Welcome to Cracking the Black Box, a micro-learning series focused on making the AWS Partner Network feel understandable, approachable, and actually useful. Each episode tackles one foundational question. Today we begin with the most important question of all:
Why should a technology company partner with AWS?
Many companies considering the AWS Partner Network ask the same thing. They want to know what the partnership unlocks, how it helps them grow, and why it might be worth the effort. These are smart questions, and answering them well means starting with a perspective that is rarely discussed. Before looking at why you should partner with AWS, it helps to understand why AWS created this program in the first place.
My name is Justin Freeman. I am the founder of PartnerCloud, where we help technology companies accelerate and optimize their AWS partnership. Before starting PartnerCloud, I spent three years at AWS as a Partner Development Specialist. During that time I helped partners understand what the program offers, how AWS thinks about partner value, and how to build a practice that gains real traction inside the AWS ecosystem.
That experience shapes everything we will cover today.
Why AWS Built the Partner Network
To understand the value for partners, it helps to understand the motivation behind AWS’s design of the partner ecosystem. AWS has more than a million active customers, thousands of field sellers, and a global presence that is unmatched in cloud computing. On paper, it might look like AWS could serve the market without help. In reality, AWS relies heavily on partners because global distribution and customer enablement require more specialization and reach than any single company can achieve.
AWS needs partners who can solve industry specific problems, build repeatable solutions, and implement the broad range of AWS services in real customer environments. Services like EC2, S3, Amazon RDS, Amazon Bedrock, and Amazon SageMaker are powerful, but they do not solve problems on their own. Customers need experts who can turn cloud services into tangible business outcomes. That is where partners come in.
When partners successfully deploy solutions that run on AWS, customers achieve their goals and AWS sees increased consumption of its core services. Your success becomes AWS’s success. This is why AWS invests so deeply in helping partners grow and why the partner ecosystem has become such an important part of the company’s long term strategy.
The Top Five Reasons to Partner With AWS
If you understand AWS’s motivation, the value for partners becomes clear. Although the program includes dozens of benefits, the most impactful ones (IMHO) fall into five major categories.
- Visibility and Access
The moment you join the AWS Partner Network, your potential audience expands significantly. AWS has relationships with millions of customers and thousands of sellers, and this becomes your new addressable market. This does not grant instant access to every contact you want, but it does provide legitimate pathways to build visibility through listings, Marketplace presence, specialization programs, and engagement with AWS sellers. It is similar to placing a product on Amazon.com. The moment it appears in the ecosystem, the possible reach increases dramatically.
- Differentiation
There are more than 140,000 partners in the AWS ecosystem. AWS created specialization programs to help customers identify partners who have demonstrated real expertise. These include competencies, service delivery validations, and industry specific designations. During my time at AWS, I helped launch the ECS Service Delivery Program and the Generative AI Competency. Partners who earn these recognitions demonstrate proven technical capability and documented customer success. In return, AWS provides them with stronger visibility, prioritization, and often additional investment. Specialization becomes a signal of trust and a major advantage in a crowded field.
- Funding Your Growth
Building on AWS requires investment, and AWS helps partners offset that investment through funding programs. These include marketing development funds, proof of concept funding, sandbox credits, migration incentives, and additional program specific support. AWS directs the strongest funding toward areas it believes represent the future. The Generative AI Competency, for example, carries significantly more available MDF than many other programs. This tells partners where AWS sees momentum and where it is encouraging innovation. Funding becomes both a practical benefit and a strategic roadmap.
- Enablement
One of the most underutilized benefits of the AWS Partner Network is its enablement ecosystem. AWS shares its best practices openly so that partners can sell, position, and deploy solutions with greater confidence. Through Skill Builder, immersion days, workshops, bootcamps, and specialized learning tracks, partners gain access to the same knowledge AWS uses internally. This accelerates readiness, shortens the learning curve, and helps partners avoid the repeated trial and error that slows down so many early stage practices.
- Co-Sell
Co-sell is the outcome most partners dream about. It is the possibility of entering customer opportunities alongside AWS sellers with a shared story and a unified message. It is also the possibility of receiving inbound interest from AWS teams who need a solution shaped like the one you have built. While fully mature co-sell motions take time to develop, there are many smaller co-sell opportunities along the way. Marketplace activity, regional programs, specialization programs, and proactive alignment with field teams all create momentum long before formal co-sell is established. Although many partners view co-sell as the final destination, it is more accurate to view it as a natural outcome of doing many foundational things consistently.
The Vision From AWS Leadership
AWS leadership has made the company’s direction very clear. Matt Garman, the CEO of AWS, has stated that every AWS opportunity should involve a partner in some meaningful way. Ruba Borno, who leads the AWS Specialists and Partners (ASP) organization, has echoed the same message. The company is moving toward a future where partners are integrated into more customer conversations, more often, and with deeper involvement throughout the customer lifecycle.
If AWS is moving in this direction, partners who want to grow should move that direction as well. The opportunity is expanding, not shrinking.
Final Thoughts
Partnering with AWS provides access to a worldwide customer base, meaningful differentiation, financial support, deep enablement, and a path toward co-selling with one of the largest technology companies on the planet. These benefits compound over time and can transform the trajectory of a technology company that chooses to lean into the partnership in a thoughtful and strategic way.
