New MAP Incentives to Accelerate Migration and Modernization

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

By Janine Reynolds, Senior Migration Program Manager – AWS
By Erick Levitre, Partner Investment & Incentive Leader – AWS
By Priya Bains, Head of Partner Brand and Content Strategy – AWS

We’re excited to announce updates to the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) incentives, effective July 1, that further enable AWS Partners to support customer migrations to the cloud faster and at scale.

Since its inception in 2016, MAP has supported thousands of customers on their journey to Amazon Web Services (AWS). MAP is a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program that helps partners support customers in building strong AWS foundations, accelerate migrations, reduce risk, and offset initial migration costs.

Partners have shared with us that they need more resources to work with AWS faster and better support customers as they migrate to the cloud and modernize. These MAP enhancements are a direct response to this feedback.

At re:Invent 2023, we announced we’re making investments to enhance MAP in areas that better support partners’ business needs. Today, we’re excited to roll out new incentives and a simplified partner experience that enables you to drive faster funding approvals, accelerate migrations, and closer linkage of investment to customer success—driving greater revenue growth.

“The AWS MAP Program has been a cornerstone of OpsGuru’s approach to accelerating innovation for our customers on AWS while de-risking their migrations from legacy platforms,” says Robin Percy, CTO at OpsGuru. “With these latest enhancements to MAP, we’ll be able to drive more value for customers earlier in the program by directly aligning funding with migration milestones. It mitigates the short-term ‘double-bubble’ cost concern that many of our customers share while expediting the optimizations and modernizations that are the ultimate goal for any migration to the cloud. Through our MAP offerings, we have helped hundreds of customers enhance their technological capabilities and achieve their strategic goals. We couldn’t be more excited to roll out our next-generation services.”

What’s new

The updates to MAP will help drive scale and velocity of customer migrations through three key areas:

1. Streamlined processes: Simplified funding structure and approvals to shorten sales cycle.
2. Scaled funding: Expanded funding support for more migration opportunities—including investment that scales up with deal size—meaning larger incentives for larger deals.
3. Strategic Partner Incentives (SPIs): Unlock incremental funding through SPIs, which offer additional funding for Greenfield migrations, customers transitioning from VMware on-premises to AWS Native or hybrid cloud, and Modernization opportunities.

Simplified partner experience

We’re introducing a new MAP template in AWS Partner Funding Portal (APFP) that simplifies fund request submissions and cash claims. The new MAP template automatically creates claim milestones and associates them with realized revenue outcomes. It also supports SPIs for new customer engagement and modernization opportunities, with VMWare SPI available through MAP for VMware PIF Template. This simplified partner experience improves overall productivity by avoiding the need to manually create individual claim milestones.

Additionally, you can now easily view and verify status of your funding investment and claim readiness through the Analytics tab in AWS Partner Central.

Figure 1 – MAP template in Partner Central. 

The opportunity is now for AWS Partners

The opportunity to help with customers transformation using the cloud is greater than ever. Per the IDC, end-user spend on cloud will be $1.3T by 2027, which represents a $543B incremental revenue opportunity. As customers migrate and modernize, they are not just looking for technology, they’re looking for trusted partners to help them in their cloud transformation journey.

This indicates that migration continues to be a growth area for partners, with 90%+ customer workloads still not on the cloud. For example, if you have a Services business and do not already have a migration practice, you are missing a key offering in your services portfolio. Leverage MAP to develop migration capabilities and grow your business—propelling you to move across and up the AWS Partner Profitability Framework.

The MAP enhancements help you capitalize on this opportunity to drive larger and faster customer migrations and cloud adoptions.

Get started

MAP funding is available to AWS Migration Competency Partners and partners at the Validated Stage. For more details, check out the AWS MAP Partner Funding Benefits Guide.