and who are like, okay, I just want to think about how to use a different service. I just want to innovate this part of my business. And that's a different conversation to how do I even begin. So that those five pillars, if you will, of how to think about moving to the cloud I think are pivotal and each one of them will help the other move along. And then before it, you're on a journey of growth hopefully for your business, which is all that we're trying to do, help businesses to grow

Host: Jon

Five pillars of their journey. I can see this is going to be a white paper out. Yeah, we're coin in that. I'm not sure we'll write it together, be one of those <laugh>, it'll be like the well-architected review. It will continuously grow. You heard it here live folks. No, it's not being released at re don't worry this recording's not going out until after reinvent. But if something does come up to and reinvent, we set it here first off. Just kidding. So Anna, let me jump on over to the next question I got for you. And this is going in strictly within our conversation based on your experience working with SMBs, what are their business and technology priorities today and what are some of those key challenges that they're realizing for these goals?

Guest: Anna

So look, we've covered them a little bit in my previous answers, but let's just double down on them to be clear. The first is cost management. It is the number one thing that any business owner will tell you. So I was fortunate in a prior role to be the c e O of a bank. So I've run a p and l and I would challenge anyone that the fundamentals of running a business are the same. If you are going to manage the business, the cost is the first thing you want to manage, especially in an environment where there are challenges from a macroeconomic perspective and there's been a lot of uncertainty in the last six months or so. So the first thing businesses are asking is, is this something I can afford? So cost management becomes the first issue and what we see is that cloud absolutely without a doubt saves people money, it just does and it makes sense over from moving your expenses from a capital expender to an operating expense and it can be done over a course of time.

Guest: Anna

And the ROI that we see is sometimes 234% of return on investment if you are looking at moving to the cloud. So the business fundamentals, the cost management, and the cost savings make sense moving to the cloud, they just do. And then you have growth. So the next thing your customer, the next thing your business person will say is, okay, so it's not going to cost me too much money, why would I do it fine, but what's it going to do for me? Well, I'll save some money. And the answer is that not only do you save money, but you end up being in a position to grow your business. And that is because as I said earlier, the consumers of today, the customers of today expect a digital experience. So your ability on the cloud to build a website to build a digital business model is just so much easier and so much more practical than if you were continuing to do things the way that you did.

Guest: Anna

Traditionally in a legacy infrastructure environment, you can buy SaaS software, you can work on the cloud, and use different technologies at your fingertips. It it's just such so much of an easier conversation and it allows customers really to grow. So again, that would be the second part of that. Then as we were talking risk management, all businesses right now are going through pretty challenging environments in terms of what are the regulators expecting of them. Even things like doing reporting, all of this stuff is starting to be automated whether we like it or not, you can no longer rely on doing an Excel spreadsheet of your expenses every month and just send them off that's something that is still doable through the use of existing technology. But if you want to improve for the future, there are ways that you can start to use cloud technology to change that.

Guest: Anna

So risk management is another thing that we're hearing from SMBs that they are enjoying about using the cloud. And then finally something that maybe doesn't intuitive, but if you want to attract talent, the talent of today not, I mean the existing tech talent are tenured and experienced, but the people who are going to be working in your organizations for the future, they are used to using their phone, they want to use technology, they want to use technology to solve problems. They're used to using these technologies. So using cloud technology in your business makes sense for your teams. It makes sense for those people who want to be able to do jobs quickly, they want things automated, and they don't want to have to spend an hour or two hours of their day just simply typing in stuff manually when there's a very easy program or process that could replace that. So cloud technology enables that, which means people enjoy working in your business

Host: Jon

Talent and playing around with the latest technology. Now you don't have to have the latest technology to attract top talent, but you have to enable them and take it to the next level. So cloud allows them to be innovative and to be speeded. The Excel spreadsheet, the data entry, all those are key to several things because if you think about it, your top talent wants to use the latest tools, wants to use the latest stuff, and this is cost-effective and efficient. Now I think one of the things that most companies don't realize when they go to the cloud, they're like cost is always a huge thing. And they're like, I've heard horror stories that cost is going up with my cloud and I don't know when to do 'em, but they don't realize that they're using less infrastructure and now they're able to innovate faster. So they're using more and able to speed up their business innovations as well. So they're going to use more, but they're going to be innovative and allow 'em to use some of an example machine learning that is not available to small businesses or not used to be is readily available to them and they don't have to have the big systems and the services now they can do more and analyze all their data that are available using these tools that once weren't available to those small businesses.

