Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been a major player in the IT environment and managed service provider (MSP) space for a number of years now. AWS drives growth through partnerships and provides organizations with a marketplace to showcase their products and services with the channel.
As a subsidiary of the larger multinational technology conglomerate Amazon, AWS provides cloud computing platforms and APIs to individuals, companies, and governments. Over the past year, AWS has made waves in the IT marketplace, crafted partnerships with companies, and debuted new growth and innovation strategies.
Here is a recap of a few moves AWS has made across the channel in 2024, showcasing their outsized impact in the ecosystem.
AWS Marketplace news
Ingram Micro Integrates AWS Marketplace
As one of the largest hyperscalers in the industry, integrating with AWS Marketplace offers service providers several advantages. Recently, global technology distributor Ingram Micro integrated AWS Marketplace into its Xvantage platform.
“Simplifying success for the channel around hyperscalers, including marketplaces, will improve the experience of our partners on multiple levels– from consolidated purchasing and billing to building, deploying, and managing custom solutions and services,” said Duncan Robinson, vice president of global partnerships at Ingram Micro at the IngramONE event in early November. “These marketplace integrations are critical to the channel ecosystem and mark another business advantage brought to Ingram Micro customers and vendor partners by Xvantage.”
This integration will open new markets and further simplify the go-to-market strategies, sales, and management of solutions for Ingram Micro’s channel partner community.
Traceable AI Joins AWS Marketplace
API security platform vendor Traceable AI also understands the benefits of making their products available on the AWS cloud marketplace as they made their platform available on the marketplace back in August.
Traceable AI’s platform discovers, monitors, and protects various API integrations a business has in use with the ultimate goal of stopping security threats and providing greater visibility for development teams and others in the organization.
“By integrating Traceable’s API security platform onto AWS’ global cloud infrastructure, we empower businesses worldwide to innovate securely. This collaboration makes enterprise-grade API security accessible and actionable for companies of all sizes, accelerating their digital initiatives while safeguarding their most valuable assets,” said Jyoti Bansal, CEO and Co-founder of Traceable AI.
Partnering with AWS
AWS Announces New Partnerships to Drive AI and Cloud Innovation
Among the moves for AWS in 2024, new partnerships have, of course, been a major component to AWS’ overall game plan.
Among the partnerships is a series of new agreements AWS made to allow organizations and customers to maximize GenAI and drive innovation through cloud computing. These partnership agreements will allow organizations to build new applications, while financial institutions can automate critical, repetitive processes and make more data-driven decisions.
The partnership agreements include:
- Box Inc. is expanding its strategic partnership with AWS to bring more GenAI to organizations of varying sizes. Through this expanded partnership, customers of the intelligent content management platform will be able to access foundation models directly in Box AI using Amazon Bedrock, including with Anthropic’s Claude and Amazon Titan.
- Q2 Holdings, a provider of digital transformation solutions for financial services, is another organization that has expanded its strategic partnership with AWS this year. As part of the collaboration, AWS and Presidio, a technology services and solutions provider, will assist Q2 with expanding the use of the AWS platform to power its digital banking product. Additionally, the partnership will allow Q2 to migrate and modernize more than 50,000 services on AWS.
- e&, a global technology group, signed a $1 billion agreement this year to accelerate the impact of cloud-driven innovation and digital transformation over the next six years. Through the agreement, AWS’ cloud infrastructure and solutions with e&’s network capabilities will combine to address stringent customer requirements across the public sector and regulated industries such as healthcare, finance, and oil and gas in the Middle East.
- Smartsheet, an enterprise work management platform, and AWS have partnered to launch a new connector that synchronizes data from Smartsheet into Amazon Q Business, a GenAI-powered assistant. The new connector will enable Amazon Q Business customers to ask their intelligent assistant for information about their projects, programs, and processes managed in Smartsheet to offer a unified search experience across their knowledge base, allowing employees to make data-driven decisions and operate at peak performance.
- CelcomDigi, a Malaysian mobile operator, is collaborating with AWS as a key cloud provider to transform into an AI-powered organization and improve its service to over 20 million customers. Earlier in the year, CelcomDigi and AWS established the AI Sandbox, which has helped CelcomDigi build and pilot more than 15 GenAI applications to streamline operations.
- Lumen and AWS have partnered to enhance network operations and delivery of cloud technologies for its customers by utilizing GenAI. Through this partnership, AWS will allow Lumen to utilize their tech across AI, machine learning, and security for application and systems modernization, while driving innovation in Lumen’s portfolio of communications, network services, security, and voice products.
To reciprocate, Lumen will provide fiber connectivity to AWS data centers to help customers build and deliver highly scalable AI applications across AWS Regions and AWS Local Zones.
AWS Adds Portal26 to ISV Program for GenAI Adoption Growth
AWS has committed to other partnerships this year, including adding Portal26 to its Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Accelerate Program.
