Accelerating AWS Partner Success: New Initiatives to Drive Customer Value in 2025

“AWS Partner Experience Transformation” is a blog series on updates to the AWS Partner Programs, AWS Marketplace, and AWS Partner Central.

By Priya Bains, Head of Partner Brand and Content Strategy – AWS

As we continue to expand opportunities at every stage of your AWS journey and propel you to move up and across the AWS Partner Profitability Framework, we’re excited to share the latest enhancements to our Partner programs, AWS Marketplace, and Partner services.

At AWS re:Invent 2024, we announced new initiatives that revolutionize how our Partners engage with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive unprecedented value for customers. These enhancements focus on helping Partners grow their relevance, reach, and relationships with customers to drive sustainable, profitable growth and unlock the $6.40 multiplier, as identified by the Canalys study.

In this post, we dive into these initiatives, designed to empower Partners across all industries—from startups to enterprise-level organizations. Learn how you can maximize co-sell opportunities with AWS, enhance collaboration opportunities, accelerate selling Partner solutions in AWS Marketplace and beyond, and leverage cutting-edge AI technologies to drive unprecedented growth. We’ll outline specific strategies for Partners to capitalize on emerging markets, particularly in the small and medium businesses (SMBs) sector, and new AWS Specializations that will help you stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape.

Get ready to unlock new revenue streams, expand your reach, and deliver unparalleled value to customers.

Maximizing Co-Sell Opportunities with AWS

According to the 2024 Canalys study, “The power of partnerships: unlocking the AWS co-sell opportunity”, frequent co-selling Partners experienced 51% higher average revenue growth, 65% of Partners reported higher close rates and 54% saw larger deals as a result of co-sell motions. Eighty percent of Partners also claimed that AWS Marketplace is an important part of their AWS co-sell motion. For these reasons, we’re providing ways for you maximize co-sell opportunities with AWS to generate greater revenue and scale customer reach with AWS Marketplace.

Beginning in January 2025, we’re expanding the SaaS co-sell benefit (also known as SaaS Revenue Recognition), previously an invite-only benefit for large technology solution Partners, to all ISV Accelerate Partners who are transacting in AWS Marketplace, including eligible Startups. Additionally, to help AWS Sales teams discover and engage the right Partners for specific customer opportunities, we introduced a generative AI tool for AWS Sales teams to discover and match Partners to specific customers opportunities. It allows AWS Sales teams to assess customer needs, find qualified Partners, and connect them with customers through AWS Originated opportunity sharing.

We also introduced several new AWS Partner Central features that enable Partners to do upfront co-sell strategy business planning with AWS; facilitate faster communication between Partners and AWS sellers to accelerate co-selling by requesting dedicated Slack channels; and collaborate on multi-partner deals using Partner Connections, which allows Partners to discover and work with other Partners on shared customer opportunities. Additionally, Partners can leverage AWS Partner Central APIs to integrate their CRM systems with AWS Partner Central for streamlined co-selling.

“SaaS Revenue Recognition is the mechanism through which our teams in the field see their AWS counterparts incentivized to collaborate,” said Helen O’Hara, Cloud Partnerships Director at Contentsquare. “This builds a confidence in the mutual benefit of co-sell for Contentsquare, AWS, and our shared customers that represents an exciting new chapter for our partnership.”

Take Action: Follow the best practices in the APN Blog “Unlocking Synergies: Maximizing co-sell opportunities with AWS”, to drive early business goals alignment, collaboration, optimization, and engagement with AWS Sales team.

Incentives to Accelerate Cloud Modernization, Leveraging Generative AI

With global cloud spending expected to double by 2028 ($1.6T per IDC), there’s tremendous opportunity for Partners to help customers migrate and modernize to AWS. AWS is investing in helping customers—with support from AWS Partners—to migrate and modernize their most strategic workloads and infrastructure to the cloud. Per a McKinsey report, 38% of cloud migrations are behind plan and 75% are over budget. We understand that the biggest barrier to infrastructure modernization initiatives is lack of skills, per Gartner.

