AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

Recognizing the Top 2021 AWS Partner Ambassadors

By Elaine Perales, Manager, Global Programs at AWS

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The APN Ambassador Program is a vibrant worldwide community of technical experts from AWS Partners.

They are prominent leaders who are passionate about sharing their Amazon Web Services (AWS) technical expertise, authoring blogs and whitepapers, creating and delivering public presentations, and contributing to open source projects.

APN Ambassadors evangelize AWS via social media and facilitate peer-to-peer learning by presenting at conferences, leading workshops, and hosting user group events.

As a result of their membership in the APN Ambassador program, AWS Partner team members can gain advanced knowledge and sharpen their technical delivery best practices.

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 proud to recognize some of the top 2021 APN Ambassadors from across the world. Congratulations!

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Top APN Ambassadors Globally

Biswajit Mohapatra – IBM, India

Biswajit is the Cloud Migration Factory and AWS Services Leader at IBM India. He contributed to AWS thought leadership with blogs on IBM portals, internal IBM webinars, national and international conferences, and event hosting. Biswajit helped IBM achieve five AWS Competencies and 12 Service Validations in one year. He also helped IBM achieve 350+ AWS Certifications through mentoring and training jointly with AWS. Biswajit’s executive sponsorship of many GSI PSA initiatives have accelerated AWS practice building at IBM.

Carlos Diego Cavalcanti – Valcann, Brazil

Carlos is Chief Technology Officer at Valcann. He graduated in System Analysis with a post-graduate degree in Management, Master’s in Computer Science, and PhD candidate in Computer Science. Carlos has professional and academic experience in software engineering, cloud computing, and DevOps. He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses, participating in the academic community by publishing articles, studies, and research.

Yoichi Satake – Serverworks, Japan

Yoichi is a Cloud Solutions Architect at Serverworks. He holds 12 AWS Certifications and is a core advisor to the company’s AWS cost-cutting consulting services. Yoichi accomplished 87 contributions despite joining the APN Ambassador program in only May.
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Top APN Ambassadors by Geography

ANZ

Arjen Schwarz, Lead Platform Engineer – DigiO

Arjen is a Lead Platform Engineer at DigIO, and the most prolific AWS Partner Ambassador in ANZ. From his open source projects to his involvement with the Melbourne AWS User Group, blog posts, and multiple podcasts, not a week goes by without Arjen sharing his knowledge and insights with the AWS community.

James Bromberger, National Cloud Lead – Modis

James is a Consulting Director at Modis and the 2nd top ANZ Ambassador, contributing his deep understanding of AWS and cloud through open source contributions, blog posts, case studies, contributions to AWS exam questions, and more. James’ content is always insightful and a source of knowledge for many in the AWS community.

Ian McKay, Cloud Lead – Kablamo

Ian, a Cloud Lead at Kablamo, is a top contributor in ANZ and has been globally recognized for his innovative open source projects, such as Former2 and AWS Account Controller. Ian is a regular blogger, contributing valuable insights and creative ways to approach solving business problems using AWS.

JAPAN

Yoichi Satake, Cloud Solutions Architect, Serverworks

Yoichi is a Cloud Solutions Architect at Serverworks. He holds 12 AWS Certifications and is a core advisor to the company’s AWS cost-cutting consulting services. Yoichi accomplished 87 contributions despite joining the APN Ambassador program in only May.

Fumiaki Ueno, Cloud Architect – NRI Netcom

Fumiaki has a decade of experience in enterprise infrastructure and multiple industries, with strong knowledge of both AWS Cloud and on-premise infrastructure. In 2021, he published over 20 blog posts and articles around multiple topics, and issued one of our 2021 AWS re:Invent Partner Guides.

Katsuhiro Fujimaki, Engineer – Hitachi Systems

Katsuhito from Hitachi System has been APN Ambassador for several years. He holds 12 AWS Certifications and is an AWS Authorized Instructor Champion. As a core member of Cloud CoE, Katsuhito provides technical support to AWS-related projects and leads AWS engineer development.

ASEAN

Thomas Smart, Consultant, Sourced Group

Thomas is a Singapore-based serverless specialist and holds 11 AWS Certifications. As the top ASEAN Ambassador, he influences customers in regulated industries, through his books, webinars, blog posts, training, and strategic engagements.

KOREA

Junseung Choi, Solutions Architect, GS Neotek

Junseung is our top Korean Ambassador and a Solutions Architect at GS Neotek, an AWS Premier Consulting Partner and top CDN provider in Korea. He has been contributing AWS technical content on GS Neotek’s official blog and evangelizing AWS within the company and for new developers with easy-to-follow examples.