The AWS ISV Accelerate Program is a co-sell program for AWS Partners that provide software solutions running on or integrating with AWS. By joining the program, Portal26 can assist organizations with progressing from proofs of concept to production and enable them to realize the full benefit of GenAI through their Generation Adoption Management platform.
“Portal26’s platform not only gives business leaders a way to have visibility and observability into their GenAI infrastructure, but with it, they can also build long-lasting strategies to support GenAI initiatives long term,” CEO of Portal26 Arti Raman said in a conversation with Channel Insider. “Our platform gives enterprises the ability to deep dive into using AI forensics and AI auditing capabilities that give an understanding of GenAI tools used, not just those sanctioned and whether there was improper use with full traceability and transparency.”
Snorkel AI Joins AWS ISV Accelerate Program
Another organization that is taking advantage of the benefits of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program is AI solutions provider Snorkel AI.
Snorkel AI and AWS teamed up on a collaboration agreement in June to help companies build customer, production-ready AI models. They furthered this relationship as Snorkel AI joined the AWS ISV program, which will allow the Snorkel Flow solution be brought to market more quickly and efficiently. Joining the program means faster, more reliable deployment for customers using the Snorkel platform for AI and machine learning tasks.
“Generative AI quality is entirely dependent on the data used to tune and align models,” said Snorkel AI co-founder Henry Ehrenberg. “Enterprises working on custom use cases need to quickly identify the best off-the-shelf model, then tune it with scalable and adaptable approaches to developing their data, and deploy these models with enterprise-grade security and privacy.”
Smarsh and AWS Partner to Enhance AI Compliance in Finance
Smarsh, a communications data and intelligence platform creator, has also partnered with AWS this year on a five-year agreement that will strengthen their initial partnership, which dates back to 2020, to bring automation and innovation to the financial services sector.
Through their partnership, Smarsh will utilize Amazon SageMaker to support compliance requirements for hundreds of financial services organizations globally. Additionally, Smarsh will explore potential offerings through the Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Q GenAI tools.
“Generative AI is delivering intelligence that is helping financial services organizations to better serve customers, enhance security, and drive deeper business insights,” said Scott Mullins, General Manager of Financial Services at AWS. “Using AWS and Smarsh, financial institutions can now use generative AI to drive more data insights that will help automate compliance and enhance risk detection to navigate an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.”
AWS strategy news
As AWS continues to innovate to bring greater value to the company, partners, and other stakeholders, the Seattle-based organization made further moves in 2024 to ensure the right leadership was in place.
AWS CEO Shift: Matt Garman to Replace Selipsky at the Helm
In May of this year, AWS made a CEO shift, having Matt Garman replace Adam Selipsky.
“Adam leaves AWS in a strong position, having reached a $100 billion annual revenue run rate this past quarter, with YoY revenue accelerating again,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to Amazon employees. “And perhaps most importantly, AWS continues to lead on operational performance, security, reliability, and the overall breadth and depth of our services. I’m deeply appreciative of Adam’s leadership during this time, and for the entire team’s dedication to deliver customers and the business.”
Garman has been with Amazon for 18 years, starting in 2005 as an MBA intern and becoming a full-time employee in 2006. As CEO, he aims to foster a culture of collaboration within the company through town halls and personal interaction with employees.
Selipsky led AWS for over three years, helping lead the organization through the pandemic. In 2023, AWS was hit hard with layoffs as Amazon had to cut over 20,000 jobs– and Selipsky had to navigate that tumultuous time. The hits kept coming during Selipsky’s tenure when in April of this year, AWS announced significant restructuring that impacted global sales, marketing, and physical stores technology teams.
This restructuring meant cutting several hundred roles across the divisions. Redundancies in several jobs, such as program management and sales operations, contributed to the decision for layoffs and to streamline operations.
“We operate in an incredibly fast-moving industry, and it is important that we stay agile as an organization,” said Garman at the time, then serving as AWS senior vice president. “The changes we are making are preparing the organization for the future, aligning with our strategy and priorities, and reducing duplication and inefficiency. I recognize the effect this has on every individual impacted.”
AWS global reach touches all corners of the channel, staying on the forefront of innovation, partnering with organizations to scale growth, and providing a marketplace for organizations of varying sizes to further their own reach in the IT ecosystem.
Going forward for AWS, 2025 will see more opportunities being provided by the cloud giant for the channel. AWS recently announced that Microsoft Windows Server 2025 images will be available on Amazon EC2, allowing customers to take advantage of the security, performance, and reliability of AWS on the latest Windows Server features.
Additionally, Amazon will require multi-factor authentication (MFA) on member accounts in AWS Organizations beginning in Spring 2025, expanding on the requirement implemented in May 2024 that required MFA for AWS Organization management account root users in large environments.
AWS is one of the three largest cloud hyperscalers, along with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. Read more about the big three in Channel Insider’s comparison of their features and use cases.