AWS Partners ‘Are The Lifeblood,’ Says CEO Garman Ahead Of Channel Program Evolution

As Amazon Web Services kicks off its re:Invent 2025 conference in Las Vegas this week, the company is preparing the January rollout of new financial incentives and partner program enhancements aimed at increasing partner profitability and growing pipeline in the AI era.

As thousands of Amazon Web Services solution providers, ISVs and customers descend on Las Vegas this week for the re:Invent 2025 conference, CEO Matt Garman is making one thing perfectly clear: Partners are the “lifeblood” of the $132 billion company.

That’s why he’s leading a channel charge for his 140,000-strong army of partners aimed at taking profitability to new heights as they connect the dots for customers and deliver value in the AI era.

“Folks from the very largest system integrators [SIs]—Accenture, Deloitte, PwC and Slalom, all the way to Caylent—all the way down to individual and smaller SIs, they are the lifeblood of helping us in AWS connect our technology into our customers to really deliver that value,” said Garman in an exclusive interview with CRN ahead of the conference.

“We have really tight partnerships with all of those folks where we work really closely back and forth to make sure that we’re helping customers really modernize and revolutionize their businesses,” he said.

In one month’s time, starting Jan. 1, Seattle-based AWS plans to inject a slew of new financial incentives and channel enhancements into its partner programs, including new customer growth incentives, better financial rewards for private pricing agreements, boosted MSP benefits and new deal registration for channel sales, to name just a few.

[READ MORE: Exclusive: AWS Launches ‘Important’ Agentic AI Competency To Elevate Partners]

“Partners are absolutely critical to everything that we do at AWS,” Garman said. “This evolution of our partner program really is with the view on how we streamline [programs], help partners be focused on the parts of growing our business that we want to do, and eliminating channel conflict where there are weird collisions in the field.”

Garman’s goal is to reshape AWS’s channel program to “make it even more lucrative” for partners, who can make upward of $7 in revenue for every $1 a customer spends on AWS.

“Our 7X multiple for every $1 that a partner drives with AWS—there’s nowhere else the partners can see that level of return,” Garman said. “The changes that we’re doing are doubling down on that. The partner opportunity in AWS is as big as it’s ever been.”

AWS partners like Innovative Solutions, a Premier Tier Services partner, are ecstatic about the revamped channel programs that take effect in the new year, expecting a profitability and AI customer pipeline boom in 2026, building on the AWS growth it has seen this year.

[READ MORE: AWS Boosts MSP Partner Incentives: ‘It’s On Steroids Now,’ AWS Programs Leader Says]

The West Henrietta, N.Y.-based solution provider saw its AWS sales increase 65 percent in 2025 compared with 2024, with its AWS AI customer pipeline growing 310 percent this year.

“AWS saw in 2025 that the partner can really help accelerate that group of customers doing these AI proof-of-concept projects into production-level deployments,” said Innovative Solutions CEO Justin Copie. “When you look at our AI-driven deal sizes, they increased 4X this year. So the actual size of the projects is increasing tremendously.”

Copie said his company plans to leverage AWS’s new program incentives to fund and fuel more customer AI adoption, cloud migrations and managed services revenue.

“When we think about how we accelerate a customer’s adoption, if you have good programs in place, you can accelerate that adoption much quicker,” said Copie. “That’s what I want as a systems integrator business owner, and these types of programmatic changes are what will enable that.”

Garman said the evolved AWS channel strategy recognizes and rewards the role that partners must play to make AI a reality for clients.

“There are so many customers out there that are now really anxious to get to the cloud, and they need the help of the partners,” said Garman. “So there is a massive amount of business out there just waiting for skilled, talented, trained people to be able to come and help them.”

Major AWS Channel Enhancements

Julia Chen, AWS’s global leader of partner programs, was instrumental in the big changes hitting the street on Jan. 1, with channel investments focused on driving better financial predictability, program simplicity and new revenue streams.

“My entire organization wakes up every morning trying to figure out how to make ourselves the best vendor for our partners to work with,” said Chen, vice president of Partner Core at AWS.

One of the biggest updates to AWS’s channel program is its new Partner Growth Incentive that recognizes incremental growth across a partner’s overarching resale portfolio.

Historically, AWS would pay an incentive if a partner increased a customer account to a certain amount or a financial reward if the partner grew a subset of its portfolio with AWS.