Guest: Anna

And we are seeing SMBs use those tools and we are seeing, but what you would call industry leaders leading by example. They are experimenting with that technology and doing amazing things. I love the example of we had a funeral home NACA in Australia over covid and they were serving a really important need in society, which is that people wanted to have these events notwithstanding the fact they couldn't go in person, they completely spun up completely new processes and product so that they could service their customers digitally online. Now had they not had access to AWS and amazing partners within AWS, they wouldn't have been able to do that, but they were thinking differently about how they could do their business. Now they've gone from that to then scaling their business to events management, thinking differently about the type of business they can run because they're using the new technology to think differently about innovating. So we see not only do we see businesses benefit from moving to the cloud because they're saving costs but we see them create completely new forms of business, which to me is super exciting and it is genuinely an upside of going to the cloud.

Host: Jon

The funeral home is a compelling case study because you just gave people what they needed, what they were looking for, but they couldn't have and they found an innovative way to do it. And now that people were back in person we're here at AWS reinventing and doing this awesome recording. So first of all, I gotta thank you again for this, but you've just given people peace of mind. Those who once couldn't attend a funeral home, regardless if it was during the pandemic or not because of the distance that they would have to travel to view it. You gave them a way to have that closure

Guest: Anna

And it's just something that no one 20 years ago someone would've gone that that'll never happen that no. But the whole way that we think about attending events, they think about building events has completely changed. And what's happened is that over this period of Covid, people have accepted it, and they understand how to do it. It's like a massive engagement with the technology, which previously they hadn't. And the hybrid workforce is something that we're all going to be thinking about for the future and it's here to stay. I can't see companies going back to only working in-house, always going to be a need for hybrid now. And the technology has been proven and so now and it's been embraced across the entire world. So now what comes next? Businesses start innovating, using that technology, thinking differently about how to build their businesses, and thinking differently about the costs associated with having people working versus being able to work remotely. It's a game changer and small businesses are using it in the same way and I would say in more innovative ways than very large enterprises because they have to survive.

Host: Jon

All right, I couldn't agree with you more, and I'm going to switch gears a little bit. We've been talking about talent and everything, so I want to talk about the digital skills gap. The digital skills gap is one of those key obstacles for SMBs and we've been talking about talent and training and investing, not only your employees and everything, but according to the new AWS APJ, alpha Beta digital scale study, and this was done this year in 2022. What are some of the key digital skills trends in APJ?

Guest: Anna

Yeah, this is a big one again because we're speaking about how we keep SMBs on the front foot and drive innovation in their businesses. And the reason we need to go deeper on this is that we need to understand that there is a gap, there is a skills gap in the market. So as much as people might want to get excited about experimenting, where are they? Are you finding the teams and the people who have the experience to implement and architect that change? And in APJ for instance a couple of key findings, digital skills we know have become far more urgently required by SMBs. 85% of SMBS employers say that the demand for tech focus skills and roles has increased due to the pandemic. We've already talked about why. And then SMBS workers themselves have reported 89% of the have said that they need more digital skills now to cope with what has how their jobs have changed during the pandemic.

