AWS AI Partner Caylent CEO On Surging Anthropic Claude Demand, Amazon Connect Deal Wins And A ‘New Class’ Of Managed Services

CEO Valerie Henderson explains Caylent’s new AWS Strategic Collaboration Agreement, demand for Anthropic Claude and winning massive Amazon Connect deals.

Caylent is one of the most innovative Amazon Web Services and Anthropic partners in the world when it comes to AI, managed services and winning artificial intelligence deals.

“Claude Code is now the single-most-requested technology across our customer base,” Caylent CEO Valerie Henderson told CRN. “Our ACE [Anthropic Consulting and Engineering] practice was built specifically to close the delivery gap between where enterprise demand for agentic AI is and where actual AWS delivery expertise, governance and operating models exist.”

The Irvine, Calif.-based AWS Premier Tier Services Partner also recently acquired Pronetx, an AWS partner with deep specialization in Amazon Connect contact center technology.

“We’ve done one of the largest federal contact center migrations done in U.S. history, moving 350,000 daily calls across 5,000 agents to Amazon Connect in under 60 days with zero downtime,” Henderson said.

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AWS Channel Chief Sees ‘A New Class Of Partner’ In Caylent, Signs Strategic Collaboration Agreement

Caylent has seen so much positive AI sales and customer momentum that AWS doubled down on the AI superstar by signing a multiyear Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) this month.

“What Caylent and AWS are building together is what enterprise AI actually looks like in production,” said Henderson. “Agentic systems that keep delivering value long after go-live, customer experiences that transform through Amazon Connect, and managed services that get smarter over time.”

The SCA supports investment in a “new class” of managed services and cloud operations offerings that go beyond traditional infrastructure monitoring and incident response into proactive resolution and continuous optimization, said AWS channel chief Ruba Borno.

"We’re seeing a new class of partner emerge—one that uses AI to compress timelines, embed intelligence into ongoing operations, and deliver outcomes that compound over time rather than ending at go-live,” said Borno, vice president of AWS specialists and partners, in a statement to CRN. “Caylent is building that way across agentic AI, managed services and customer experience, and this collaboration gives them the investment to do it at scale."

With the SCA, Caylent plans to grow its managed services engineering team and develop new capabilities built on AWS AI services, including Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and AWS DevOps Agents.

“We know how to take customers from ambition to outcomes, and that’s what we’re here to do,” Henderson said.

Caylent is a 10-time AWS Partner of the Year Award winner, including for generative AI, migration and security consulting, as well as one of Anthropic’s few dedicated partners.

In an interview with CRN, Henderson takes a deep dive on its AWS SCA, Anthropic momentum, Amazon Connect and Caylent’s winning AI strategy.

What resources is AWS providing Caylent with this SCA?

What the agreement gives us is the investment and co-sell alignment to continue scaling that vision across the three areas where customer demand is clearest: agentic AI, managed services reimagined around agents, and customer experience transformation through AWS Connect.

Our AI work, in particular, was meaningful to AWS because it is validated in production.

Since 2015, we have grown alongside organizations on AWS, but the trajectory of the last 18 months specifically is what earned this expanded agreement.

In that window, we launched Caylent Accelerate, built and deployed more than 500 AI workloads on Amazon Bedrock, took customers like Glean and Smarsh from AI ambition to production-grade agentic systems, acquired Pronetx to close the customer experience gap, and launched ACE as a dedicated practice at the intersection of Anthropic and AWS.

So talk about your momentum with Anthropic Claude and your ACE practice.

Claude Code is now the single-most-requested technology across our customer base.

Our ACE practice was built specifically to close the delivery gap between where enterprise demand for agentic AI is and where actual AWS delivery expertise, governance and operating models exist.

The formation of ACE as a dedicated business unit is a signal: a structural commitment to being the most experienced partner at the intersection of AWS and Anthropic.

Ruba Borno put it well when she said they are seeing a new class of partner emerge, one that embeds intelligence into ongoing operations and delivers outcomes that compound over time rather than ending at go-live.

That is exactly what we are building.

Why are customers investing in Amazon Connect? How big of an opportunity is this for Caylent as now the owner of Pronetx?

The intelligent enterprise is not complete until customer experience catches up.

You can have the most sophisticated cloud infrastructure and AI capabilities in the world, but if the customer-facing layer is still running on legacy Avaya infrastructure from 15 years ago, you haven’t finished the transformation.

That gap is exactly why customers are investing in Amazon Connect right now, and it’s why we acquired Pronetx.

Amazon Connect gives enterprises a cloud-native foundation that can actually take advantage of what AI makes possible at the level of the customer interaction itself. The cost of staying on legacy systems is going up while the capabilities are standing still, and buyers know it.

What does Pronetx bring to the table for Caylent? Where is your Amazon Connect advantage?

What Pronetx brings is a track record that is very hard to replicate.

[Former AWS executive and Pronetx founder and CEO] Yasser El-Haggan and his team spent years at AWS helping build Amazon Connect from the ground up.

They took that knowledge and spent nearly a decade building some of the largest, most complex deployments in existence. Today, that portfolio includes over 1 million daily calls managed across federal, enterprise and public sector deployments, and more than 40,000 native agent workspace seats deployed.

We’ve done one of the largest federal contact center migrations in U.S. history, moving 350,000 daily calls across 5,000 agents to Amazon Connect in under 60 days with zero downtime.

Integrated into Caylent, we can now offer the full arc from migrating off legacy systems onto Connect to layering in intelligent CX agents that operate with full customer context in real time to a unified operational view through CxPortal.

What is Caylent’s future in the agentic AI era?

The technology is moving faster than any company can stay ahead of. What we have tried to build is an organization designed to learn faster than the technology shifts, to make decisions at the right pace rather than waiting for the certainty that this moment will not allow.

A few years ago, we formed a belief that AI was not going to be a feature or a tool you bolt onto a services model. It was going to become the architecture for delivery itself.

Once you accept that, you stop white-knuckling through the turbulence and start learning to move with it.

We embedded agentic AI into how Caylent operates as a company: We rebuilt how we scope engagements, how we deliver migrations and database modernization, how we run our managed services, and how our own engineering teams work.

Our agentic delivery system, Caylent Accelerate, is not a portfolio of solutions—it is how we actually function. That internal transformation is what gave us the credibility to help customers do the same, and it is why the outcomes we deliver are real.

What differentiates Caylent in the AI world?

What I think differentiates us more than any technology choice or partnership credential is the experience we carry into this era. Caylent has been doing this work the traditional way for over a decade.

We have built and run some of the most complex AWS environments in production.

We have managed cloud operations through incidents at 3:00 a.m., made the hard architecture calls, learned what breaks at scale and what holds.

Our Agentic Cloud Operations platform launches with agents trained on 12 years of real operational data because we did not just theorize about what good AWS operations looks like. We built it manually first, over thousands of engagements and hundreds of thousands of tickets. You cannot teach an agent what you do not already know yourself.

That is the thing I believe is genuinely hard to replicate, and it is what gives me real confidence that the AI-first services model we are building will hold up for our customers the way it needs to.