Category: Announcements

The APN Ambassador Program is a vibrant worldwide community of technical experts from AWS Partner Network (APN) Consulting and ISV Partners. Local AWS communities are a vital resource for cloud professionals around the world, and many of these are hosted by APN Ambassadors. Members of local communities look to their leaders to provide guidance and mentorship on how to build AWS skills, solve technical problems, and grow their careers.

We are pleased to share the latest updates to our AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP) Partner Program in version 4.2 of the Validation Checklist. This version reflects our most recent program criteria and requirements, with improvements focused on raising the bar for both MSP Partners and AWS customers. The changes in version 4.2 primarily focus on clarifying requirements and removing ambiguity based on feedback and questions we’ve received from our MSP Partner community.

As customers bring more and more workloads to AWS, they are seeking to optimize for different characteristics like compute performance, memory, or throughput. AMD-powered instances are integral to these offerings. Later this year, AWS plans to offer Amazon EC2 instances powered by the newly introduced third generation AMD EPYC processors. These instances will expand customer choice of compute options available on EC2.

We are excited to highlight 74 AWS Partners that received new designations in February for our global AWS Competency, AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP), AWS Service Delivery, and AWS Service Ready programs. These designations span workload, solution, and industry, and help AWS customers identify top AWS Partners that can deliver on core business objectives. AWS Partners are focused on your success, helping customers take full advantage of the business benefits AWS has to offer.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are maturing rapidly. According to Gartner, 75% of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI by 2024. That’s why we are expanding the AWS Machine Learning Competency to help customers identify and engage qualified AWS Partners that have deep technical expertise and proven customer success in the areas of Applied AI and Machine Learning Operations (MLOps).

To help customers run the most compute-intensive workloads across industry verticals, we are excited to introduce the new AWS High Performance Computing (HPC) Competency featuring AWS Partners who are focused on the important aspects of HPC in the cloud, including security, cost management, and performance. These trusted AWS Partners are uniquely positioned to help customers innovate faster and become more agile and flexible while controlling costs.

The APN Customer Engagements (ACE) opportunity validation experience is being updated for AWS Partners to streamline the overall validation process in several key ways. This includes proactively calling out the most common errors that delay approvals, and allowing you to edit submissions requiring additional information directly in the ACE Pipeline Manager. We are also updating the “Date of last provided update exceeds 2 weeks” opportunity and lead list views to only show items in which you are able to take action.

We are excited to highlight 61 AWS Partners that received new designations in January for our global AWS Competency, AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP), AWS Service Delivery, and AWS Service Ready programs. These designations span workload, solution, and industry, and help AWS customers identify top AWS Partners that can deliver on core business objectives. AWS Partners are focused on your success, helping customers take full advantage of the business benefits AWS has to offer.

AWS commissioned 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, to conduct a study of global AWS Systems Integrator (SI) Partners focused on profitability. As a result, the new AWS Partner Profitability and Success Report was launched at re:Invent. This report explores some of the biggest challenges AWS Partners face in pursing profitability, including transitioning from other business models, changing customer perceptions, and finding ways to differentiate.

To receive the AWS Service Ready designation, AWS Partners must undergo rigorous technical validation and are assessed on the security, performance, and reliability of their AWS solutions. To help AWS Technology Partners better understand this process, we are releasing new versions of the AWS Service Ready Validation Checklists (VCL). These Validation Checklists outline for AWS Technology Partners the customer case study and technical criteria needed to achieve an AWS Service Ready designation.