Amazon Web Services (AWS) has indicated that it is looking to grow its small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) business and is looking to its channel base to support that ambition.
The cloud giant’s vice-president of specialists and partners, Ruba Borno, said one area it was prioritising this year was SME, which the firm has identified as offering a significant opportunity.
“That is a customer segment that is largely untapped, but it’s the fastest growing in terms of year-over-year growth percentage-wise, in adopting the cloud, growing over 100% year over year,” she said.
“We’re really excited about investing in SMB partner programmes that are partner-led – entirely partner-led territories – to support our customers. The feedback on our Small Business Acceleration incentive programme, which we launched last year, has been tremendous from our SI [systems integrator] Partners, our distributors that support that customer segment,” she added.
Borno said AWS had been ramping up its involvement with the SME customer base and had already seen traction across its channel base for its existing efforts.
“We launched an SMB competency last year, and when we did a comparison of partners who had that competency versus partners who didn’t have that competency – adjusting for geography, size and the customer profile that they typically serve – we saw that the partners that had that competency grew 30 percentage points faster,” she said.
“We believe in the power of partners for all of our customers, but especially in SMB, where we are seeing tremendous opportunity growth,” added Borno.
The SME market push could also result in fresh channel partners joining the AWS ranks to ensure that customer segment is covered.
“We believe that our customers’ needs are diverse, and our partners develop unique and differentiated capabilities to support them. We are constantly recruiting new partners to AWS,” she said.
Borno added that AWS has taken steps over the past couple of years to make partner onboarding smoother and make it easier to reach more customers.
We believe in the power of partners for all of our customers, but especially in SMB, where we are seeing tremendous opportunity growth
Ruba Borno, AWS
“You hear us say this all of the time – something like 80% of the workloads that could migrate to the cloud have yet to migrate to the cloud. So, with all of the enthusiasm and excitement and the growth that we’ve seen in the cloud industry, there’s still tremendous potential, far more than what we’ve accomplished to date, and we need more and more partners to support our customers in doing that.
“That’s why we’re investing in a better onboarding experience for them, better enablement experiences and tools for them, and better training available to them with the competencies that they would get,” she said.
The AWS partner community has been busy over the past year, with more distribution and reseller partners gaining accreditation to provide more support and services across the firm’s Marketplace.
Borno said she was optimistic about the prospects for its channel in 2025, and there continued to be growth opportunities for those that choose to work with the vendor.
“We’ve been really excited about the growth in EMEA in general. I don’t think UK is an exception here, but EMEA has been one of our fastest-growing regions, so we are really excited about the performance year over year. In the first quarter, we’ve been really happy about the growth with partners. So we’re seeing partner attach grow significantly year over year in EMEA, and in particular in the UK, I so that’s encouraging,” she said.
