AWS Global Channel Chief: 4 ‘Major’ Areas Partners Need To Be Investing In

Ruba Borno talks to CRN about the major areas channel partners should be investing in today, which include the AWS Generative AI Competency, cybersecurity, data and analytics, and its Migration Acceleration Program. Here’s what every AWS partner needs to know.

Amazon Web Services global channel chief Ruba Borno is tasked with leading and guiding thousands of AWS partners who are generating billions in AWS sales into the future.

In an interview with CRN, Borno explains four “major” focus areas partners should be investing in for the remainder of 2025 and beyond if they want to be successful in the AI era. These are cybersecurity, data and analytics, AWS’ Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), and generative AI.

“First and foremost is generative AI,” AWS’ Borno, vice president of global specialists and partners, said.

“My advice to our channel partners here is, ‘Let’s work together to get our Generative AI Competency.’ Because those partners who have that competency are able to increase the conversion from proof-of-concept or pilot to production for customers,” she said. “That’s what customers want. They want to get value out of those AI investments.”

Partners who achieve the rigorous AWS Generative AI Competency, which launched in 2024, are showcased and featured by AWS as partners with top-notch technical proficiency and a track record of customer success when implementing AWS’ GenAI technology.

AllCloud, a Denver-based AWS Premier Consultancy partner, has earned its AWS Generative AI Competency.

The Generative AI Competency has helped AllCloud with new customer opportunities as the company has built a wide range of AWS solutions around Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, Amazon SageMaker and services like Amazon Lex for chatbots, Amazon S3 for data storage and AWS Lambda for custom functions.

AllCloud Chief Strategy Officer Peter Nebel told CRN that AllCloud begins customer GenAI engagements by offering flexible models designed to unlock value for organizations, “ranging from low-commitment engagements to strategic transformations.”

“These models act as a sales funnel,” Nebel said. “And [they] include a no-cost AI Readiness Workshop and multiple flavors of AI assessments—from simple alignment work to full AWS-specific AI implementation.”

‘Think Bigger’ With AWS’ MAP

The second focus Borno wants AWS partners to double down on is the company’s popular Migration Acceleration Program. The partner program provides deep financial incentives and co-selling opportunities to channel partners around migrating customer workloads to AWS.

“When we removed the financial caps in MAP, we saw the number of large deals double nearly overnight,” said Borno. “The appetite has always been there, we just needed a few more vehicles to support our customers and our partners in taking that ‘thinking bigger’ approach.”

“So I would encourage our partners to think bigger because our customers want them to do that and are counting on them to help them think bigger and migrate their entire estate to AWS to take advantage of all of the cloud technology, generative AI and agentic solutions,” she said.

Lemongrass, an Edison, N.J.-based AWS Premier Consulting Partner, was one of the first partners to leverage MAP to migrate SAP environments to AWS.

“In large engagements, we work directly with the MAP team at AWS to create a compelling business case for our joint customers and enable them to modernize their SAP environment,” Raman Yousefi, senior vice president, partner sales practice, at Lemongrass told CRN.

This starts with Lemongrass’ RISE Advisory Services, which can be funded by MAP, all the way to large migrations to AWS, he said.

‘Data Is The Differentiator’ In The AI Era

Borno’s third area where she wants partners to focus on is helping customers with their data and analytics strategy.

“Data is the differentiator for many of our customers,” Borno said. “So the partners who are investing in supporting customers with their data and analytics strategy, AWS is supporting them in that and they’re getting great rewards from that.”

AWS partner AllCloud emphasizes a “data-first” strategy and foundational expertise, which highlights the importance of a solid data foundation for successful GenAI implementation, Nebel said.

“We leverage their expertise in data and analytics to ensure that a customer’s data is clean, secure and ready for use with AI/ML tools,” Nebel said. “This helps customers build a comprehensive ‘Customer 360’ view by unifying data from different sources like Salesforce and AWS.”

He said availability of vector database services such as OpenSearch and Amazon Kendra are enabling AllCloud to build and deploy a Retrieval Augmented Generation [RAG] architecture.

“AWS’ flexible data storage and integration solutions like S3, Glue, Transform and Textract allow us to unlock document-heavy AI use cases that leverage Bedrock for summarization or new text generation,” said Nebel.

Cybersecurity ‘Is Core’ To Product Development

Last but not least, Borno said, is security, which is about a partner building a secure foundation for everything they’re deploying in a customer’s environment.

Borno said when a customer is slowing down a migration or a partner is scaling down on a customer’s transformational goals, it’s usually because their data posture wasn’t correct or “they didn’t think about security when thinking through how to scale that solution.”

“Whether it’s role-based access control, whether it’s guardrails, governance, responsible AI—all of that is core to how we have developed and launched our products. When thinking through the security posture of our customers, it helps them scale that much faster,” Borno said.

Partners Weigh In

Lemongrass’ Yousefi said Borno’s four key areas of focus “make sense” in the cloud computing landscape in 2025 and beyond for partners and their customers.

“As we are very much focused on SAP-related workloads, we’re applying the data and analytics strategy and MAP to our customers, though security is also a priority at Lemongrass,” Yousefi said. “We’ll likely pursue the AWS GenAI Competency in 2026 as more SAP customers start to leverage AWS’ GenAI products to augment their SAP estate.”

For AllCloud, GenAI and agentic AI will continue to be the main driver of new solutions for customers.

The company recently launched a new Salesforce AI Sales Agent powered by AWS inside the new AI Agents and Tools category on the AWS Marketplace.

“Executive dinners with AI as the main topic have drawn more interest than any AWS topic to date,” said AllCloud’s Nebel. “Many SaaS organizations we work with are also showing demand as they need to incorporate AI features into their products but don’t have development resources skilled in implementing GenAI capabilities on AWS.”

Borno said this is where partners fit perfectly into AWS’ AI go-to-market strategy.

“AI is moving faster than even the most optimistic person can think it’s moving at. I’m really excited about the future and really appreciative of our AWS partner network that continues to grow and to support our customers,” she said.