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.

https://www.crn.com/news/cover-story/aws-partners-are-the-lifeblood-says-ceo-garman-ahead-of-channel-program-evolution