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AWS re:Invent 2025 - Accelerate your growth: AWS Partner Programs for Software Partners (PEX103)

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Overview

📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Accelerate your growth: AWS Partner Programs for Software Partners (PEX103)

In this video, Mathangi Ranganathan explains how AWS software programs accelerate growth for software partners. She highlights that the SaaS market is growing at 20% with IT spend expected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2029, yet less than 50% of workloads run in the cloud. The session covers the AWS Partner Profitability Framework and four key programs: Marketplace List and Sell Program, Marketplace Private Offer Promotions (offering 1-2% TCV incentives), ISV Accelerate Program (a global co-sell program), and ISV Workload Migration Program (providing 15-25% ARR incentives). She emphasizes that customers receiving Marketplace Private Offer Promotions show 50% increased downstream sales and spend 1.7 times higher in PCV, demonstrating how these programs drive partner success through build, market, sell, and grow motions.

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Main Part

The SaaS Market Opportunity and Cloud Transformation Challenges

Thank you. Hi everyone, good morning, and thank you all for joining me here today. I'm Mathangi Ranganathan, and today we'll be talking about how AWS software programs are meant to accelerate growth for our software partners. I'm sure we're all seeing the growth for SaaS continue to rise. Customers are looking for the benefits and agility of SaaS, but the transformation is still hard.

Let's start by taking a look at what the data is telling us. The SaaS market is growing at an incredible tier of 20%. The IT spend for SaaS globally is expected to reach 1.7 trillion by 2029. And just for this year, by the end of 2025, that number is going to be at 300 billion. But if you look at most of the organizations, less than 50% of their workloads are running in the cloud. Now, what's the reason for this? There's a great untapped opportunity for software partners, but let's look at what some of those challenges are.

Customers are still facing some very real challenges as they embark on their cloud transformation journey. There is still a general hesitancy towards cloud. There's perceived risk, there's security concerns. We're also seeing that there are many instances where there are parallel code bases. The on-premises software and the SaaS version are at feature parity. This makes the value proposition for SaaS increasingly difficult.

Where you have large enterprise solutions, we're also seeing that they're entrenched with third-party integrations. It becomes a very daunting task when you think about migration and breaking all those integrations and having to do them all over again. There are some compliance and regulatory issues in certain industries, and last but not the least, cost continues to be a major factor that influences the cloud transformation journey.

We've done thousands of migrations in the past, and what we've seen is that all successful migrations have some specific patterns where there's a clear and compelling business case. There's a strong SaaS value proposition and cost clarity. It becomes that much more easier to accelerate the cloud transformation journey because if we don't react to these challenges early enough, customers become reactive. They start exploring multiple options and delay their transformation journey.

AWS Partner Profitability Framework: Build, Market, Sell, and Grow

Now let's take a look at how AWS Partner Programs help you accelerate this journey, especially for our software partners. This is the AWS Partner Profitability Framework. It provides a scalable and reliable way to maximize your value with the AWS Partner Network. We have different business models here which each offer different levels of profitability. The concept behind this Partner Profitability Framework is very simple. The better value that you provide for your customers in terms of differentiating your solutions and capabilities, the more value you drive and the better profitability you drive for yourselves.

Now all of our APN programs fall into these four major categories: build, market, sell, and grow. These reflect the journey that our partners take as they scale through the cloud. Now let's talk to each one of these and see what they mean. Build, as the name suggests, is where you build your solutions and capabilities in the cloud. This is the start of your AWS practice, and this is where you align with your business model.

Now in the market motion, we help you drive demand for that solution that you just created. We help you position it in a way that will resonate with your customers. We do this through AWS specializations, go-to-market support, and marketplace listings. Sell is where we win together. We have sales support, wholesale support, as well as aligned programs and incentives. And grow is where we help you grow in the cloud. We have strategic collaboration opportunities, additional funding mechanisms, and enhanced programs which help you grow and scale.

Together, the build, market, sell, and grow motions help define a structured approach for partner progression and value creation. Now let's look at what is specifically geared towards our technology partners. Now if you look at our technology partners, they deliver market-ready solutions and they work towards a very specific outcome. Now the goal is not to just sell the technology.

We want to make sure that we're helping you sell business outcomes that help your customers retire technical debt and also leapfrog their own competition. If you look at programs that we have in the AWS Partner Network that support technology partners, these are focused on cloud transformation. We have prescriptive guidance and help with scalability overall.

