The Tech Sales Newsletter #70: All of my (AWS) friends
Source: AWS re:Invent 2025
There used to be a time in the technology industry when the key event of the year was Dreamforce. As the market has shifted toward the dominance of the three cloud hyperscalers (AWS, Azure, and GCP), the mindshare and excitement within the partner ecosystem have shifted toward participating in these flagship conferences.
AWS re:Invent was the last major event of the year, and it set many expectations for how the competitive landscape will look over the next 12 months. More than a third of all sessions focused on AI and enterprise ML, and, if we are being honest, this ratio will only increase at future events.
One of the marketing exercises during the event is to give out awards to key technology players within the AWS ecosystem. This is a good opportunity to take a “temperature check” on the companies that AWS considers integral to its strategy.
The key takeaway
For tech sales: While not a "guarantee," if a company is consistently seen as critical to the ecosystem of large cloud providers such as AWS, odds are that they are a high-growth business that's going places.
For investors: More and more technology companies are paying attention to the importance of getting access to compute from AWS/GCP/Azure and being able to drive adoption on their marketplaces. Software companies below $100M will find it difficult to pass this revenue threshold with traditional Go-To-Market strategies; they need to be visible participants in the new cloud ecosystem.
Who is who in the AWS ecosystem
As part of this article, we’ll review the key awards that were given out and take a look at their recent quota attainment and stock performance where available.
Security Partner of the Year
Recognizes top partners with the AWS Security Competency. Recognizes partners who have proven customer success securing every stage of cloud adoption, from initial migration through ongoing day-to-day management.
Global Consulting: Winner – Deloitte | Finalists – Slalom, AllCloud
Consulting: Winner – Mission Cloud | Finalists – T-Systems International GmbH, CloudZone
Technology: Winner – CrowdStrike | Finalists – Palo Alto Networks, Splunk
CrowdStrike and Palo Alto are becoming the default platform vendors in the industry. The edge when it comes to AWS Marketplace sits with CrowdStrike - they reached $1 billion in total revenue via AWS Marketplace last year.
Crowdstrike Quota attainment on RepVue: 48%
Crowdstrike Stock performance YTD: 48% (I know, same number but the financial outcomes are completely different).
Migration Partner of the Year
Recognizes top partners with the AWS Migration Competency. Recognizes partners who have demonstrated expertise in customer migrations to the AWS cloud. Judged based on number, value, and on time delivery of migrations.
Global Consulting: Winner – Accenture | Finalists – Slalom, Deloitte
Consulting: Winner – Caylent | Finalists – Mission Cloud, Rackspace
Technology: Winner – Sage | Finalists – Splunk, NICE
The software winner here is interesting - Sage. They are an SMB-focused company offering a mix of back-office HR and Finance-oriented products. Earlier this year, they announced accounting-focused LLM products in collaboration with AWS.
Sage Quota attainment on RepVue: 63%
Sage Stock performance YTD: 13%
Data and Analytics Partner of the Year
Recognizes top partners with the Data and Analytics Competency. Recognizes partners who have demonstrated expertise in data and analytics. Judged based on the number of competencies, value provided to customer, and revenue generated.
Global Consulting: Winner – Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) | Finalists – Deloitte, Capgemini
Consulting: Winner – Adastra | Finalists – Pepperdata, Inc., Woodmark Consulting AG
Technology: Winner – Snowflake | Finalists – MongoDB, Databricks
The dynamic here is notable: Snowflake continues to get the nod, predominantly because in recent years Azure became the first-party choice for most organizations to run Databricks.
Snowflake Quota attainment on RepVue: 50%
Snowflake Stock performance YTD: -3%
GenAI Global Partner of the Year
Recognizes top global consulting partners with the Generative AI Competency that has deep expertise working with businesses to help them adopt and strategize generative AI, build and test generative AI applications, train and customize foundation models, operate, support, and maintain generative AI applications and models, protect generative AI workloads, and define responsible AI principles and frameworks.
Global Consulting: Winner – Deloitte | Finalists – Accenture, Capgemini
Consulting: Winner – Slalom | Finalists – Mission Cloud, Caylent
Right now, it looks like Deloitte is getting an advantage in a lot of the implementations - I've encountered them in multiple sales cycles as GenAI advisors to C-levels.
Deloitte Quota attainment on RepVue: 56%
Deloitte Stock performance YTD: Partners are the only one getting paid on this, let’s be honest.
GenAI Tools Partner of the Year
Recognizes top technology partners with the Generative AI Competency that leverage AWS Generative AI tools to craft innovative solutions for AWS Customers.