Guest: Anna

So we know it's there and we've heard from people we need the skills we need more people who have those skills, we've got fewer people who know how to do it. So within SMBs, we can use cloud-based tools is the second most required skill in SMBs. and cybersecurity skills are third. And then the ability to think about how to migrate things to the cloud is ninth. So that gives you an ecosystem of thinking about what type of skills SMBs are looking for in the future. And what we see is that where SMBs do invest in providing digital skills, 84% of SMBS employees say that when they train their employees with digital skills, it improves talent retention, it improves employee productivity. So to the discussion, we were having earlier, people who are engaged, if you're helping to invest in people for the future of what everybody knows, they're going to have to learn to be able to keep a job and be relevant to their organization.

Guest: Anna

If you invest in them, they will stay with you and it improves their sense of permanency as well in the organization. And then we also see the faster achievement of digitization goals, increased revenue, and faster innovation cycles. And we also see that workers in SMBs are experiencing benefits in terms of increased efficiency in performing the work. So what we were talking about before, if you have cloud digital skills, some of which allow you to learn how to automate you're no longer having to rely on manual input of data into Excel spreadsheets. I use that as an example because it's one that we can all relate to. Those are things that cloud technology will help to change within an organization, which means people feel better about coming to work every day because their job is not simply putting in data or keeping admin. It becomes more value-added work for them and also for the organization.

Host: Jon

I feel that if SMBs even enter large enterprises, but SMBs in particular, I like working for small companies because you usually have a lot more say you can grow with them. Where in an enterprise there are times that you're lost between the numbers and everything. And with an SMBS, if my company is investing in me and it's a small company, they know me, I know the c e o, we talk, we have those conversations. If they're investing in me, I'm more likely investing in them. And I'm not talking hours where I'm like, I'm looking at new processes, I'm looking at saving money, my job is fulfilling. I come in and they're like, listen, my boss, he wants me to take this skills thing, he wants me to improve this environment, I have full control over it. This is awesome. I have a say in it where you're really, your talent is sticking around. And one of the things that I want to ask is with this digital skills gap and this shortage, and you notice a lot we had the great resignation or great re-imagining happening and everybody was kinda leaving and jumping ship and everything, and they were gone trying to tackle this skill shortage gap is not because we have a limited amount of people for it, is we don't have the training and stuff or being invested into it. How are SMBs tackling this?

Guest: Anna

Yeah, great question. And I think what we've seen is that the first thing you want to do is just provide a platform for your employees to upskill. And that can be done in various ways. There are lots of ways you can find online training services. There are lots of ways that you can investigate building a platform for education and educating your employees on digital skills. So the first thing is that you need a platform and you need to be clear as a leader that you want to help your team to build and grow their skills in that space. And secondly, create a culture of learning. Make sure that people understand that there is time aside in their day to do this. It's not something that they have to do on top of their day job. It's one of the classic challenges that I see leaders all the time. They're like, yeah, invest in yourself, grow, but do that on top of your day job

Host: Jon

With your extra time and anglers

Guest: Anna

Just unrealistic. So you must also allow time for people to invest in themselves to build and grow. And yes, that's time away from maybe productive work, but then long run you're going to end up with a workforce who is more engaged, who feel like they've learned more. And yeah, it is important to acknowledge that that time must be put aside to build and grow your skillset and that culture of learning is how you do that. And then thirdly, really look at ways that you can work with industry partners. So obviously AWS has got lots of programs that we've built to make sure that we can help to train and certify our teams and our customers. And we have partners who are just absolutely amazing at that as well. We've created a program that I've spoken about in India called SMBS Vila Vidia layer which is again targeted SMBs. It's a technology upskilling program to make sure that they're digitizing their oper operations and offerings using the AWS cloud. It includes 50 tech education models specific to SMBs and finds, helps them to find opportunities to drive business growth. So AWS is investing very intentionally around programs and certifications that will help our customers to skill their teams. So that's one example, but there are going to be so many more in the future.

