(NOTE: This story was originally posted to CRN.com Nov. 17.)

Solution provider giant SoftwareONE, which has close ties with Microsoft, is responding to customer demand by beefing up its support of Amazon Web Services (AWS), rolling out transaction, billing, advisory and migration capabilities tied to its automated cloud platform.

Even though the Waukesha, Wis.-based, $5.5 billion solution provider – No. 14 on the CRN Solution Provider 500 – has a full-service offering around Microsoft Azure, it says customers have been asking for more visibility into their AWS consumption, according to Bali Kuchipudi, SoftwareONE's product marketing lead. He hopes the enhancements will allow the company to get deeper into AWS-centric customer environments.

"Microsoft [customers] understand that these are the leaders in the IaaS space right now, AWS and Azure," Kuchipudi told CRN. "We're giving an unbiased view so that the customer can make the best possible decision on which service to consume."

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SoftwareONE's Azure offering includes managed spend, technical services, back-end support and front-end advisory services to determine which workloads to migrate to the cloud, Kuchipudi said.

AWS is the world's largest cloud provider, controlling 31 percent of the global market at the end of last year, according to Synergy Research. Microsoft Azure is the second most significant player, controlling 9 percent of the market.

Effective immediately, Kuchipudi said SoftwareONE customers can bill and transact AWS through PyraCloud. The solution provider plans to build out advisory, support and migration services for AWS in 2017 to better serve on-premises or pure-play AWS customers interested in moving workloads to the public cloud, according to Lawrence Schwartz, SoftwareONE's CMO.

For the first time, Kuchipudi said SoftwareONE would have a significant marketing presence at AWS's re:Invent event later this month in hopes of highlighting the new capabilities around PyraCloud and generating more AWS-specific leads and prospects.

"We definitely want to help customers get into the AWS environment," Kuchipudi said. "We've been part of their partner network, but we haven't really done much with AWS [until now]."

Unlike Microsoft, AWS doesn't have a large base of on-premises customers, Schwartz said. But since SoftwareONE has a view into the on-premises spending of end user organizations, Kuchipudi said the company is better positioned than born-in-the-cloud players to help clients determine the financial and performance ramifications of migrating workloads into the cloud.

SoftwareONE is also rolling out a decision calculator to help CIOs or line of business leaders determine whether AWS, Azure or IBM SoftLayer would be the best fit for their workloads. Kuchipudi said customers could input what type of computing, networking, storage and operating systems they require, and the decision calculator will estimate how much it would cost to fulfill those needs on using each service.