AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Accelerate Multi-Partner Opportunities with Partner Connections

By Ujala Rizwan, Sr. Product Manager, Technical – AWS
By Marcos Bianchi, Sr. Technical Business Development Manager – AWS

We’re excited to announce Partner Connections (in preview), an integrated experience in AWS Partner Central that allows Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partners to find and connect with other Partners and co-sell together on customer deals. Through Partner Connections, Partners can jointly develop and market differentiated solutions, accelerate deal closure, and deliver enhanced value to customers.

Multi-partner co-selling is a key priority for many Partners to accelerate go-to-market. Partners are working together to drive transformative customer outcomes across healthcare, manufacturing, energy, financial services, retail sectors, and more. A 2023 Canalys study shows that 44% of customers rely on multiple partners (4+) to meet their business needs. These relationships deliver significant benefits—improving productivity, reducing costs, enhancing quality, and driving growth.

However, finding and engaging in multi-partner opportunities can be challenging due to fragmented systems. Partner Connections helps to simplify this by providing a streamlined experience for Partners to find and collaborate with other Partners on new opportunities, helping them build strategic relationships more effectively.

Partner Connections is a combination of two key capabilities that define the AWS Partner’s journey of multi-partner co-selling in AWS Partner Central and AWS Marketplace:

  • Connections discovery and management: Facilitates Partner matchmaking by allowing Partners to find, connect, and manage their relationships with other complementary Partners through search and AI-driven recommendations. Partner-to-Partner connections can help unlock new revenue streams through coordinated sales efforts, shared projects, or joint solutions building that Partners might not be able to offer on their own.
  • Multi-partner opportunities: Enables Partners to share joint sales opportunities within their trusted network of connected Partners. Optimized multi-partner deal management supports direct collaboration between multiple Partners and AWS field teams, ensuring real-time updates to support faster and more successful engagements.

Benefits

Partner Connections offers a range of advantages that can enhance your business operations and market presence:

  • Access to the AWS Partner community for strategic and competitive advantage: Partner Connections provides a centralized space for you to scale co-selling relationships; accelerate the development of a channel strategy; and expand into untapped markets to deliver joint solutions to customers.
  • Insights and visibility to build customer-centric solutions, facilitating new customer engagements: Customers seek integrated solutions that deliver measurable outcomes, often involving multiple components and organizations. According to Gartner Forecast Analysis, global IT spending is forecasted to reach $5.1 trillion by end of 2024 and working backwards from the customer’s needs, with Partner Connections we are giving you tools to help accelerate business outcomes by leveraging each other’s past engagements, understanding customer preferences, and crafting powerful, full-stack solutions.
  • Accelerated sales cycles: Engage directly with AWS field teams on opportunities, helping to reduce operational overhead and keeping all parties informed. Timely updates drive faster deal lifecycles and improve win rates.

How it works

Search for other AWS Partners or view the AI-recommended Partners suggested to you. Once you have created a connection with another AWS Partner, you can share opportunities with each other and start collaborating together on multi-partner opportunities.

Prerequisites:

Find and connect with a Partner:

Log in to AWS Partner Central and select Partner Connections from the top navigation. Select Find and Connect to use search and AI recommendations to send connection requests to strategic Partners.

Manage Partner connections:

Select Manage Partner Connections in the top navigation under Partner Connections to view and manage all connections with other Partners.

Share an opportunity with a Partner connection:

Once a connection has been established with a strategic Partner, AWS Partners can start sharing their opportunities with each other. Navigate to ACE Pipeline Manager, select the opportunity to share select Share with partner to get started.

Accept an opportunity from a Partner connection:

When an opportunity is shared with another Partner, they will receive an invitation request. To view all invitations, navigate to the Sell tab in the top navigation in Partner Central, select Multi-Partner Opportunities, View invitations.

Review the invitations and decide whether to engage in the opportunity by accepting or rejecting the invitation. Once an invitation has been accepted, a new opportunity will be created and appear in ACE Pipeline Manager and the new Multi-Partner Opportunities table as an active opportunity.

View shared opportunity information:

Once you become part of a multi-partner opportunity, you can track the progress from other Partners engaged on the deal through the Shared partner details tab inside your Opportunity details view. View progress, status, and next steps from other Partners directly in the tab. You can also see opportunity-level recommendations for other Partners you can involve in the opportunity to help accelerate the deal cycle and increase your chances of winning together.

Channel Partners can attach Channel Partner Private Offers to opportunities:

Additionally, Channel Partners can now attach their AWS MP Channel Partner Private Offer (CPPO) to their ACE opportunities to get real-time sales insights and track deals from your co-selling pipeline all the way to customer offers. Select the opportunity you want to associate with a channel partner private offer in ACE Pipeline Manager and select Associate offer, search for the offer or input its ID to associate the opportunity with the selected CPPO.

Get started

Partners can create, update, and share multi-partner opportunities using the AWS Partner Central API for Selling. This allows Partners to collaborate with other Partners and AWS on joint sales opportunities from their own customer relationship management (CRM) system.

Partner Connections (in preview) is available to all eligible AWS Partners who have signed the ACE Terms and Conditions and have linked their AWS account to their Partner Central account. For more information, review the ACE user guide in Partner Central (login required).