Now let's take a look at some of the programs that we have for technology partners. We'll go through four of the programs that are highlighted here today for the purpose of the session. We'll go through the Marketplace List and Sell Program, the Marketplace Private Offer Promotions, the ISV Accelerate, and the ISV Workload Migration Program. We'll go through each one of these in detail. I'll go through what the benefits are for each program, and then we'll wrap it up with how do we get started.

Marketplace Programs and ISV Accelerate: Driving Co-Sell Success

So first for the Marketplace List and Sell Program, this is geared towards our partners. It's a financial incentive program which connects AWS technology partners with other qualified AWS partners to help you build, market, and sell on AWS Marketplace. It helps software providers enhance customer activation and retention and unlock brand new revenue streams.

Let's look at some of the benefits that the Marketplace List and Sell Program provides. First, we accelerate co-sell by increasing customer adoption and revenue growth. We offer financial incentives that help you build, market, and sell on AWS Marketplace. We also have additional financial incentives to help you unlock product-led growth with best practices to grow on AWS Marketplace, and finally we connect you with qualified AWS partners. So these could be third-party system integrators that can help you simplify your Marketplace experience. This could be making it easy to list your solution on Marketplace or CRM integration.

If you look at partners that are utilizing the Marketplace List and Sell Program today, we see that all of them experience faster listing times on Marketplace. They have higher project success rates and of course higher increased revenue streams.

Now, moving on, let's look at the Marketplace Private Offer Promotions program. This is our flagship incentive program for Marketplace. If you look at this program, the incentives are calculated on a per opportunity basis. The incentive is based on the TCV that you transact for the Marketplace deal, and the incentives are calculated at one to two percent of the Marketplace TCV. The credits are dispersed directly to the end customer. This is one of our most popular programs for Marketplace.

We did launch an enhancement in August of 2024 for this program to make it simplified to receive the incentive on this program. Today we have five times more partners participating in Marketplace Private Offer Promotions than we did about two years back.

Let's take a look at what the impact of this program has been. So customers who have received Marketplace Private Offer Promotions in the last twelve months, we see that there is a fifty percent increased downstream gross software sales. There is also less lag to the next opportunity that is being transacted on Marketplace, and finally, when you compare customers that receive the Marketplace Private Offer Promotions benefit versus customers that do not, we see that customers that receive it spend 1.7 times higher in PCV. So overall that shows you the scale of how the funding helps promote growth.

Now, before we go further, let's take a step back and talk about what co-sell means for AWS. Co-sell is a collaborative approach where AWS and partners work together hand in hand, and we do this through different ways: complementary services and programs, integrated tools and processes, as well as aligned programs and incentives. And where co-sell is executed effectively, you can see that customers do realize the value of their AWS investments far more quickly.

Partners grow their AWS business and also increase their trust with their customers. Co-sell extends far beyond just sharing your opportunity pipeline with AWS. It is a collaborative concept where we build, grow, sell, and market together. The idea is for us to understand our partners' go-to-market solution and work with you on developing integrated marketing messages, events, and campaigns, as well as driving success together.

It is all designed to drive more value for both our partners and our end customers.

Now that we understand what co-sell is, let's talk about one of our global co-sell programs, the ISV Accelerate Program. The ISV Accelerate Program is our global co-sell program. This is targeted for our partners that want a deeper engagement with AWS. ISV Accelerate partners have specialized solutions that are market ready and customers trust these solutions. The program is available to both commercial and public sector partners, and we recently also opened it up to services partners that have a SaaS solution on AWS. The key requirement to be in this ISV Accelerate program is that you have a SaaS solution that runs on or is integrated with AWS and is sold through AWS Marketplace. There's dedicated co-sales support and benefits, and it drives deeper collaboration between the partner and the AWS sales teams, resulting in better customer outcomes.

Let's take a look at some of the benefits that the ISV Accelerate program provides. The first one is we offer sales compensation for our internal sales teams. This motivates them to work with you closer and generate those customer outcomes. Partners who are account managers who work with the ISV Accelerate partners in selling a deal through AWS Marketplace get sales compensation benefits. This includes our SaaS Co-Sell Benefit program, which provides quota retirement to our end customer account managers when they close an ISV Accelerate deal on Marketplace. So when a SaaS solution sold by an ISV Accelerate partner is transacted through Marketplace, then our end customer account managers get that SaaS Co-Sell Benefit. This motivates them to work much more closely with you and stay more engaged.