To better enable Partners to support customers’ migration and modernization needs, earlier this year we introduced Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) incentives for VMWare, Modernization, SAP, and new customer engagement. Since then, we expanded the VMWare incentive to include managed services to bundled managed services with VMware modernization proposals. Furthermore, we recently launched Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) to run VMware-based workloads alongside other applications in AWS.

Additionally, we launched Amazon Q Developer Transformation for VMware (QT for VMware), the first generative AI-powered solution to accelerate and simplify the migration and modernization of VMware workloads to AWS, which will reduce the timeline for migration of VMware workloads and reduce the cost of migration delivery for Partners.

Now, we’re excited to expand MAP to include Amazon Bedrock as a MAP-eligible service and third-party Large Language Models (LLMs). This strategic expansion allows customers to migrate and modernize their AI/ML workloads onto AWS—taking advantage of the most comprehensive set of capabilities across the three layers of the generative AI stack.

“At Caylent, we are leveraging the transformation capabilities of Amazon Q Develop to achieve an 80% savings in time and effort on our .NET transformations,” Clayton Davis, Senior Director of Cloud Native Solutions at Caylent. “Amazon Q Developer streamlines the process for our engineers and enables us to deliver high value, high quality outcomes to our clients faster than ever before.” 

Take Action: Explore the benefits you can unlock as an AWS Competency Partner to showcase your expertise to customers and qualify for eligible MAP benefits.

Expanding Your Reach with AWS Marketplace: Meeting Customers Where They Are

Customers are increasingly purchasing software and services in AWS Marketplace to take advantage of added efficiencies, cost savings, and enhanced governance. The AWS Marketplace catalog has grown to more than 30,000 product listings, and the depth and breadth of what customers can find in AWS Marketplace is continuing to grow. AWS Marketplace sellers are transacting billions of dollars in products and services through AWS Marketplace—representing a significant opportunity for our Partners.

We’re investing in making it easier and faster for customers to find, buy, and use the Partner software, data, and services they need to drive innovation in the cloud. We’re doing this by accelerating Partner solution discovery and procurement in AWS Marketplace, in AWS service consoles, and now on websites beyond AWS.

To speed up product discovery and evaluation for customers shopping in AWS Marketplace, we launched AI-powered comparisons and product recommendations for SaaS products. In October, we launched the ability for sellers to issue private offers in non-USD currency and use local bank accounts to receive disbursements.

At re:Invent 2023, we announced the AWS Marketplace SaaS Quick Launch feature and we continue to invest in making the customer experience to buy, configure, and deploy Partner solutions on AWS fast, with our latest launch allowing customers to deploy Databricks in AWS Marketplace in three quick steps. Now, for the first time, select customers in the United States can apply for, utilize, and manage financing for AWS Marketplace software purchases within the AWS Billing and Cost Management console.

For customers building in AWS service consoles, such as the EKS console, AWS Marketplace surfaces relevant Partner solutions to help customers find the tools they need, when and where they need them. We’re excited to launch our newest integration, making EC2 Image builder components available in AWS Marketplace. With this integration, customers can find and subscribe to Image Builder components from ISVs in AWS Marketplace or in the Image Builder console and incorporate the components into golden images through Image Builder.

Venues beyond AWS: We’re launching Buy with AWS, allowing Partners to create solution discovery and buying experiences on their own websites that are powered by AWS Marketplace. Partners that sell or resell products in AWS Marketplace can now make it easier for website visitors to discover and purchase products by adding Buy with AWS buttons to your website. Customers can quickly subscribe to free trials or make purchases using their AWS accounts—accelerating the path-to-purchase with a co-branded, secure, and familiar purchasing experience. On top of extending the benefits of AWS Marketplace procurement to your customers, you’ll also gain access to customer insights so you can track conversion performance.

Furthermore, we’re launching a new Targeted Transformation Modules (TTM) pilot as part of the AWS Partner Transformation Program to help AWS Public Sector Services Partners stand out in AWS Marketplace and accelerate their revenue growth. The TTM modules helps Partners build AWS Marketplace go-to-market plans and drive Total Contract Value (TCV) through AWS Marketplace.