“Now we’re simplifying all of that. We’re just saying, ‘We’re looking at your AWS resell business, and if you grow that, then we’re going to pay you a growth incentive,’” Chen said. “It will make it easier for partners to calculate and be much more predictable. Partners won’t have to say, ‘Wait, did I do it with this customer during this quarter? Or with a different customer another quarter? And how do those two things net each other out?’ We’re now making it so that it’s on their portfolio in total.”

AWS is also implementing a New Customer Incentive that better rewards partners for winning new customers, replacing former offers such as the Partner Originated Discount, Public Sector Discount and Customer Engagement Incentive.

“We’ve had different versions and flavors of this, but we’re simplifying it into one incentive now,” Chen said. “We’re simplifying it for everybody to say, ‘Don’t worry about all the flavors anymore. If it’s a new customer consuming something on AWS, then you get the incentive.’”

AWS is also boosting its MSP Partner Program with new financial incentives and AWS resources for partners that drive key services like AI and cybersecurity, as well as government deals and cloud adoption.

For the AWS Solution Provider Program, the company will launch a new Base Benefit that consolidates the program’s previous Base Incentive and Technical Capability Discount together to simplify management for partners.

On the distribution front, AWS is rolling out new benefits and incentives to better support the partner ecosystem, especially in areas like the SMB market and AWS Marketplace.

“We really count on our distributors to help us recruit, on-board and enable downstream partners because we have a long tail of smaller partners,” Chen said. “So for that, we’re paying them an incentive as well to see if they can grow the business of their downstream partners.”

Deloitte Consulting Chairman and CEO Jason Salzetti said the AWS program updates are “music to our ears.”

“The simplifications are a huge benefit for us,” said Salzetti. “We have a very large firm with a lot of different account leaders working closely with our clients. So simplifying and streamlining the pricing will help accelerate market momentum because we can equip our sellers, our lead account partners and our lead alliance partners to then drive that into the market.”

Salzetti said AWS’s revamped partner programs “are really important because it’s all focused on driving client outcomes and business outcomes,” including the enhancements to the popular Private Pricing Resell program.

AWS Private Pricing Deals And New Incentives

AWS’s Private Pricing Resell program is designed to give partners and their customers access to commercial benefits in exchange for up-front customer spending commitments.

Many solution providers finalize AWS deals using private pricing agreements due to the better discounts a customer receives when it signs an up-front AWS commitment deal versus the typical pay-as-you-go AWS pricing model.

Now, AWS’s Private Pricing Resell program is getting a variety of new incentives including cash and discounts, as well as new deal registration for channel sales.

AWS is implementing a total contract value threshold in the program where if a deal falls below a large multimillion-dollar threshold, “then our partners are going to get a higher level of incentive” compared with the current version of the program, Chen said.

“The incentive is a mix of discount and partner cash, which is going to be good for them. Because in the past, it had all been discounts,” Chen said. “Now it’s just like a check that we write to them, and they can put it in their bank. Partners tend to like that.”

If the private pricing agreement is above the large multimillion-dollar deal threshold, AWS has the option to take the deal direct.

“But what’s new is that the partners will still get paid for their involvement in selling the larger private pricing agreement. So that’s a positive for them and a big change from the past,” Chen said.

New Deal Registration For Private Pricing Agreements

A key enhancement to the Private Pricing Resell program AWS is implementing on Jan. 1 is partners’ ability to register a deal.

New deal registration inside the program will enable solution providers to register opportunities and gives AWS a way to recognize the ownership of opportunities that a partner originates.

The goal is to make sure a partner that did any presales work on a customer deal is financially rewarded, even if it isn’t the partner that closes the deal.

“It’s based off feedback that we’ve gotten for a long time, which is, ‘Hey, if I’m the partner that’s been in there doing all the work, we don’t like that another partner just shows up and offers a lower price and takes the business,’” Chen said.

“That’s why we’re differentiating the payouts and saying, ‘If you were in there working the deal from the start, we’re going to record that in our system. Then later, if another partner comes in and competes with you, potentially on price or otherwise, we still honor the partner that was in there first and give them a higher incentive,’” she said.

Lastly, AWS is simplifying billing capabilities inside the private pricing program to help partners reduce overhead, optimize the billing experience and provide customers with greater administrative control.