LATAM

Carlos Diego Cavalcanti, CTO – Valcann

Carlos is Chief Technology Officer at Valcann. He graduated in System Analysis with a post-graduate degree in Management, Master’s in Computer Science, and PhD candidate in Computer Science. Carlos has professional and academic experience in software engineering, cloud computing, and DevOps. He also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses, participating in the academic community by publishing articles, studies, and research.

NA

Robert Belson, Strategy Analyst – Verizon

As our top North American Ambassador, Robert has a passion for 5G networks, distributed systems, serverless architectures, and can be found working with customers on designing cloud-native solutions, maintaining the Verizon 5G Edge Blog on Medium, and engaging the developer community through educational materials and meetups.

Denis Astahov, Solutions Architect – OpsGuru

Denis is a Solutions Architect who takes passion in automation and developing all kinds of cloud solutions with infrastructure as code (IaC). He holds seven AWS Certifications and owns the YouTube channel ADV-IT, where he teaches people a variety of IT topics: AWS, Terraform, Ansible, Jenkins, Linux, Python, and K8s. His channel has more than 80,000 subscribers and more than seven million views.

David Ball, Cloud Platform Architect – WWT

David has been in IT for 20+ years in different areas such as virtualization, storage, and cloud computing. He holds multiple AWS Certifications and attempts to provide helpful insight by blogging at virtualbonzo.com and wwt.com.

EMEA

Phil Basford, Head of Solution Engineering – Inawisdom

As our top EMEA Ambassador, Phil delivered 15 webinars, 10 presentations, and eight blog posts for the AWS community this year. He also drove the attainment of the Data and Analytics Competency and AWS Lambda Service Delivery designation for Inawisdom. Phil’s passion lies with machine learning and his passion showed when he published the first APN Blog post about Amazon Fraud Detector right at its general availability.

Simone Merlini, CEO – beSharp

Simone has been an Ambassador for 43 months as one of our original EMEA cohorts to onboard to the program. Simone published eight blog posts, seven customer case studies, hosted five events, and delivered eight presentations and webinars this year. On the business side, Simone drove beSharp’s attainment of the AWS Data and Analytics Competency and Service Delivery designations for Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Lambda, and Amazon API Gateway.

Adrian Hesketh, Principal Consultant – Infinity Works

Adrian has been an Ambassador for almost 23 months and submitted 30 contributions this year, consisting of 18 blog posts, six webinars, and five open source projects that focus on his passion of developing solutions where he can go deep into topics related to AWS Lambda, AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK), CI/CD pipelines, GraphQl, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Step Functions, and AWS AppSync.

INDIA

Biswajit Mohapatra, AWS Service Leader – IBM

Biswajit is the Cloud Migration Factory and AWS Services Leader at IBM India. He contributed to AWS thought leadership with blogs on IBM portals, internal IBM webinars, national and international conferences, and event hosting. Biswajit helped IBM achieve five AWS Competencies and 12 Service Validations in one year. He also helped IBM achieve 350+ AWS Certifications through mentoring and training jointly with AWS. Biswajit’s executive sponsorship of many GSI PSA initiatives have accelerated AWS practice building at IBM.

Sanchit Jain, Lead Solution Architect – Quantiphi

Sanchit is Lead Cloud Architect at Quantiphi and our second most active Ambassador in India, with contributions in AWS Well-Architected Framework and APN Immersion Day deliveries. Sanchit is also active in local user groups in India and has participated as a lead speaker in annual AWS Community Days in India and SAARC.

Rahul Sharma, Sr. Lead DevOps – SourceFuse

Rahul is Sr. DevOps Lead at SourceFuse and recognized as a top India contributor because of his open source contributions. He is a builder and enjoys sharing tools and accelerators which help developers to quickly build Well-Architected compliant product and services.
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Top APN Ambassadors by Strength

#1 in Well-Architected and Immersion Days

  • Sanchit Jain, Lead Solution Architect – Quantiphi, India

#1 in APN Programs and Webinars

#1 in Exam SME

  • Colin Barker, Cloud Solutions Architect – DevOps Group, UK

#1 in Blog Posts

  • Yoichi Satake, Cloud Solutions Architect – Serverworks, Japan

#1 in Presentations

AWS Certification All-Stars (12+ Active Certs)

Learn More About the APN Ambassador Program

If you are an employee of an AWS Services Partner at the Advanced or Premier tier or an AWS Software Partner at the validated stage, hold multiple AWS Certifications, and contribute to the AWS community through public presentations, open source projects, and social media, see if you qualify for the APN Ambassador Program.

If you’re an AWS customer and want to contact an APN Ambassador, we have listed each Ambassador’s contact information so you can connect with them directly through their employer. Just click the Ambassador’s name to visit their company page, and then click the Contact Partner button to get started.