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Overview
📖 AWS re:Invent 2025 - Scale and Optimize your Solutions Globally with AWS Expansion Programs (ISV317)
In this video, Jeff Klaus introduces AWS Global Passport, a program helping ISVs expand into new regions through four pillars: strategic planning with partners like Think&Grow, technical readiness optimization, regulatory compliance guidance, and go-to-market support via Passport Catalyst. Customers in the program grow twice as fast as non-participants, with Catalyst users growing 65% faster. Real-world examples include Qlik saving $150K monthly through Graviton and infrastructure optimization, Darktrace generating meaningful engagement with top US manufacturers through Symbio, and Riskified building a $40M pipeline in 12 months with Connact's support. The program addresses challenges like regional pricing differences, service availability, compliance requirements, and local partner connections, particularly highlighting expansion opportunities in regions like Saudi Arabia.
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Main Part
Introduction to AWS Global Strategy for ISVs: Opportunities and Challenges in International Expansion
My name is Jeff Klaus, and I'm responsible for global strategy for our ISV customers. I'm based in Boston and have been at AWS for just over four years. My background is in software, and my team put this together. I'm very happy to continue and show you what we can do to help you.
This is an opportunity for international ISVs. We're going to continue to help customers with growth paths. As we do that, the landscape, as we've heard at this session, involves continual discussion around AI and how we view that as an opportunity to continue our growth path. When we look at that, we consider not only the product perspective but also what areas, what regions, and what customer types we're targeting. We have a number of legacy customers and continued SaaS customers that are looking at AI projects they can pilot in a new region specifically to test. This might give them a great opportunity to explore AI in that context.
We are continuing to grow as well. We opened five new regions in 2025 and will continue that growth with additional regions projected for 2026. One region that I want to highlight, which has gotten a lot of attention, is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, or KSA for short. We have detailed demographic information and data behind the reason why we're going there. That information is also available to you as a customer considering entry in this region. This is an area we continue to invest in, and we'll show you the portfolio you can consider when you hear this presentation if you want to explore that potential journey.
However, we know this is not easy. We know there are risks and investment required on the customer's part to consider this type of movement. There's certainly a competitive landscape. You won't be the only one when you land with the product you offer. There may be some differentiating advantages, but you are going into an area where you're unlikely to be first. The local technology advancement might be different. There are different client demands and expectations, and then there's the really complex aspect of the regulatory environment and how that gets transferred and managed as part of your operations.
Introducing Global Passport: A Program Delivering 2x Growth for Participating Customers
With that background, I had customers asking me about this for at least a year. I said we've got to do better at this. We've got to put something together that can continue to answer the questions and objections we get from customers about navigating this type of path. Global Passport was the name of the solution, the umbrella that will guide this conversation, with all the components within this talk.
This is a program that's essentially a one-on-one program where we come to you and give you advice from the deep resources of AWS. Reinvent gives you an idea of how vast the scale of AWS resources is. Part of the challenge is finding those experts who can address the major challenges I mentioned before. That's the objective we're going to review. We've done this for just over a year, and we're still at about 400 customers out of the thousands we have. There are some criteria to get into this program, but we're really looking at those next wave of growth opportunities to help with that trajectory into a new region specifically.
This is probably the proudest slide my team has produced. The customers in this program working through Passport are growing at twice the rate of customers not in it. Now, you could say those are customers looking to grow, and yes they are. But we're facilitating and accelerating. We're putting fuel on the fire and helping to smooth the ROI to make it as fast as possible. Those account teams are telling their peers, their peers are telling other individuals they work with, and it's continuing to work out.
Strategic Planning Pillar: Building Market Entry Strategies with Think&Grow and Partners
So what is Passport? It's essentially four different pillars designed to address the needs I mentioned at the beginning. The first part is strategic planning. We're going to go through each of these in a little more detail. The next one is technical readiness. We have senior people who have done this before with customers in 25 or more regions.
This ensures we can avoid any future mistakes and you can learn from their experiences. We also have a regulatory compliance element, and we want to make sure that when you land in a new region, you have a paved path ready for go-to-market and understand the environment you're entering.
The first piece is strategic planning. We have three wonderful partners that we work with. Think&Grow does the bulk of these sessions. They're the original partners we've worked with here, and we had a relationship with Think&Grow prior to this because they help our customers with growth opportunities. We've also been using ThoughtWorks for some technical deep-dive challenges with customers, and then we have EDI & Partners for public sector specifically.
