AWS streamlines and aligns APJ partner strategy

The Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region has one of the largest Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure networks outside of North America, driving growth and innovation, even though some organisations in the region are still early in their cloud journey.

AWS APJ director of partnerships Chris Casey said one of the most exciting aspects of working in the APJ and Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) regions is the incredible diversity of its partner landscape.

“What makes this region unique is the dynamic growth. Many partners have built highly sophisticated and successful businesses around specific technologies that help customers at the start of their cloud journey,” he said.

In an interview with ARN, Casey said when he stepped into his role, which was in January last year, the focus was to align the APJ partner strategy directly with AWS’ broader strategy in the region.

“Internally, we say, ‘we don’t have a partner strategy, we have an AWS strategy with partners embedded in it’,” he said. “That might sound like a subtle distinction, but it’s made a huge difference.

“It’s helped us become more streamlined and aligned. Everyone, from sales teams to service teams to partners, is now focused on the same priorities, using the same language.”

According to Casey, when AWS goes to market, teams are aligned in both message and execution.

“The goal has been to keep things simple and focused, so we can scale effectively with partners while staying tightly coordinated around shared outcomes,” he said.

Specialisations and partner matching

During the cloud giant’s inaugural Sydney Partner Summit, held in early April, the cloud vendor said the partner contribution to AWS’ A/NZ business continues to grow at a rapid pace, going from 47 per cent in 2022 to 68 per cent in 2024.

AWS was committed to discover more ways that it can work together with partners especially as the managing service provider space was evolving quickly. This was why the vendor consolidated its partner programs from 127 down to 64.

“We’ve been on this simplification journey for over a year now,” noted Casey. “In Australia and New Zealand, and across the broader APJ region, we’ve seen a steady increase in partner-influenced customer opportunities year over year.

Simplifying these programs has been very “well received” by A/NZ partners.

“Even with fewer programs, our partner impact is growing, which tells us the simplification is working,” he said. “Our goal isn’t to restrict innovation or slow down investment. We’re still co-investing with partners where we see a need for capability and capacity. The intent is to make things easier.

“Partners are running businesses. They need straightforward answers about what’s available, where and how to use it,” he said.

According to Casey, while partner programs have been simplified, the vendor has also expanded the number of competencies available, which has now reached to over 30.

“These competencies span industries and use cases, allowing us to be much more precise when matching partners to customers and their specific challenges,” he said.

This increased precision helps AWS teams recommend the right partner for a customer’s unique needs, whether it’s via automated tools like its Partner Matching Engine or through traditional engagement.

“For example, if a customer has a VMware migration imperative, we can connect them with partners who’ve done similar projects in that region, with relevant expertise and delivery capability,” Casey said. “This focus has driven a notable increase in successful partner engagement and we expect that trend to continue.”

Modernising with cloud migration

In today’s digital landscape, a modernised customer is really one who has not yet realised the full value of the cloud, Casey said.

However, during the AWS Partner Summit, Casey said that “depending on the literature you read, there’s between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of workloads that are still yet to be moved to the cloud”.

This presents MSPs with a new opportunity to migrate more of their customers workloads than they have been and modernise things they might have already migrated.

“There are still other workloads that remain on-premises, in data centres, and have yet to move to the cloud,” explained Casey.

“But interestingly, technologies like Amazon Q Developer and Amazon Q Transform enable customers to tackle challenging migrations, such as those involving VMware estates, mainframes, and even .NET code, that were previously pushed aside due to their complexity.

“With the help of these technologies, many customers are revisiting these projects. They’re seeing a return on investment because of the time saved through automation, whether it’s code transformation, testing, or documentation, ultimately reducing both the time and total cost of these migrations.”

Accelerating SMEs

As part of the drive for cloud adoption, AWS recognises that small and medium-sized customers will also play an important role.

AWS has previously noted that IDC forecasts of the total cloud spend for small and medium customers will grow by 87 per cent in the next three years to $87 billion, which is why it launched its small and medium business competency.

In 2025, AWS launched the Small Business Acceleration initiative, which was one of the cloud giant’s first partner-led channel sales motion.

“We’re really focused on [helping] these customers with this transformation, through partners,” he said. “In the past, that expertise and capability might have only been available in some of the larger consulting firms around the world.

