AWS’ ‘Huge’ OpenAI, CrowdStrike Partner Play And AI Edge Over Competitors: Ruba Borno

AWS global channel chief Ruba Borno talks to CRN about the new partner opportunities with OpenAI and CrowdStrike, as well as AWS’ AI market differentiation today against the competition.

The world’s largest cloud company is doubling down on partnerships with AI unicorn OpenAI and security star CrowdStrike to open up new opportunities for channel partners, as AWS’ “end-to-end AI” strategy differentiates itself from the competition, says AWS’ Ruba Borno.

“Our AI business is a multibillion-dollar ARR business that’s growing at really high rates, with partners being such a key part of that,” AWS’ global channel chief, Borno, tells CRN. “We’re thinking about the entire AI stack, and not only how AWS plays a role in it, but also how our partners play a role in it.”

The $124 billion cloud giant just unveiled a new AI security initiative with CrowdStrike as well as on-boarding OpenAI’s new foundational models to AWS for the first time.

“This is a continuation of our strategy of being committed to AI model choice for our customers,” said Borno, vice president of global specialists and partners. “We’re [putting] more powerful AI technologies into the hands of our customers to expand the impact of OpenAI’s technology by making it available to now millions of customers on AWS.”

On the CrowdStrike front, AWS’ enhanced partnership aims to drive more cybersecurity sales and customer traction for partners by leveraging CrowdStrike’s products and tools.

“I’m really excited about the CrowdStrike partnership in being able to look at a customer’s security posture holistically,” Borno said.

AWS’ $124 Billion Cloud Run Rate

Seattle-based AWS recently reported second-quarter 2025 earnings of $30.9 billion, meaning the company has an annual run rate of $124 billion.

The $30.9 billion in quarterly sales represents a 17 percent increase year over year compared with the $26.3 billion AWS generated in the second quarter of 2024.

Borno, who was honored on CRN’s Top 25 Channel Sales Leaders of 2025 list, expects cloud and AI momentum to continue throughout the rest of 2025.

“This 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,” she said.

In an in-depth interview with CRN, Borno talks about how AWS’ elevated partnerships with CrowdStrike, OpenAI, SAP and Oracle are opening up doors for the channel, as well as AWS’ market differentiation when it comes to GenAI and agentic AI.

Why is AWS’ new relationship with OpenAI important, and how will it benefit partners?

We’re very committed to expanding the selection and choice for customers and giving them a chance to be able to use the best model or the best agent for their particular use case.

We’re excited for our partners to expand customers’ AI model choices with OpenAI’s advanced open weight models on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon Sagemaker, and also Anthropic’s Claude 4 models in Amazon Bedrock.

We’re giving customers incredible choice to be able to use those models for advancing reasoning capabilities, for agented workflows, for coding, for mathematical problem-solving, for scientific analysis, etc.

This is a continuation of our strategy that we announced from the beginning, which is we’re committed to model choice for our customers.

Amazon has our own family of foundation models, like our Nova family of models, but we are embracing all of the models out there to support our customers in being able to use the right fit-for-purpose model for their use cases.

What can partners do now with Amazon Bedrock and OpenAI?

So with OpenAI’s two new open weight foundation models—GPT OSS 120B and GPT OSS 20B—[we’re putting] more powerful AI technologies into the hands of our customers to expand the impact of OpenAI’s technology [by] making it available now to millions of customers on AWS.

Customers who are using Bedrock are able to get really fast and strong price performance. They’re able to now deploy that and they’re also able to test it and compare it to other models.

That’s the power of Bedrock—that you can change the model that you’re using to determine which one is the best model for your purposes. And it’s not just in Bedrock, [OpenAI] is also in Sagemaker in order to give our customers the most selection in the way that best suits their business.

How does AWS’ recent partnership enhancement with CrowdStrike help your channel partners?

By working with CrowdStrike, we’re seeing that as customers distribute their data more and more—and this is an even bigger issue with generative AI and agentic—it becomes more and more important to have a better sense of their security posture.

If you look at AWS’ product strategy, security is job zero. So any of the launches that we have had from a product perspective, as it relates to generative AI and agentic, have always put in place a security foundation and guardrails—whether it’s Kiro, our agentic integrated development environment, or Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, there’s a foundation of deploying secure production-grade AI agents. And with Kiro, it’s also secure for the developers to be able to control their development process.