Global: Winner – Nvidia | Finalists – Weights & Biases, Firemind PULSE
NVIDIA AI Foundry continues to be the go-to service for innovative model training and development for enterprise customers. This is also reflected by the type of sessions they had during the event:
“Build, Customize and Deploy Generative AI With NVIDIA on AWS”
“Advancing Physical AI: NVIDIA Isaac Lab and AWS for Next-Gen Robotics”
“NVIDIA AI Startups: Innovations in Action”
“AI-Driven Value: Capital One’s Path to Better Customer Experience”
“NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Platform on AWS”
These figures will make everybody look bad but I can’t not mention them:
Nvidia Quota attainment on RepVue: 90%
Nvidia Stock performance YTD: 195%
GenAI Infrastructure and Data Partner of the Year
Recognizes top technology partners with the Generative AI Competency that support vector embeddings data storage and management or synthetic data generation in multiple types and formats.
Global: Winner – Elastic | Finalists – MongoDB, Datastax
While VCs continue to talk about small vector database startups as "the next big thing," the reality is that the majority of revenue on the data platform side is going to incumbents with vector search/storage capabilities and existing customer relationships.
Elastic Quota attainment on RepVue: 45%
Elastic Stock performance YTD: 4%
GenAI Innovator Partner of the Year
Recognizes top technology partners with the Generative AI Competency that possess a unique advantage in driving the advancement of services, tools, and infrastructure pivotal for implementing generative AI technologies.
Global: Winner – Pinecone Systems, Inc. | Finalists – Glean Technologies, Inc, Perplexity AI Inc
If you can't be the leading vector database, then you can always be the innovator! We have no useful stats on Pinecone as a tech sales opportunity; revenue this year is expected in the $25M-$30M ballpark. The secondary market for shares has been stagnant, with the price being down 4% YTD (but also very low activity).
GenAI Industry Solution Partner of the Year
Recognizes top Industry Solutions partners with the Generative AI Competency that excel in creating and launching transformative applications across diverse industries.
Global: Winner – Caylent | Finalists – Slalom, Deloitte
Public information around Caylent is a bit limited; it's clear that they are creating a niche for themselves within GenAI implementations for AWS specifically. They've now won awards three years in a row and are connected to a number of high-profile AWS customers.
RepVue is sitting at 71% attainment but with not a lot of reviews, which makes it difficult to qualify the opportunity. The CRO started as a sales rep and scaled to an AVP at SHI over 11 years and has been with Caylent for the last four years.
GenAI Foundation Model Partner of the Year
Recognizes top partners with the Generative AI Competency that develop foundation models available through APIs, model-as-a- service hubs, or marketplaces for diverse applications.
Global: Winner – Anthropic | Finalists – Cohere, Stability AI
It's not a coincidence that the majority of GenAI implementations that AWS highlights are connected to Claude or Llama. Anthropic is one of the largest consumers of AWS compute, and they are leveraging AWS reps as an extended part of their sales teams.
Some of this is also a logical political alignment - Microsoft bet big on OpenAI, Google is trying to regain its footing, and Amazon needed a strong win.
No usable stats on sales performance are available, partly because this year they don't even have quotas due to how difficult it is to build a territory plan for such a rapidly growing product.
For investing - shares on the secondary marketing are up 60% YTD.
Storage Partner of the Year
Recognizes top partners with the AWS Storage Competency. Recognizes a partner who provides industry-leading consulting and technology services for a variety of use cases, including Backup & Restore operations to, from, and within the AWS environment; primary storage using IP File or Block protocols and object storage; active and passive data archiving capabilities; and business continuity/disaster recovery (BCDR) solutions.
Global: Winner – Veritas/Cohesity | Finalists – Druva, Nasuni
It's an important but tremendously boring topic. If you are cynical, the whole space can be called a glorified AWS wrapper with native security integrations built-in, but that's a topic for another article.
Cohesity Quota attainment on RepVue: 51%
Cohesity secondary market share performance YTD: 160%, propped up by the Veritas acquisition.
Public Sector Global Technology Partner of the Year
Recognizes top AWS Public Sector Global Technology Partners with cloud-based solutions and experience supporting government, space, education, and nonprofits around the world.
Global: Winner – Salesforce | Finalists – Palantir Technologies, Inc., CrowdStrike
NAMER: Winner – Palantir Technologies, Inc. | Finalists – SAP NS2, CrowdStrike
APJ: Winner – TechnologyOne | Finalists – Splunk, Snowflake
EMEA: Winner – Salesforce | Finalists – Trend Micro Incorporated, Splunk
LATAM: Winner – CrowdStrike | Finalists – Trend Micro Incorporated, Coursera
Interestingly enough, an ERP company made it to the top spot - TechnologyOne. They are dominating the APJ market from an ERP standpoint, with a very deep footprint in government and healthcare customers.
TechnologyOne Quota attainment on RepVue: 35% (only 3 reviews, very limited sample).
TechnologyOne Stock performance YTD: 105%
AWS Marketplace Partner of the Year
Recognizes our top AWS Marketplace Partners with significant AWS Marketplace transactions.