Partners will need to be involved in assessing the customer’s footprint on what might be good to migrate to the cloud. This then follows all the way through to potentially managing services and helping that customer manage their workloads on the cloud into the future, explained Casey.

“Now there’s many more players that can embark on these engagements with these customers, leveraging generative AI technology to underpin that work,” he said. “Also automating things like the testing and the quality assurance associated with actually moving some of these workloads into production.”

Partners have been positive about this initiative, said Casey.

“Not only is [this initiative] helping provide some dedicated incentives and frameworks to support partners who might be building or accelerating their practice, it has helped provide a little bit more structure for those partners in terms of AWS’s focus on this customer segment, as well as how we’re thinking about leveraging partners very holistically [on the] cloud adoption life cycle.” he said.

AI and security

The growing importance of cloud also brings with it the emerging use of AI, with the cloud vendor embarking on a broad training initiative with partners, including MSPs.

The goal is to ensure they’re fully aware of how AWS AI and AWS services work.

“We’re still at a stage where basic foundational training is essential, especially for employees within an MSP,” said Casey. “Ensuring they understand how this it works, and how to apply it meaningfully within businesses, is attractive to our MSP partners.

“It helps them to not only protect their margins but also grow their profitability and overall business through the use of this technology.

“It’s also critical that their employees and builders have a foundational understanding of how AI should work, not just from a technical standpoint, but in the context of interacting with broader business processes.”

Important is the issue of digital security in era of AI which comes with its own complexities.

“Security is job zero for us, and certainly something that we are laser-focused on when we’re talking about building capability and capacity with our partners,” said Casey. “That includes supporting our partners as they help customers adopt and manage emerging technologies particularly AI.

“We’ve developed security specialisations that address everything from digital sovereignty requirements to the latest challenges associated with artificial intelligence,” he said.

According to Casey, what AWS is trying to do is help partners provide a clear security roadmap and value proposition where the vendor and customers have identified that the partner plays a key role.

“That includes protecting AI applications not just from the latest cyberattacks but also implementing guardrails for how users engage with frontier models,” he said. “Even protecting against nefarious hallucinations, if customers are concerned about that.

“Whether that’s all the way through to security specialisations, our efforts span from helping customers at the highest end in terms of digital sovereignty, all the way to supporting the adoption of cutting-edge AI technologies.”

Working with distributors

With all that AWS wants to achieve with its partners, distributors play an important role, from taking partners through the partner program to specialised security certification training.

While distributors have been a part of AWS’ strategy for many years, they have become more at the forefront in the past few years.

“We are lucky enough to have a partner network of over 140,000 partners around the world,” said Casey. “[About] 70 per cent of those are headquartered outside of the US, which is fantastic, but we simply do not have enough AWS resources to deeply train and enable all of those partners at the scale that we would like to.”

Casey said that a lot of its distributor partners, whether that’s Westcon, Ingram Micro or TD Synnex, have a lot of relationships with local technology providers.

That includes either the born-in-the-cloud partners, where they’ve started their business and they’re looking to work with a distributor on AWS, or those that have been partners of a distributor selling other forms of technology, like physical hardware, in the past and they’re looking at new ways to do business and service their customers.

“Both of those partners are equally meaningful for us, but our distributor relationships, especially in a region like Asia Pacific and Japan, are absolutely critical to our growth story across customer segments,” said Casey. “For the Small Business Acceleration initiative, our distributor relationships there in Australia and New Zealand, and across APJ, are critical for making that a success.”

“But also more broadly, in terms of the migrations and modernisations, as well as what we’re doing with industry use cases and, of course, generative AI.”

From an AWS perspective, Casey explained there’s new frontier models becoming available on Amazon Bedrock quite regularly.

“There’s a lot of new information in this space and us helping the distributors stay really focused on what are some of the core components to enable their partners on,” he said. “They’ve been leaning in, importantly, giving us a lot of feedback on how partners need to use these services, or how partners are reacting in terms of using these services.”

Casey believes its distributor partners have already done a great job and continue to do a great job in training and enabling their partners to give informed responses to customers.

According to Casey, that challenge and opportunity lies in balancing AWS’s strategic clarity across the region with space for local partner innovation.

“That’s the most rewarding part of the job,” he added.