Partners Can Achieve $7 Multiplier For Every $1 Of AWS Sold

Partner profitability has been top of mind for Garman for years with the goal of driving life-cycle services sales through its global partner ecosystem.

“We focus a lot on how we make sure that our partners have a really profitable business built on top of AWS, and that flywheel has been pretty awesome to see,” Garman said, pointing to recent research that shows AWS partners can achieve up to a $7.13 multiplier for every $1 of AWS sold to a customer over a three-year span. The multiplier represents the incremental revenue partners can capture for every $1 of AWS technology sold.

“Just a couple of years ago, it was $4 or $5 multiple for every $1 that came into AWS. Now it’s above $7. So it’s more and more profitable for partners every day,” Garman said.

Partners are seeing massive profitability around advisory, design, procure, implementation, cloud adoption and managed services, the study found. Overall, nearly 50 percent of the AWS partner multiplier opportunity happens post-procurement, with life-cycle services driving higher long-term revenue.

Garman said “more and more,” the AI expertise that customers need “lives in our partner ecosystem.”

“It’s actually quite easy to get AI into a proof of concept, right? You can actually roll out something very easily. But when you think about moving it into production, there’s a lot that needs to change,” Garman said. “You need to help the customers think about how do they change their workflows? How do they think about security? How do they think about privacy? How do they think about scalability?”

While AWS creates AI building blocks with offerings like Amazon Bedrock and AgentCore, partners are the ones that are taking AI proofs of concept into production and providing successful business outcomes.

“Customers need partner expertise to know where do you apply the right AI models to the right problems? How do you think about putting the right guardrails in place so that when you roll new agentic workflows out to your customers, they do what they think they’re going to do,” Garman said. “Customers are looking for, ‘How do I apply AI, not in a generic sense, but specific to my industry, specific to my business?’ And that’s where a lot of these multipliers come in, where we’re seeing partners that have really, really profitable businesses help companies implement AI so that they can get all those benefits.”

‘In A Noisy AI Market, Customers Want Partners Who Can Actually Deliver’

Award-winning AWS partner Caylent has seen its AWS AI business expand annually by 30 percent in 2025.

“In a noisy AI market, customers want partners who can actually deliver,” said Randall Hunt, CTO of the Irvine, Calif.-based AWS Premier Tier Consulting Partner.

Caylent has seen its agentic AI enablement projects increase 14X in the fourth quarter of 2025 compared with the same quarter a year ago.

For example, Caylent created a code interpreter solution for Brainbox AI, an energy management customer, that boosted Brainbox’s ability to better manage around 30,000 buildings across North America. Brainbox needed to interpret all the data and content it was collecting through HVAC and IoT systems inside its buildings.

Caylent helped develop an Artificial Responsive Intelligent Assistant (ARIA) that has revolutionized energy management for Brainbox thanks to AWS AI products like Bedrock.

“They needed to take all of this content collected from these HVAC systems or these building IoT systems, and they have to interpret those. This used to be the job of a data scientist. They would employ a ton of data scientists who would go in and run queries for customers to say, ‘How many East-facing buildings on November 5 are going to be in direct sunlight?’ Really random stuff so that these operators of these large-scale buildings could go and tune their HVAC or IoT systems and tune their electricity usage,” Hunt said.

ARIA is now a natural language interface powered by AWS’s GenAI suite that improves insight access and depth, enabling users to interact conversationally for data analysis.

“What we built for them using Bedrock was the ability to interpret those results, to type a natural language query or even say via voice in a natural language query, ‘Get all the data back and interpret those results,’” he said.

To better drive AI customer opportunities, AWS has also created a new AI Competency.

AWS AI Openness Is A Key Advantage

Basis, an AWS Advanced Services Partner, has seen its AWS AI sales increase 40 percent this year compared with 2024 thanks to creating AI solutions around Bedrock, SageMaker and Textract.

The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based AWS partner is driving AI deals around uses cases like document processing and document extraction that target legal, medical, real estate and financial industry clients.

Joshua Corb, founder and CEO of Basis, said one of AWS’s biggest market differentiators is the tech giant’s openness when it comes to AI models and agentic AI products from third parties.

“What we really like about Bedrock, and why we’ve used it for all our clients, is that it’s one source, one API,” said Corb.