“Many of our customers prefer purchasing through AWS Marketplace,” Francois Grenier, Head of Partnerships at Thoropass. “By implementing Buy with AWS, we can offer our customers more options to purchase, enhancing their overall buying experience. This approach strengthens customer loyalty and further expands our partnership with AWS.” 

Take Action: Reach more customers, drive more leads, and convert more opportunities by selling your products in AWS Marketplace or by signing up as a Channel Partner to resell products in AWS Marketplace. Implement Buy with AWS to surface AWS Marketplace listings on your website and offer new buying experiences for customers.

New AWS Consumer Goods Specialization

A Canalys study shows that Partners’ specialization plays a big role in customer selection—specifically 87% of customers highlight AWS Specializations as a top three criteria for partner selection, 74% of customers review their Partners’ vendor certifications at least 2x a year, and 59% of Partners currently have, or are actively building, industry-specific IP to solve customers’ problems.

At re:Invent 2023, we launched the Generative AI Competency, enabling customers to leverage generative AI Partner solutions available in AWS Marketplace. We recently expanded the generative AI Innovation Center to provide these Partners the training and resources to better support customers. Additionally, to help Partners accelerate their gen AI journey through tailored one-on-one guidance and support, we also launched gen AI Targeted Transformation Module for Public Sector Partners earlier this year as part of Partner Transformation Program.

To help you capitalize on new opportunities while continuing to demonstrate value to your customer, we’re excited to launch 5 AWS Specializations, including Security categories, expanding our current portfolio of 118+ AWS Specializations.

The AWS Consumer Goods Competency highlights top AWS Partners who provide consulting services and software solutions for an end-to-end transformation of the Consumer Goods Company’s Operating Model across one or more of the six solution areas: Marketing, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Product Development, Unified Commerce, and IT & Digital Transformation.

“Treasure Data with our AI-powered suite of Customer Data Platform (CDP) solutions shares a commitment to deliver exceptional customer experiences with AWS and is proud to achieve the AWS Consumer Goods Competency,” says Kaz Ohta, CEO and co-founder at Treasure Data. “This deeper collaboration with AWS increases our ability to better serve the consumer brands better.” 

Take Action: Explore AWS Specialization Partner benefits (Partner Central login required).

New AWS Security Specializations to Build Securely and Operate Efficiently

As customers build, run, and scale applications on the cloud, security remains a top priority at AWS. International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts the global security product market will continue to see double-digit growth over the next five years with total revenue reaching $200 billion in 2028.Per the 2024 Cybersecurity survey, 95% of respondents are moderately to extremely concerned in the security of cloud. These concerns also act as limiters to growth of AI-powered cloud workloads.

Partners have shared with us they wish to leverage our industry-recognized unique security culture and focus on “Security of the Cloud” but do not always have a clear roadmap of partnership opportunities making investment decisions difficult. That’s why we’re launching 4 Security Specializations with unique GTM benefits to provide Partners a clear Security framework and roadmap positioning security as a business enabler, and updating the existing AWS Security Competency:

• AWS Security Lake Service Ready Specialization which allows Partners to validate their integrations for compatibility with Security Lake.
• AWS Digital Sovereignty Specialization for commercial and public sector Partners to validate and promote AWS Partners with demonstrated skills, solutions, and experience in helping organizations address their digital sovereignty.
• A new Security AI Category in the Security Competency for both Software and Services Partners, to help customers identify and engage trusted AWS Partners with deep expertise in protecting AI applications and targeting AI applications, or leveraging AI for advanced cyber-attack tactics, techniques and procedures.
• AWS Security Incident Response Service Ready for ISVs and Service Delivery Specializations for SIs. Security Incident Response triages threat findings, helping customers with coordination and AWS-native response tooling during their incident, and providing 24/7 access to security experts. Service Delivery and Service Ready Specialization for AWS Security Incident Response helps customers leverage various Partners via tools or security professionals to assist their incident response across AWS, multi-cloud, and on-premises assets.