Host: Jon

Anna, I know as an ex-Amazonian, when I was there, it was required that I spend 20% of my time regardless of how I had to manage my time learning a new T F C, which is a technical field community learning something new of my desire. I think AWS instills that into their employees and then it's trickling down because AWS huge company, and everybody's following their lead in a lot of things. So not only in our previous ones we've talked about sustainability and how AWS does that, but also now in the skills and they've been doing this for years, this is not something new. They have been telling that we need you guys to invest in yourselves because you're ultimately going to be happy, you're going to be doing better. And I think that's trickled down to not only enterprises, but now SMBs were investing in their employees are great because not only are they having, they're learning new skills, they're learning new things, but now they're going to retain them because they're not locked into that role. They're not locked into what they're doing and they enjoy coming to work daily because hey, listen an example, I was in cloud management tools and I ultimately became a podcaster now in doing this. But I did, I started that journey at AWS because they allowed me to do it.

Guest: Anna

And again, it's such a great organization for that. It is all those leadership principles that come to the fore. You have to own your journey and that's fine. So we have a really strong leadership principle around ownership and learning and being curious is also part of our culture. So if you put those two things together and then you start to build something meaningful for the people around you, apply that regardless of what role you have and you start to see results and you drive results. It's another one, deliver results.

Host: Jon

Okay, wait, I think we've quoted, how many are we? We're three. Why? So let's say customer obsession, frugality. I can do it.

Guest: Anna

I've been here for three years. I feel like I know it very well. But yeah, look for me. But it's real. That's actually what's happened in my job. That's exactly what I've done. I've seen, and I've been customer-obsessed with SMBS customers. I've realized just how massive that cohort of customers is and how particular each one of their journeys is on the cloud. And I've thought to myself, how do I do something that is going to help each one of those customers to benefit and grow their businesses on the cloud? So we'll talk a little bit about how I've done that with one of the programs that we are launching recently. But just to pivot back to your point, so what we've done is think differently about, as I said, the customer journey. So we've got a good example of an amazing business, Jim's mowing and they are the largest franchisee in the southern hemisphere.

Guest: Anna

And they have 4,600 F franchisees and serve over 500,000 customers. And they actually, started as a mowing franchise and have branched out into a whole bunch of other stuff. But what they did was they rapidly expanded, which meant that they had legacy infrastructure and processes, like we were talking about that, were hard for them to manage. They were growing rapidly and they needed to be thinking about what is the journey. And they had this amazing c E o who was just sort of visionary in the way that he was thinking about the way that he wanted to build the business. He had grand plans, a real true entrepreneur going to conquer the world. And indeed he did. He created the largest franchise of mowing businesses in the Southeast Asian region. But he realized that one of the key issues he was trying to tackle was customer complaints.

Guest: Anna

Because he had a very manual way of dealing with it. Someone would call, there would be a complaint that would be filed somewhere, and then something else happened. What he was able to do after he had moved his infrastructure to the cloud was change the way that he saw customer complaints and he was able to implement technologies that meant that he saw a 99% reduction in customer complaints by automating his customer service platform. And I have to say he worked with one of our amazing partners, CVO to help him to implement that as part of their journey. But what that was was like this whole of business change in ways that they were managing processes not just about an infrastructure change, but a business change. So more of this kind of inspirational change that you're seeing as a result of the application of cloud technology. Just some great interesting innovative thought processes around changing business models, which I'm constantly inspired by working at AWS.

Host: Jon

Anna, before I ask you the last question I've written down, I want to talk about Jim's case study for a second. The customer complaints, right? If you think of the old mentality, oh man, customers are complaining to me, but the value of them of obviously leadership principle number one, customer obsession in listening to your customers and improving on it because you're not building an application for yourself or software or a solution for yourself. You're building it because customers need something, there's a need and you're fulfilling that need. But if you don't tailor that need and change it, you have your vision. But if you develop your vision without some feedback from the customers, you're ultimately going to build something that's not being utilized. What is the value of listening to those customers, not only for AWS but even what Jim found out? I mean, you said he improved what 90, what was it? 90, 90, 90 9%, 99% of listening to your customers turning around and improving. And now he's become the number one. I mean, he did something that, no, I don't think many businesses would say, let's improve our customer complaint system.

