AWS Partner Experience Transformation: Roadmap

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

By Priya Bains, Principal, Brand and Content Strategy – AWS Partner Network

At Amazon Web Services (AWS), we’re at the forefront of an exciting transformation to drive our partners to new heights of productivity and profitability. Earlier this year, we shared that we’re transforming the AWS Partner experience to help you drive greater customer value and a more predictable profitable growth.

Whether you want to reach new customers, sell alongside AWS sellers, or accelerate sales through AWS Marketplace, this transformation expands your opportunities with AWS at every stage of your journey.

In this post, we share key enhancements we’re making over the next six months to deepen your expertise and broaden the value across your business models—propelling you to move across and up the AWS Partner Profitability Framework.

Accelerating Sales with AWS Marketplace

Customers are increasingly purchasing software and services in AWS Marketplace to take advantage of added efficiencies, cost savings, and flexible payment and terms. Our mission is to make AWS Marketplace your preferred route-to-market to help you capitalize on this opportunity and access more than 330,000 active AWS Marketplace customers.

In June, we shared a few of the enhancements we’ve made to help you scale your offerings in AWS Marketplace. Over the next few months, we’ll continue to make improvements to better align the AWS Marketplace and Partner Central experience to accelerate your engagement with AWS.

Whether you offer technology solutions or services, you can deliver differentiated value to customers—enabling them to transact the way they prefer to buy by offering custom terms and pricing or through self-service.

Partners like World Wide Technology and Drata and have seen fast growth and accelerated sales by listing in AWS Marketplace. Since August 2022, Drata has engaged AWS on 5,000+ co-selling opportunities and won more than 400 Marketplace Private Offers (MPPOs) to date. They also implemented multiple internal incentives designed to encourage their sales team to lean into AWS Marketplace.

Develop Solutions to Meet Demands of Line of Business Buyers

To help you deliver greater customer value and meet the demands of Line of Business (LOB) buyers looking for ready-to-use applications, we’re investing in resources that support solution building.

In Q4, we’ll expand AWS Partner Solutions Factory to include a self-service framework that aims to simplify and expedite delivering industry-focused solutions between AWS and partners. This expansion will provide a curated way for you to access AWS best practices, reference architectures, toolkits that enable you to build ready-to-use software and applications, and sell through AWS Marketplace.

Leveraging AWS Partner Solutions Factory, partners like GE Digital, Syntax, and Pepperl & Fuchs are working together to deliver a turnkey predictive solution to industrial customers in as little as a day and scale globally.

For Public Sector partners, as we roll out more open source solutions via AWS Solution Spark in the next few months—like Digital Evidence Archive (DEA) for law enforcement agencies—we’ll provide more dedicated sales academy training, go-to-market templates, and AWS sales team alignment to leverage these open source solutions.

Foster Tri-Party Engagement between AWS, Services, and Technology Solution Partners

Throughout the year, we are engaging with the partner community to collaborate together to co-develop business innovations and solutions for customers of all sizes and industries. This deeper engagement between Services, Technology Solution partners, and AWS, accelerates growth and profitability with enhanced go-to-market (GTM) support, additional funding, and incentives for joint solution development.

We’re already witnessing significant growth with early engagements between successful Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) working with Global System Integrators (GSIs) to build industry/vertical solutions—realizing bigger deal value with AWS Marketplace and access to more customers and markets.

For example, partners like Accenture and Pega are working together with AWS to holistically support business reinvention with customized Gen AI workflows for the insurance industry. With the plug and play solution available in AWS Marketplace, customers are able to drive faster sales, increase customer satisfaction, boost loyalty, and reduce costs.

Additionally, we’re working closely with partners like Caylent, Infosys, Slalom, and Deloitte to build generative AI offerings on AWS and develop specialization with accelerators such as AWS Solutions Library and AWS Solution Constructs, that allow customers to easily identify solutions and partners for their business needs.

Improved Managed Services Provider (MSP) Program

By 2026, IDC projects that Managed Service Provider (MSPs) will manage 65% of the total Public Cloud spending, representing $443B. As technology becomes more powerful and complex, and IT talent is becoming scarcer, customers are looking to outsource some or all of the lifecycle management of their IT stack. They are willing to pay for a business outcome with an SLA and cede their vendor decisions to their MSPs. To help you capitalize on this opportunity, we’re testing a new set of enhanced benefits and requirements with our current MSP Partners.

Over the next few months, we’ll learn from you and evolve the MSP program to better fit your needs around build and marketing support, customer management, and program benefits. This enables you to provide highly customized management services to end customers, better align with AWS sellers, and list your offerings in AWS Marketplace seamlessly.

Standardizing Validation Mechanisms

For Services Partner to achieve AWS Partner Specializations faster and list your consulting, professional, or managed services in AWS Marketplace earlier in your partner journey, we’re standardizing the foundational elements across resellers, services, and managed services business models.

Services Partners can now validate offerings with the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR), that will be available in AWS Partner Solutions Finder (PSF) for customers to engage with confidence and establish trust quickly. This was previously only available for partners offering Technology Solutions. By Q4, we’ll introduce foundational validation to the AWS Solution Provider Program to help resellers adopt AWS Well-Architected best practices early in the journey. In addition, to further expand your reseller and services business model, we’re introducing a foundational level validation in December as a stepping stone towards becoming a MSP.

The standardized foundational validations across the business models will serve as building blocks to achieve AWS Partner Specializations and list your offerings in AWS Marketplace faster. This will provide a consistent experience to accelerate your go-to-market motions, access partner benefits, and better align with AWS sellers.

Stay Tuned

We’re excited about these enhancements to simplify your partner journey and drive greater value. As we transform, we’ll be agile in our approach—iterating and shifting based on feedback from our customers and partners. We’ll listen, learn, and work together throughout this journey.

We’ll continue to invest in building a simple, personalized, and value-driven experience that allows customers to discover partner solutions based on their business needs, and enables partners to identify new marketing opportunities and growth areas to drive greater profitability.

Stay tuned for more updates via the “AWS Partner Experience Transformation” blog series.

Additionally, check out the latest enhancements to AWS Marketplace, programs, and AWS Partner Central in our What’s New posts.