What we want to get out of this is really to package a plan for customers to have a strategy to put together. There were times when I was asking a customer why they just launched in the UAE, and the response I got was, "Well, we got one customer that said they want our product there, and my brother-in-law happens to live there, so it's pretty easy for me to go make that work." That's not a strategy for deep engagement in a new region. Think&Grow is made up of really mature senior operators that have experience taking startups into new regions, and each of these partners have different skills that can help you pave and build a strategy.
What happens next is that strategy gets components that are listed here, and we can talk about any one of these components. You can even add on some additional items if you like what you see. You can have them help you with first hires in a new region or deeper go-to-market data. The program components are really about understanding market fit, how you go to market—whether you're channel or direct—and what your pricing strategy is, among all these other considerations.
We've had some very senior customers, some of our largest customers, come and say they want us to evaluate their existing strategy for the next set of regions they want to go into. Don't think this is just for customers that are emerging or just starting out on this path. We've had some other senior groups come and want us to evaluate what they're currently doing. After that session, which is about a 2.5 hour session initially, there will be a report out that takes approximately 2 weeks. That report summarizes the observations provided during the workshop and gives you a set of recommendations and a playbook for that next region.
It's also something you can use as a template and evaluate for future engagements, giving you confidence that a third party is taking a look at this and giving you advice. We've had customers bring that to their board, and we've had customers use this internally and say, "We're not saying this, but this team is also saying so." There's definitely some advantages to the report outs and the guide for understanding how this would work.
Technical Readiness Pillar: Optimizing Architecture Before Regional Expansion
The next pillar is really about technical readiness. We don't want there to be any surprises. You should know that our regions have different pricing for our products and services. We don't have every service in every region. We have some senior solutions architects that have gone through this journey with a number of customers. They come in and spend an hour with you to ensure that best practices are transferred. Think of this as a well-architected review for new region expansion, just to ensure that your footprint is as tight and as modernized as possible before we start replicating it multiple times.
Let's get the cost down as much as we can before we have to overcome those cold start costs to achieve a fast ROI. There are also security considerations and performance enhancements. This is a session where the senior solutions architect will go through and talk about the opportunities in this domain. We want to make sure you get the right servers in that environment that you typically use, and we want to make sure that the services and features of those services are available in that region as well. That is the goal of the technical readiness session. The outputs are essentially to make sure that you are aware of what's happening.
Qlik's Success Story: Achieving $40K Monthly Savings Through Technical Optimization
We'll go deeper into that. By bringing up a customer so you don't have to hear it from me, we'll bring up a customer that's gone through this. I'm going to bring up Paul Peterson, who is the Global Offering Manager for Regions & Regulated Markets at Qlik. Qlik has had a great growth experience, and I want to have him talk about his experience with Passport.
Thank you. So, just a little bit about Qlik. Qlik has been around for quite a long time. We have something like 40,000 customers globally and a number of product items in our portfolio, both client-managed and SaaS infrastructure. We're a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader in a number of areas. Over the last kind of five years—I guess I've been with Qlik almost seven years—like everybody, we're moving to the cloud, moving to SaaS.
As we move our portfolio to the cloud, we are having to address our customers' data sovereignty, residency, and regulatory requirements, just as Jeff was highlighting. We have hit all of those in spades on how we look to expand and bring our customers onto our SaaS environment. So, a little bit about what we do: our main platform, unlike our competitors, has a comprehensive unified platform where we provide everything from analytics to AI to data management integration and so forth in our overall solution.
From our expansion strategy, this year in 2025 we've added five new regions on top. I think we're now over between 10 and 15 globally. We've done the UAE, Israel, Brazil, and France this year as well as expanding our US government footprint with a new DOD region. In support of that, we had a kind of base footprint for each of our regions. We were trying to reduce the cost on that environment. For things like the cold start that Jeff highlighted, as we're ramping up our customers and those types of things, as well as optimizing the existing footprint that we have out there, we had a number of things in our backlog that we were looking to work our way through. Being part of the program and working with Jeff's team, we had a number of primary items that came out that are helping us reduce the cost of our overall infrastructure.
The first one was to move to Graviton. This allowed us to adjust our auto-scaling infrastructure to make it a little bit more flexible on what we are able to deploy and give us a little bit more options from the instance type expansion that we were able to do. We gained the ability to take lowest cost compute within that environment as well and improved our ability to scale up and scale down based on our workloads and the ramp period for that. So you can see here as we look to deploy the Graviton implementation, we're looking at some pretty significant numbers, saving upwards of $150,000 a month after we deployed this into our global infrastructure across those regions at that time.