“A major challenge in security is ensuring that you don’t bury yourself under alerts; it’s critical to filter false positives out before humans get involved,” said Mike Fountandez, Senior Security Engineer at Canva. “Having a tool like Tines (AWS Security Specialization Partner) helps us to be ready to onboard the next alert by empowering us to filter false positives, freeing up our time for more valuable tasks.” 

Take Action: Explore AWS Specialization Partner benefits (Partner Central login required). Drive demand with Security LIVE!, featured on Twitch and YouTube showcasing AWS Security Partners solving security challenges for customers.

Introducing Small Business Acceleration Initiative

The AWS Small and Medium Business (SMB) Competency launched in January 2024 has already grown to more than 60 Partners. This year, AWS SMB Competency Partners grew their SMB AWS business 33% more YoY as compared to a similar group of Partners without SMB Competency.

Starting January 1, 2025, we’re doubling down on this success and launching the Small Business Acceleration Initiative, the first Partner-led channel sales motion at AWS. Moving forward, AWS Partner Territory Managers will provide dedicated support to Partners serving these customers and we will drive customer awareness through AWS demand generation channels- passing leads to SMB Competency Partners and distributors.

As part of the initiative, to help Partners accelerate achieving SMB Competency and provide greater value to customers, we’re introducing the Small Business Acceleration Package (AWS Partner Central login required), available in AWS Partner Central. This is your one-stop-shop for all SMB go-to-market materials including marketing campaigns, sales plays, packaged solutions, and more—to further boost your SMB business growth.

“As an SMB Competency Partner, Trend Micro has been able to work with SMBs to provide them with security needs, tools, and requirements, to help them innovate and build on AWS,” said Carlos Gonzalez, VP of Strategic Alliances at Trend Micro. 

Take Action: AWS Partners looking to build or grow their SMB-focused practice should leverage the Small Business Acceleration Package (login required) to achieve the AWS SMB Competency and unlock additional GTM benefits.

Enhanced Solution Validation and Go-to-Market Support for Startups

Startups play a vital role in the cloud, driving innovation and fostering economic growth. Our startup Partners have repeatedly told us they need help getting their products to market —both by validating their technology and generating net new business.

As a response to these asks, at the Startup Summit in October, we introduced a private preview of a Startup Track within our AWS Specialization Program beginning in Q1 2025. This purpose-built track will support startups in achieving AWS Specialization to showcase expertise to customers and unlock benefits designed to help you go to market with AWS. Initially it will focus on AWS Specializations like Gen AI and Security. To help startups go-to-market faster with AWS, eligible Global Startup program Partners can take advantage of MDF to create three fully AWS funded co-branded joint marketing assets with our marketing agencies including eBooks, Workshops, Case Studies, Webinars.

Then, to help convert leads to active customers with the support of AWS sellers, starting in January, we’re extending our SaaS co-sell benefit to eligible Startups who are leveraging the power of AWS Marketplace. Startup Partners who’ve chosen to lean in early and make co-selling with AWS as a core part of how they go-to-market, are eligible for this benefit.

“The AWS Global Startup Program helped us reach not only AWS customers but developers as well, which was pivotal to the growth of our AWS partnership and overall business,” said Webb Brown, Founder and CEO at Kubecost. “Growing our AWS customer base was one of the many important variables that led to our recent acquisition by IBM.” 

Take Action: Explore the AWS Global Startup program to leverage resources to help you go-to-market faster with AWS.

AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) Day for Partners

Managed services are a key driver of Partner profitability and customer success. As projected by Forrester and IDC, by 2026, MSPs will manage 65% of the total Public Cloud spending on IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, representing $443B. Additionally, we conducted our own research of cloud customers last year, and discovered that MSPs are one of the top 3 influencers (internal and external) of a customer’s purchase decisions. We’ve also heard from several of our Partners who engage in multiple business models that when they engage with a customer through Managed Services rather than a SOW based professional service— retention doubles and end customer account growth increase by nearly 50%.