Guest: Anna

No, they wouldn't. And I think what I've learned being at AWS for three years and the adoption of technologies is that this new generation of consumers is mobile literate. And by that I mean when they are engaging with anything, whether they want to buy something, whether they want to use a service, whether they want to go down the road in a cab, everything they do happens on their telephone happens online. So their expectation now is, and so much of that is driven by this sort of community, connected community culture that we see being built and it's being built in a digital context. So if you are thinking about building a business, then you are only going to be successful in a digital context if you give customers what they want because now customers can review you online within a matter of seconds. All they have to do is press the number of stars that they want to give to you.

Guest: Anna

And people use that. Those type of reviews is the way that people are starting to buy. They're starting to be making informed decisions about their buying processes around that technology. So it sounds like a long step, but it's not all Jim has done is gone. That can be applied to my business. I want to use that same very simple technology to understand my customers and do better so that I end up doing and giving them what they want. So not that different from an AWS methodology around customer obsession, but a very simple way of applying what I think is new business thinking around a consumer or a customer experience. And it's completely changed the way that I think about business as well because as I said, I'm from the banking industry, which is perhaps more reactive than proactive. And what I see is that customers who are being proactive about their customer experience are the most successful ones.

Host: Jon

Just touching on the stars, I'll give you a true customer case study. My daughter was about to order US food for lunch while we were doing it, and she looked at the reviews of the delivery service, and I'll keep names out of this here in Vegas for this one. And all the reviews or 50% of the reviews said, yeah, my half order made or my order didn't make it at all. And we ended up walking to go get something to eat because based on the reviews.

Guest: Anna

Yeah, I mean that is a very normal, real-world example of the way that people use digital technology. If you're building a platform, your customer experience and how your customers engage with you are pivotal to your being successful, can't. And it's something, again, it's a new way of thinking about business. You can immediately get feedback from a customer on whether or not they like what you're doing and you can change your methodology so that you've built something that most customers want. And that's a great way of thinking about building a business. And it's a great way to ensure your success and growth for the future.

Host: Jon

I just thought of something. I need to have a podcast review system for people to click the number of stars and tell me what they think. I think one thing means people return to it. I think that's a good thing. But I think I need what, hang tight folks. This might be on my website soon. I will. It'll be

Guest: Anna

Very smart and enable so that it can be done on your phone. Yes,

Host: Jon

Say <laugh>,

Guest: Anna

Yes. Technology is the way of the future. That is what people will be doing and building and buying going forward. It's just such an important way to think about business going forward.

Host: Jon

Well here at AWS Reinvent 2022 with Anna Green, I got one more question for you, but speaking of your phone everything that I'm doing and posting socially is right from my phone. There's not much I'm doing from my laptop because one, I don't want to crack it and carry it around with me and I want to record posts and do as short as much as possible and get the information out.

Guest: Anna

Yeah, well, you're way ahead of the game than Jon. You are in the right industry <laugh>. All right. Right.

Host: Jon

I'm doing the right job over that way. All right, Anna, last question I have for you before we wrap things up. How's AWS helping SMBs to scale now that we're post-pandemic restrictions have eased up in certain areas?

Guest: Anna

Yeah, thank you for asking this because, in my journey as the leader of the business, I've had to think intentionally about how can I help, as I said, what is it that I can do to help businesses to grow on AWS? And the thing we hear most from our businesses is that they want to save costs. They want to do it in a risk-free environment and they want to have a trusted partner that they can do that. So what I have done with my team in APJ is that we've built a program called AWS Lyft. We've rolled it out in Australia, the Philippines, and Singapore, but we are going to be grow rolling it out across APJ. And what it does is it manages those three things that they keep asking us about <laugh>. So we've created a starter pack of credits so that cost imperative is taken away and SMBs can start using AWS cloud and experiment without there being a huge cost impost. We've also created free training we've also got expert guidance and we are working on helping them to match with partners as part of that program so that their first experiment with using the cloud, which is what we keep hearing, is that we are nervous, we cost too much money, don't change the systems and processes. We're scared of the risk we are trying to solve for that. So

Host: Jon

That's solve of just getting started in the journey you're trying to, all right, let's take that away from you, that concern or worry, and let's help you with that.