Our partnership with CrowdStrike allows us to extend that security posture beyond just our products and tools in order to support other things that CrowdStrike is supporting for our customers.

So we’re really excited about this partnership and being able to look at a customer’s security posture holistically.

CrowdStrike has been a great partner with AWS and to our customers for a really long time. CrowdStrike was one of the first partners that crossed the $1 billion in TCV [total contract value] on the AWS Marketplace in 2024 alone.

What other big vendor partnerships is AWS investing in to drive channel momentum?

Our OpenAI and CrowdStike partnerships are huge. There are also ones with Oracle and SAP.

Oracle Database@AWS is now is generally available in multiple regions. We’ve already got it available in two regions in the U.S., and it’s going to expand to 20 more.

We’re really excited to be able to give customers this joint offering that allows them to use their Oracle data with AWS services. We’ve seen it actually help large enterprises, multinationals, regulated industries—whether it’s energy, telecom, banking, insurance—to be able to accelerate their migration to the cloud.

The reason they want to do that is actually to take advantage of generative AI capabilities.

The other big partnership is the AWS and SAP AI Co-innovation Program we introduced in May.

This is a new program that we put together with SAP to help unlock value for customers from their business data that they are accessing through SAP. This gives them the security that they’re comfortable with [at] AWS, and the flexibility to build Gen AI applications with Amazon Bedrock and act on their most critical SAP data.

We’re really excited about how partners like Accenture and Deloitte are working with AWS and SAP to help customers accelerate their generative AI solutions using their SAP data and AWS.

Talk about AWS’ GenAI and agentic AI momentum today. What is AWS’ market differentiation here compared with competitors?

As it relates to GenAI and agentic, partners are core to our strategy and how we go to market and how we support our customers. The GenAI piece we’ve got incredible momentum in, and our growth is incredibly strong here.

Our AI business is a multibillion-dollar ARR business that’s growing at really high rates, with partners being such a key part of that. We see it as the biggest opportunity for the entire industry and, frankly, for any industry since the internet. If we now double-click into agents specifically, they represent the next frontier and how we work and how we live.

What’s really interesting for our partners is how AWS stands and differentiates ourselves from our competitors in this space. We’re thinking about the entire AI stack, and not only how AWS plays a role in it, but how our partners play a role in it.

So we’ve got our investments in custom chips like Trainium and Inferentia. We’re also working with partners like Nvidia and Intel and AMD, making agent technology economically viable at scale.

Then with our new Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and also the AI agents and tools in AWS Marketplace, it’s thinking about the entire agentic experience for our customers, including what role partners play in it.

Give me a good use case for AgentCore and AWS’ new Agent Marketplace.

Through the [AI agents and tools] in the AWS Marketplace, a customer can just enter the problem statement or use case that they have that they’re seeking support in.

Let’s say it’s a supply chain use case. From there, they’ll get AI agents that are from across multiple partners that can address different parts of that particular use case. And then they’re not only able to discover and evaluate getting customer feedback on those different agents, they can procure it and then they can deploy it in Amazon Bedrock AgentCore.

They can then start working on their use case, start getting the agents to interact with each other and delivering on that outcome that they want.

So thinking about that end-to-end AI is what differentiates AWS. And it shows our commitment to our partners in order to deliver the best solutions and best outcomes for our customers.

Since the AI agent and tools launch in the AWS Marketplace, we now have over 1,000 listings, and that number continues to increase.

We’re providing selection to our customers. We’re providing an ability to evaluate to our customers, and now we’re providing them the ability to go ahead and deploy it and use it through one seamless workflow. I’m really excited about how we’ve thought about our agent product portfolio for our customers and how critical our partners are to that.

What’s your message to partners as it relates to GenAI?

There’s so much activity here as it relates to GenAI, and I’m excited about how AWS is committed to partners. You’re going to see a continuation of announcements this year around expansion in AI.

You can see it isn’t just the partner team that’s committed to partners. It’s across the entire organization—from our products, our engineering, our strategy—all the way through to go-to market and sales and the partner team as well.

This 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 continues to support our customers.