For this reason, we launched new benefits earlier this year to provide more enablement support to organizations looking to build their managed service practice and grow managed services revenue streams. In October, we hosted an inaugural MSP Day, a virtual global first of its kind event, attended by AWS MSP Partners, AWS Services Partners, SPP Partners, and Migration Competency Partners. MSP Day attracted 2000 registrants from 83 countries, with discussions ranging from generative AI, Automation, Security, Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies, Business Planning, and more.

Based on Partners’ requests for more such events, we’re expanding MSP Day from a single day event to 4 regional events for to provide both technical and business guidance specific to MSPs. In 2025, we’re further scaling the MSP Build workshops to support more Partners and additional regions in 2025. Additionally, we’re also adding MSP Sales and MSP Technical Accreditations, to bring AWS expertise to a larger population of AWS MSPs.

“A diverse team from AWS and Ollion came together for an invigorating workshop on managed cloud, exploring innovative approaches and strategizing on how to better serve customers across various industries,” Lauren Dettloff, Chief Marketing and Growth Officer at Ollion. “We’re honored to be part of the workshop, where we discussed ideas to partner alongside organizations large and small, within financial services, manufacturing, retail, services and more.” 

Take Action: Access the on-demand MSP Day content available through AWS Skill Builder, available at no cost to organizations looking to build and grow their MSP practice.

Unlocking AI for Partners to Drive Greater Operational Efficiencies

Partners have told us that they want faster ways to engage with AWS that enable quicker decision making. So, we’re investing in capabilities to automate how our Partners do business with us and scale. We’re extending the power of generative AI to AWS Partner Central and the AWS Marketplace Management Portal to better support our Partners with capabilities that help drive operational efficiency and faster engagement with AWS.

On November 26, we launched AWS Partner Assistant, a new a generative AI-powered virtual assistant for Partners available in AWS Partner Central and the AWS Marketplace Management Portal. Built on Amazon Q Business, Partner Assistant makes it easier for you to get quick answers to common questions—helping you boost productivity and accelerate your AWS Partner journey to unlock benefits faster. Partner Assistant enables you to reduce the need for manual searches by generating real-time guidance and concise summaries from guides and documentation on a variety of topics. Use Partner Assistant to learn about Partner programs, guidance for listing and selling in AWS Marketplace, APN incentives and benefits, and more.

“The AWS Partner Assistant is a game-changer,” said Nancy Caudle, Director, Sales at Sotyra. “It provided instant, accurate answers to our queries about AWS services, Partner programs, and certifications. It’s ability to understand context and provide relevant information saves us hours of documentation searching. It’s like having a 24/7 AWS expert at our fingertips. This addition will significantly boost our productivity as an AWS Partner.” 

Additionally, we’re using Amazon Bedrock to automate the Foundational Technical Review (FTR). Partners seeking access to AWS funding programs, AWS Specialization Programs , and the AWS ISV Accelerate Program for co-sell support must qualify their solutions by completing the FTR. The new process for the FTR allows Partners to submit responses in several non-English languages and offers review decisions in minutes. Partners with approved FTR are able to access co-sell and incentive programs faster to enhance customer discoverability.

Take Action: Link your AWS Partner Central account with AWS account or AWS Marketplace account through the Account Linking feature to leverage the power of AI and accelerate your Partner journey.

2025 and Beyond

From AI-powered co-selling tools and expanded AWS Marketplace reach to dedicated support for startups and SMBs and new AWS Specializations, we’re empowering Partners to deliver exceptional value to customers across all industries. As you embrace these new initiatives, you’ll be well-positioned to unlock new revenue streams, expand your reach, and stand out in an increasingly competitive landscape.

As we continue to make enhancements to the Partner experience, streamline processes, improve communication, and facilitate collaboration, we’ll continue to listen to your feedback. AWS sees Partners as a force multiplier in customer obsession. These enhancements reflect our commitment to your success as an AWS Partner.

The journey ahead is filled with exciting possibilities. Let’s get ready for a year filled with enhanced collaboration and expanded opportunities that will reshape the way we work together to better serve our customers.

Stay tuned for more updates via the AWS Partner Experience Transformation blog series. Additionally, check out the latest enhancements to AWS Marketplace, Partner programs, and AWS Partner Central in our What’s New posts.

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