The second thing is, as an ISV Accelerate partner, your solution gets more visibility. Your solution is featured in our partner solution finder and partner recommendation engine. Your participation in the program is highlighted in our CRM systems. And finally, partners that are part of the ISV Accelerate program get early access or preferred access to some of our co-sell guides, benefits, webinars, events, and such. Overall, this helps drive a closer engagement with AWS partners and our field sales teams.

ISV Workload Migration Program: Accelerating Customer Migrations with Financial Incentives

And the last program that I'm going to talk about today is our ISV Workload Migration Program. The ISV Workload Migration Program is targeted at software partners who have a SaaS solution on AWS. This could be partners that have a large legacy install base that they're trying to migrate over to their SaaS solution, or it could be partners that are trying to migrate competitive solutions over to their SaaS solution on AWS. The goal of the ISV Workload Migration Program is to drive a repeatable and scalable motion where you can de-risk the migration and offset the cost of the migration.

Let's look at some of the benefits that WMP provides. WMP has three key value pillars: technical enablement, financial incentives, and go-to-market. Through the technical enablement pillar, ISV WMP partners get access to AWS solution architects. These solution architects can help review your migration methodology and provide recommendations on optimizations or accelerations. They can also provide support on technical go-to-market. This ensures that your migration methodology is robust.

Now, moving on to financial incentives. Similar to other programs, financial incentives are calculated in the ISV WMP program. I'll go through that in just a second, but the goal of the financial incentive is to create a better funding offer for your customers. Using the financial incentives that ISV WMP offers, you can create a better funding offer. You can work in the discounts into your sales offer for your customers. This reduces or offsets the migration cost that your customer incurs.

And finally, from a go-to-market perspective, depending on where you are in the journey, go-to-market can range from joint field messaging that we can work with you on for your field sales teams to integrated campaigns for demand generation or otherwise, and also customer references, ebooks, and other resources.

Together, we want to help create a scalable motion to accelerate your migrations. Now, if you look at what is eligible for the ISV Workload Migration Program, any migration that stems from a non-AWS source qualifies. This means the existing solution is running outside of AWS. It could be on-premises software, open source software, or a third-party solution running on a different cloud or in a private data center. All of those are valid use cases for a migration.

The way we define a migration is that it has to follow the AWS Migration 7 Rs and result in the deprecation of a system outside of AWS and increased consumption for your SaaS solution on AWS. That is how we define a migration. We also have a very detailed qualification guide on APN Partner Central that can help you determine if your workload is a fit. Now, there are a number of partner types and profiles that can benefit from the ISV Workload Migration Program. Whether you're a traditional software provider, a cloud-native partner, or you're looking to monetize your open source solution that is running outside of AWS, WMP can be a fit.

Now, when WMP activation happens, we see that software partners have increased revenue streams. We also see faster and accelerated migration timeframes, and we also see better customer experience. We have a repeatable and scalable model. When you combine it with a robust go-to-market methodology, it helps create a flywheel that accelerates customer migrations.

Now, let's take a look at how the incentives work for WMP. As I said, similar to the Marketplace Private Offer Promotions Program, WMP incentives are also calculated on a per-opportunity basis. We calculate the WMP incentives based on the first-year annual recurring revenue for that opportunity, or the ARR. We do follow a tiered incentive model, and based on the ARR for the opportunity, the incentive is either 15% or 25% of the ARR. Incentives are delivered as AWS promotional credits that you can use across all AWS services, and the incentives are delivered directly to the ISV account where the SaaS solution runs from.

In October of this year, we made a huge program enhancement that allows these credits to be disbursed directly to the end customer. Now, what this does is it takes away the burden of the ISV partner having to figure out how to pass on these credits to the end customer. This is available for all software partners that are in ISV WMP for eligible transactions that are delivered through ISV WMP and Marketplace.

Now that we've seen the benefits of all of these programs, let's wrap it up by looking at how do we get started. The first step in getting started is going back to the build, market, sell, and grow journey and figuring out where you are in that process. Once you've figured out where you are in that process and how you want to move forward, the APN Partner Network offers a host of programs that you can select from that suits your needs. Once you've selected the program, do work with your AWS account manager or your Partner Development Specialist or representative to make sure that they can help you get started.