“A lot of the times, customers want self-deployed [AI] or in their private environments. With OpenAI and others, you can’t necessarily do that. So what we’re able to do with Bedrock is to shift and lift anytime a new model is released and try out those new models—all with the same APIs and things that we were doing before,” Corb said. “The level of effort to try new models and do different things for every one of our clients is much, much less with AWS. What would normally take a week or two is now taking us a day to basically do those experiments and test it.”

AWS CEO: ‘Innovation Happens In Lots Of Different Places’

Garman said AWS’s openness in terms of AI model choice and AI selection is helping AWS and its partners differentiate themselves versus competitors working with Google Cloud and Microsoft.

“We think that innovation happens in lots of different places, not just inside the walls of Amazon,” the AWS CEO said. “We want our customers to be able to benefit from that ecosystem of innovation.”

“It is a difference in philosophies of how we operate, and our competitors don’t always operate that same way,” Garman said. “I think they want to own everything, which is OK, they can go on that strategy. For us, we love the partner model.”

For example, Garman said AWS didn’t build its agentic AI platform AgentCore as a closed system.

“We built it so that you can pull the very best of the pieces, and we think AWS is going to build some—and has built—some pretty fantastic building blocks to help you build scalable, secure, high-quality agents. But we make it so if you want to pull in Gemini models from Google, you can use those with AgentCore. If you want to use frameworks from Amazon like Strands Agents, awesome. If you want to use frameworks from LlamaIndex and open-source frameworks, no problem—pull those in. You can really mix and match and pull all these different pieces in.”

Deloitte Consulting CEO Salzetti said this commitment to AI openness is a major selling point for his company’s large enterprise customers.

“It’s a huge benefit to us. Our clients demand that. Their needs are too complicated for any single vendor to solve,” Salzetti said. “AWS pulls in other alliance partners of ours. People like Anthropic, Databricks, Snowflake, Nvidia, etc. … I mean, every week or maybe even every day, it seems like there’s a new model or a new core piece of AI technology or new code assist tool.”

Salzetti said his company’s AWS business is growing because Deloitte’s enterprise customers prefer AWS’s open strategy due to the rapid changes in the underlying AI technology.

“You look at every segment of the market, and this is where AWS’s strategy is really helpful to us because that openness in the modularity really allows us to evolve these solutions over time with our clients,” Salzetti said. “Some of these are very, very compute-intensive solutions, and you want to have the right purpose-built answer.”

Garman ‘Doesn’t Sit In The Ivory Tower’

With Garman’s AI openness vision and revamped channel program changes set for 2026, the future looks bright for AWS’s partner ecosystem.

“I love Matt’s leadership. It’s different than leaders in the past,” said Innovative Solutions CEO Copie.

Garman began his Amazon journey as an intern working underneath AWS founder and former CEO Andy Jassy in 2005. He climbed through the AWS ranks to become senior vice president of sales, marketing and global services in 2020, then CEO in 2024.

“One of the things that I’ve witnessed with Matt’s leadership is he doesn’t sit in the ivory tower,” said Copie. “Like myself, we came into this business as entry level as you can get. When you have the opportunity to do that, you have such empathy for every layer beneath you. He really wants to know and be involved in decision-making where he can add value,” said Copie.

Copie said there have been numerous times throughout 2025 where an AWS executive has asked for Innovative’s feedback, which was then quickly relayed to Garman and implemented to help the channel.

“I feel like it’s a flatter AWS now,” Copie said. “Matt preserves a lot of what AWS has always been about: innovating on behalf of the customer; start with the customer and work backwards. Matt understands that partners are really, really critical in helping scale and grow the business, especially through a time like right now where AI is just so interesting. I feel like the right executive folks are in the boat now, rowing in the same direction.”

Garman said listening to partner feedback was critical in crafting the AWS partner program changes and key to the company’s success, not only in 2025, but since its founding.

“From the very beginning when we started AWS back in 2006, we knew that partners were a key piece and absolutely a critical component of us building this business together,” said Garman.

In 2026, Garman said many customers will be anxious to get to the cloud and get AI projects in production so organizations can reap the benefits of AI and agentic AI.

“AI is an enormous tailwind to all of our businesses and, particularly, the partner ecosystem businesses. I’m really delighted and excited about leaning in together next year on that,” Garman said. “My message to partners is that business is bigger than it’s ever been.”