Global: Winners (tie) – Okta, Inc (acquired Auth0) and Wiz | Finalist – Palo Alto Networks
NAMER: Winner – CrowdStrike | Finalists – Okta, Inc (acquired Auth0), Palo Alto Networks
LATAM: Winner – Pier Cloud | Finalists – Pipefy, Cloud8 Serviços de Internet Ltda
APJ: Winner – Local Measure | Finalists – Buildkite, MoEngage
GCR: Winner – PingCap
When it comes to marketplace, it's difficult not to highlight how many successful cybersecurity vendors are utilizing the platform as their primary transactional vehicle. Back in February, AWS accounted for $175 million in annual contract value for Okta, growing at over 130% YoY.
Okta Quota attainment on RepVue: 32%
Okta Stock performance YTD: -2%
AWS Marketplace Channel Partner of the Year
Recognizes our top AWS Consulting Partners with significant AWS Marketplace transactions.
Global: Winner – CDW (plus Sirius) | Finalists – World Wide Technology, LLC, Presidio
EMEA: Winner – Computacenter | Finalists – Softcat plc, SoftwareOne
While AWS doesn't have the easiest reseller workflow for private offers (IYKYK), the ability to also charge for consulting on the platform has attracted the attention of large VARs that play a middle ground between trying to get reseller fees together with consultancy fees.
CDW Quota attainment on RepVue: 61%
CDW Stock performance YTD: -18%
Technology Partner of the Year
Recognizes our top AWS Technology Partners that are using AWS to lower costs, increase agility, and innovate faster.
Global: Winner – Palo Alto Networks | Finalists – MongoDB, Snowflake
NAMER: Winner – MongoDB | Finalists – Palo Alto Networks, Snowflake
LATAM: Winner – VTEX | Finalists – Sensedia, Bluesoft Sistemas
EMEA: Winner – Dynatrace | Finalists – CyberArk, Elastic
APJ: Winner – Snowflake | Finalists – Splunk, CrowdStrike
GCR: Winner – PingCap
One of those interesting categories in which a number of key AWS ISVs are highlighted.
Palo Alto Networks Quota attainment on RepVue: 44%
Palo Alto Networks Stock performance YTD: 40%
MSP Partner of the Year
Recognizes top AWS Managed Service Providers (MSP) that provide end-to-end AWS solutions to customers at any stage of the cloud journey—from consultation on initial solution design, to building applications, through to ongoing optimization and support.
Global: Winner – ECLOUDVALLEY TECHNOLOGY PTE LTD | Finalists – nClouds, Kyndryl
The last award I'll address today is a bit of an ironic one. By all accounts, eCloudvalley Technology is a very successful local MSP in the APJ market and has been a driving force in cloud adoption in the region. Recently, AWS opted to make significant changes to how they handle reserved instances for MSPs and Resellers as explained in detail here:
AWS is making a policy update that prohibits the sharing of Reserved Instances (RIs) and Savings Plans (SPs) across end customers within a single AWS Organization. The new policy will become effective June 1, 2025, which is fairly quick by AWS standards. AWS claims that “These changes are aimed at aligning the partner actions to AWS’ intent for RI and SPs to be customer specific commitment-based pricing products.”
This is a completely separate and distinct situation from a single organization having RIs and SPs held at a root/management level being shared across that same organization’s linked or member accounts, which remains unimpacted.
Who Does this Impact?
There are a number of Managed Service Providers and new-age reseller companies that facilitate the purchasing of commitments on behalf of their end-customers. These businesses typically have a portion of their revenue model orchestrated by purchasing SPs and RIs in a centralized organizational account. As these savings are realized, the majority of the savings are passed on to their end-customers, but some margin of that is retained as revenue to the MSP or reseller.
These organizations sometimes have hundreds or thousands of companies that they’re orchestrating commitments on behalf of. They also take on significant risk by nature of being on the hook for these SPs and RIs that are spread out across their customer base.
These changes, which go into effect on June 1st, 2025, shut this model down overnight (pending bespoke, negotiated exceptions). The end-customers will no longer be able to receive the savings from the centralized organizational account. They must have commitments made directly in their account from that point forward to be able to receive savings.
Probably even more impacted are the MSPs and new-age resellers that are still obligated for the commitments they made on behalf of all of their end-customers. It’s possible that these organizations are exposed to hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of annualized spend that presumably would be heavily exposed to commitments impacted by this policy.
In short, come June 1st, 2025, these resellers and MSPs are still obligated to pay for their customers’ commitments they’ve accrued but will not have the technical ability to pass these commitments on to their customers anymore. It’s very possible that we could see insolvency in a number of these companies relatively quickly unless AWS works with them to reallocate commitments to the customer base.
This is a good example of the power that AWS is starting to wield over its entire ecosystem. With simple changes to its model, the whole ecosystem can go through a significant shift of dynamics, with some companies being caught completely off guard and unable to recover.
Those that are considered important to the ecosystem will be mostly shielded from such significant changes. My personal view is that it will be incredibly difficult for any new software vendor to scale past $100M revenue without a strong marketplace strategy, regardless of whether they are cloud-agnostic or focus their business on a specific hyperscaler.