Guest: Anna

Let us help you let us in a meaningful way so that AWS is giving you credit so that you can experiment. We help you with a partner who can also help you and then you end up having a good experience with the cloud and meaning that you will then start thinking about building and growing your business in that context. So that's the first thing we've done. And I'm so proud of the team for building that. We've now got AWS lift off the ground. It's for SMBs and it's going to be part of a broader, or we already have a broader platform called the AWS Connected Community. Once again, that's about connecting SMBs with partners, with other customers, with use cases, with thought leadership, with blog posts, with all the stuff that they need to start thinking intentionally about architecting their journey to the cloud regardless of where they are on that journey.

Guest: Anna

And then finally we've also got an ASK Expert program, which is a free one-on-one consult consultation with experts on business or technical issues which again, will help our customers to think differently about how they architect their journey on AW s. So really for me, trying to do something helpful for businesses, trying to think, again, customer-obsessed. What is it that small businesses need to be able to help them on the journey to the cloud? And that is a program that gives them the freedom to experiment without spending a lot of money and connect to partners that can also help them build and grow. So that's what I've done, that's what my team has done. We're very excited about it. It's the first time we've been able to have a program like this for SMBs. And it also points to the real customer obsession that AWS has, but the imperative that I think we as a cloud community have to help more than just large enterprises to start building on the cloud.

Host: Jon

Okay. So AWS Lift and you said off the ground. I think that was a sort of con to it, but I didn't, we got AWS to lift off the ground, and that was pretty good. Credits are key to any s and B because right now starting the traditional free tier is great, but there are services that I don't want to use that are not part of the free tier. And helping them get started with that journey and ease that mindset like, okay, we've got six months, let's put a solid plan in place, or how long they will last. The expert is very helpful because it goes along with the credits. It goes along with the start of their journey. They are afraid to get started because they don't have the skills or the talent for it. So they don't know where to start Having that guidance on where to start and the credits will ease some of that because they're going to guide them to the right path.

Host: Jon

Community is huge because we all like a community. We all like networking with folks and being able to reach out to not only AWS, but those who have experienced, it because you ever notice that when AW S releases a service, there are people who will use a service that AWS might not have thought of you how they designed it. So they're amazed and they take those and they put 'em in the customer case studies and they talk about 'em are like, this is amazing what you guys did. We need to show more people. And that's where the community comes into because they want to show this out and they want, and then that's why a W does their architecture stuff. So they want to show how people have designed the stuff on their services that have not been thought of before so they can show other customers the potential of the cloud and how they can do it.

Guest: Anna

And it is, it's a community that is building, and I'm very pleased to say is growing every single day and will do even more so after re: invent. So yeah, for me it's just a very cool business to be associated with. And as I said, my job is to make sure that we're helping all those businesses out there to grow. And I'm very excited to be able to be part of that journey.

Host: Jon

Well, Anna, I'm going to wrap things up here. I appreciate you joining me, not only at AWS Ring Bank because I know you traveled a very long distance and carved out some time for this podcast. I appreciate you joining me for the show.

Guest: Anna

I couldn't come here. I couldn't come here without speaking to you. Jon, what are you talking about? I'm so happy that finally, we're doing it and it's my pleasure always. And thank you for taking the time.

Host: Jon

Oh, thank you so much, everybody. Anna Green, head of s and b Asia Pacific and Japan, Amazon Web Services. Anna, thank you so much for joining me. Thank

Guest: Anna

You, Jon.

Host: Jon

All right, folks, that's it. This is Jon Myer's podcast. I'm your host Jon Myer. And guess what? In true podcasting style, we're outta here.