The second thing we did was to move to partial deployments. We had a standard footprint that we started with where we wanted to be able to handle up to 2,000 tenants in the infrastructure. That was a pretty hefty footprint to start with. We didn't come out of the gate with customers like that. That's a ramp—getting to 2,000 is a decent ramp period. This allowed us to reduce the cost footprint by deploying a partial footprint. We have a couple of really high-cost items in there. One thing we call our one app per engine implementation is for customers who have really heavy-duty analytics workloads with really large instances. This gave us the ability to shut those off and save a lot on the compute side. Another aspect was around capacity flags as part of that deployment as well, and this allowed us to save a pretty decent chunk of money monthly on those deployments.
The third one, which is a little bit counterintuitive, was that we adjusted the chipset. We moved to AMD from Intel, and that saved a fair bit of money on that front as well, approximately $100,000 a month overall across all of those regions.
The outcome was obviously cost savings on that front, and you can see a big difference here between our German region that we rolled out in 2023 versus the UAE one that we rolled out in April of this year. Overall, there's a $40K a month cost differential on that front. Lower costs ultimately help me as I look at additional regional expansion, right? Lowering those costs gets us more opportunity to either invest in other things in the portfolio or in our case we're looking to expand further in 2026.
We've already announced that we're going to go into Canada in the first half of next year, and tomorrow we'll be announcing that we're part of the European sovereign Cloud launch partner program as well. This is giving us the opportunity to continue to expand and grow by leveraging the program. So thank you. There's a great example of how we take practical examples from past companies that have done something like this and see if that applies to a company that wants to go on this journey as well, with meaningful reductions in costs at the same time we're also trying to grow revenue so you see there's a great opportunity there.
Regulatory Compliance and Passport Catalyst: Accelerating Growth by 65% with Go-to-Market Support
The next pillar that I want to talk about is regarding regulatory compliance. In this area it's really just about understanding and ensuring that the passport that you have and the visa that you have is appropriate when you go to that new region. There are a number of different compliance standards. It also gets deeper if you're in the medical field or in the financial field. You might not be aware that AWS has ex-regulators and ex-auditors that work for AWS. They're in a group that is essentially designed to help you overcome and navigate this type of pothole to ensure that you're aware, and they're very familiar with AWS services, so they're intertwined with understanding the requirement and how you can overcome that with the service.
These individuals will come in. Like I said, the workshop you've got, the strategy piece you just went through, the technical part, we'll bring that technical person in. We're not going to have you go around all those individuals and experts. They come to you with this bespoke program, and then the regulatory individuals also come in and they give you their perspective. Where do you want to go? Here's what to look out for. We also have tools to ensure that you can pass regular audits in this regard as well. So that is the third pillar and a pretty large piece as well that we want to remove.
The next piece is around go-to-market. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to be confident when you land in a new arena what that will look like? I often equate this to, I think most of us have been into a new airport for the first time. You've been to that new airport. You're tired, you might be jet lagged, you picked up your bags, you go out through customs and then you're in this sea of people and you have no idea where to go. Maybe there's a foreign language you can't even read the signs. You're trying to find the taxi, you're trying to find the shuttle. Where do you go?
In the distance you've got this little sign with your name on it and you're like, oh my gosh, that's so awesome. That person's going to show me where to go. I pre-booked that person to help me. That's what this is. When you land in Saudi Arabia and you want to work with a local partner there, guess what? That partner is someone you can trust, someone that knows the landscape, they know the customers and the partners. So we want to set you up with people that know that landscape. When I come here, I always feel like somebody wants to sell me something, whether it's here in the taxi or going anywhere, and it's hard to trust them, right?
So you need to work with people you trust, and that's what this is. The partner program has a wealth of capabilities that can offer you through marketplace or the partner network, and these individuals understand how to navigate that. So they use this matrix of different go-to-market activities in order to help educate the AWS team and the local team on your solution and kind of build some momentum and some discipline from how the best companies operate because they've operated and they've seen how those companies work. So it's things like CRM integration, scalable motions around co-sell, and I'm going to let some of them speak to you about this.
So what we've done so far is that we've pieced together some partners in different regions that can help you. They know the landscape and as a part of the program we help pave that first instance.
We pay for the use and utilization of those individuals in order to get that first set of opportunities under the covers. Now the other exceptional data point here is that Passport Catalyst customers are growing 65% faster than regular Passport customers. So you've got people that are not in Passport, then you've got double the growth for Passport, and then you've got 65% higher growth for people that are in Catalyst. You see this momentum here and that's the value of where we're taking this.
