AWS Partner Network (APN) – 10 Years and Going Strong

Ten years ago we launched AWS Partner Network (APN) in beta form for our partners and our customers. In his post for the beta launch, my then-colleague Jinesh Varia noted that:

Partners are an integral part of the AWS ecosystem as they enable customers and help them scale their business globally. Some of our greatest wins, particularly with enterprises, have been influenced by our Partners.

A decade later, as our customers work toward digital transformation, their needs are becoming more complex. As part of their transformation they are looking for innovation, differentiating solutions, and routinely ask us to refer them to partners with the right skills and the specialized capabilities that will help them to make the best of use AWS services.

The partners, in turn, are stepping up to the challenge and driving innovation on behalf of their customers in ways that transform multiple industries. This includes migration of workloads, modernization of existing code & architectures, and the development of cloud-native applications.

Thank You, Partners
AWS Partners all around the world are doing amazing work! Integrators like Presidio in the US, NEC in Japan, Versent in Australia, T-Systems International in Germany, and Compasso UOL in Latin America are delivering some exemplary transformations on AWS. On the product side, companies like Megazone Cloud (Asia/Pacific) are partnering with global ISVs such as Databricks, Datadog, and New Relic to help them go to market. Many other ISV Partners are working to reinvent their offerings in order to take advantage of specific AWS services and features. The list of such partners is long, and includes Infor, VTEX, and Iron Mountain, to name a few.

In 2021, AWS and our partners worked together to address hundreds of thousands of customer opportunities. Partners like Snowflake, logz.io, and Confluent have told us that AWS Partner program such as ISV Accelerate and AWS Global Startup Program are having a measurable impact on their businesses.

These are just a few examples (we have many more success stories), but the overall trend should be pretty clear — transformation is essential, and AWS Partners are ready, willing, and able to make it happen.

As part of our celebration of this important anniversary, the APN Blog will be sharing a series of success stories that focus on partner-driven customer transformation!

A Decade of Partner-Driven Innovation and Evolution
We launched APN in 2012 with a few hundred partners. Today, AWS customers can choose offerings from more than 100,000 partners in more than 150 countries.

A lot of this growth can be traced back to our first Leadership Principle, Customer Obsession. Most of our services and major features have their origins in customer requests and APN is no different: we build programs that are designed to meet specific, expressed needs of our customers. Today, we continue to seek and listen to partner feedback, use that feedback to innovate and to experiment, and to get it to market as quickly as possible.

Let’s take a quick trip through history and review some of the most interesting APN milestones of the last decade:

In 2012, we first announced the partner type (Consulting and Technology) model when APN came to life. With each partner type, partners could qualify for one of the three tiers (Select, Advanced, and Premier) and achieve benefits based on their tier.

In 2013, AWS Partners told us they wanted to stand out in the industry. To allow partners to differentiate their offerings to customers and show expertise in building solutions, we introduced the first two of what is now a very long list of competencies.

In 2014, we launched the AWS Managed Service Provider Program to help customers find partners who can help with migration to the AWS cloud, along with the AWS SaaS Factory program to support partners looking to build and accelerate delivery of SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions on behalf of their customers. We also launched the APN Blog channel to bring partner success stories with AWS and customers to life. Today, the APN Blog is one of the most popular blogs at AWS.

Next in 2016, customers started to ask us where to go when looking for a partner that can help design, migrate, manage, and optimize their workloads on AWS, or for partner-built tools that can help them achieve their goals. To help them more easily find the right partner and solution for their specific business needs, we launched the AWS Partner Solutions Finder, a new website where customers could search for, discover, and connect with AWS Partners.

In 2017, to allow partners to showcase their earned AWS designations to customers, we introduced the Badge Manager. The dynamic tool allows partners to build customized AWS Partner branded badges to highlight their success with AWS to customers.

In 2018, we launched several new programs and features to better support our partners gain AWS expertise and promote their offerings to customers including AWS Device Qualification program, AWS Well-Architected Partner Program, and several competencies.

In 2019, for mid-to-late stage startups seeking support with product development, go-to-market and co-sell, we launched the AWS Global Startup program. We also launched the AWS Service Ready Program to help customers find validated partner products that work with AWS services.

Next, in 2020 to help organizations co-sell, drive new business and accelerate sales cycles we launched the AWS ISV Accelerate program.

In 2021 our partners told us that they needed more (and faster) ways to work with AWS so that they could meet the ever-growing needs of their customers. We launched AWS Partner Paths in order to accelerate partner engagement with AWS.

Partner Paths replace technology and consulting partner type models—evolving to an offering type model. We now offer five Partner Paths—Software Path, Hardware Path, Training Path, Distribution Path, and Services Path—which represents consulting, professional, managed, or value-add resale services. This new framework provides a curated journey through partner resources, benefits, and programs.

Looking Ahead
As I mentioned earlier, Customer Obsession is central to everything that we do at AWS. We see partners as our customers, and we continue to obsess over ways to make it easier and more efficient for them to work with us. For example, we continue to focus on partner specialization and have developed a deep understanding of the ways that our customers find it to be of value.

Our goal is to empower partners with tools that make it easy for them to navigate through our selection of enablement resources, benefits, and programs and find those that help them to showcase their customer expertise and to get-to-market with AWS faster than ever. The new AWS Partner Central (login required) and AWS Partner Marketing Central experiences that we launched earlier this year are part of this focus.

To wrap up, I would like to once again thank our partner community for all of their support and feedback. We will continue to listen, learn, innovate, and work together with you to invent the future!

— Jeff;