Symbio and Darktrace Partnership: Driving Manufacturing Sector Co-Sell Success in North America
I'm going to have some partners come and talk to you about what they do, how they operate with their customers, and give you some specific customer examples. The first is Symbio. I want to bring up Justin and then he'll bring up Francesca and I'll talk to you about his experience with the program. Thank you, Jeff. Morning, everyone. Thank you for being here. My name is Justin Eddie. I'm the founder of Symbio. It's good to have you here.
Symbio is a cloud go-to-market agency. We specialize in AWS co-sell and co-marketing services. Our goal, as Jeff mentioned, is to accelerate that journey to co-sell revenue with AWS. What we do is we bring together three services within the Passport Catalyst program. Those three services are here on the slide: partner marketing services, co-sell enablement services, and fractional partner staffing.
Starting with partner marketing services, we focus on your joint messaging and positioning with AWS. How can we clearly articulate that better together narrative to the AWS customer and to the AWS ecosystem so that we know we're landing that message with maximum impact? We build the content and the campaigns to tell that story and drive awareness. The second is co-sell enablement services. This is really driving that message to the AWS sellers as well as to the partner sellers to help them work effectively with AWS sellers and co-sell, help them understand the best practices and have the materials and toolkits to drive co-sell opportunities and joint sales engagements.
The third is fractional partner staffing. Our team provides AWS-enabled Partner Development Managers who can navigate the AWS programs and the variety of resources to help partners unlock and qualify for these go-to-market benefits within the program. We also provide co-sell specialists who help execute on joint sales engagements and enable best practices for working with AWS on specific opportunities and expanding those.
All three of these services come together in the Catalyst program to enable this virtuous cycle. Starting with partner-led co-marketing, driving the content and the messaging to drive lead acquisition and pipeline generation, that really opens the door to connecting with AWS sellers. Once you're working with AWS sellers, you build those relationships and the trust opportunity by opportunity, seller by seller. You can expand that relationship through these best practices to other accounts, their peers, other sellers, into broader sales enablement and identification of other accounts and opportunities that you can work on and then repeat this cycle. All three of these services come together to enable that virtuous flywheel effect of co-selling with AWS.
We have a great example of this today. I'm excited to have Darktrace, our mutual customer here, to talk about a real-world story about this. So I would love to introduce Francesca Bowen, VP of Strategic Alliances at Darktrace. Thank you, Justin, and thank you Jeff. Well, it's lovely to see everyone and I'm really privileged to be part of this conversation because we've had an awesome experience with Passport, actually firstly with Think and Grow at the very beginning, and then with Symbio when we really looked to expand.
Show of hands, who is not familiar with Darktrace? Okay, only a few. Well, that's good because I love to just give a bit of background on the story and the history because it's a really interesting organization. Darktrace was the first to apply AI to the challenge of cybersecurity back in 2013. This is before the big rage of AI and certainly before we were talking about AI and cybersecurity. What we do is we learn the behaviors of individual customers and we are able in real time to detect and respond against never before seen threats. That's really helpful for our 10,000 plus customers, but particularly in regulated industries like manufacturing, which is what we'll talk about today.
We'll do a billion dollars in ARR this next year. We were listed on the London Stock Exchange and have now been bought out by Thoma Bravo, a big PE firm in the US. It's been an incredible journey with AWS. I'd love to talk about the Passport program.
So, who is interested in Passport and who's part of it today? It might be early days for some of you. What I would say about Passport is that the secret to success is going to be intentionality. You've got to be really intentional with what you want to get out of this program. Let's think about the challenge for Darktrace at the time. As you can hear, we're a British-born organization managed by AWS out of the UK, which is awesome. That's where our development team is, but ultimately it means that all of our resources are in the UK.
Amir from AWS and John, who runs our alliances, naturally grew very quickly in that region, but less so in the US, which didn't make much sense for our business because ultimately we do more of our revenue out of the Americas. So we wanted to elevate the AWS partnership specifically in North America and mature that co-sell mechanism that can be so effective between our sellers.
So what did we do and how did we do it? Ultimately, the Passport Catalyst funded the ability to work with an organization like Symbio, which was really awesome. We were assigned a Partner Development Manager with AWS-specific skill sets, and she, Maria, extended our alliances team and really helped us nail down the better together messaging. That is the most important thing when you're going to market with AWS.
Back to the objective, we were trying to mature our co-sell efforts, and our customer in this case is the AWS seller. We need to think about how in manufacturing we decided to choose that industry because it's less saturated than financial services. How are we going to help the seller sell more AWS or reduce friction to sale, ultimately leading to more revenue? What Darktrace does is secure organizations, particularly in regulated industries, across their entire digital estate. In manufacturing, there's a lot of legacy operational technology and IT, and organizations want to gain efficiencies and benefits from cloud but can be slower on the uptake because of security challenges. This is where Darktrace comes in as a great partner to the AWS seller to drive additional revenue and help customers transform toward AWS Cloud.
With that story, Symbio built brilliant assets for AWS and through AWS that we still use today even after the campaign. They're absolutely fantastic. We then packaged it up to create a very targeted marketing campaign into medium and large-size manufacturing companies in the US.
So what were the results? They're pretty good, and I was very happy. The numbers speak for themselves, but I'd like to highlight three things that got me really excited. The first one was access into organizations we'd never engaged with before. We had meaningful engagement with ten of the top fifty manufacturing companies in America that we had never meaningfully engaged with. That's a really big deal. The next thing is procurement. We're on AWS Marketplace, and we did some pretty sizable deals with manufacturing organizations on Marketplace. I remember one organization that would have typically taken three months to procure, but with Marketplace, we were able to do that in under one month, and that was a very sizable deal. So we love that. And then the final one is that number forty-nine.
So as sales and partner leaders in the room, I think we can all build the best possible programs, but at the end of the day, it's really about our seller engagement between AWS and Darktrace. We have 200+ reps trained on the Darktrace side, which is awesome, but 49 AWS manufacturing sellers are thinking about Darktrace and thinking about how we can help them sell more of what they want to. For me, that was probably the most exciting thing.
Thank you so much, Jeff. All right, awesome. Yes, great example of how this can work. I think the beauty of this is that you're really focused on how Symbio can help focus on the process. Here are the results, but the process is about building the maturity and the muscle memory of what it takes to get these types of results. If you can keep doing that going forward, that gift is going to keep on giving, so it's a fantastic result there.
Connact and Riskified Case Study: Building a $40M Pipeline in 12 Months Through Marketplace
I also want to talk a little bit about where this is a global program. We are testing some partners in APJ, but we don't have that fully baked and ready to offer yet. We obviously are showcasing here that we have North America. I'm going to bring up our partner that we use in EMEA, and then we're also working with a partner in the Middle East. APJ is kind of in progress at the moment, but there is a lot of interest there as well.
What I'm going to do next is talk about Connact and their story. I'm going to bring up Jonathan, and then he's going to bring up Max to talk about his specific example of their working relationship.
First of all, Jeff, thank you for inviting us and being such a great sponsor, and thank you everyone for attending. My name is Jonathan. I'm COO and co-founder at Connact. A bit about our story: seven years ago, I was working for one of the biggest ISPs in Israel, and there was a lot of hype around it. Following an investment by a cloud provider that we won't mention by name here, we were tasked, together with my partner Yuval, to build a cloud alliance.
We didn't know exactly what it was, what it meant, or what the impact would look like, but we understood that there was a lot of potential in the scope, so we needed to double down on it and really understand what it is. This is how Connact was born. What we do at Connact is support ISVs at all maturity levels and build their partnership and business partnership with AWS. We work with early stage partners that need their foundation built from basic programs like Accelerate Marketplace and so on, to Better Together story narrative and executive alignment, and much more advanced partners that require deep differentiation, business development, global business development, and co-sell at scale.
Since we established the company, we have served more than 200 ISVs. We're based out of Israel and the UK. Alongside the professional services that we provide for 360 of all cloud alliance requirements, we develop our own proprietary go-to-market platform called Flow. Flow connects and operationalizes all the systems and also provides a data layer and insights layer to actually take the best practices that we developed internally and expose them to our users.
Regarding our partnership with AWS, it's really growing rapidly. We are in multiple programs, but of course, the most important one is the Catalyst program. We are in the third wave of Catalyst, have served more than 35 ISVs, and have generated significant revenue and a significant pipeline. I think that one of the most important things that we provide as part of the program is not only the fish, but we teach the ISVs how to fish. If there is a problem or something that doesn't work, we dive deep and find a source to enable them to afterwards either do it with us after the program or do it independently.
I want to call to the stage Max, Senior Director of Global Partnership at Riskified, to give his point of view on that. Thank you, Johnny. Thank you, Jeff, for inviting me to come here and share the story of Riskified with both Connect and AWS. I'll try to do that in the next five or so minutes. I wish I was part of the session before, a year ago, when we were looking into starting the partnership with AWS, but I'm happy I'm here now, and it's very interesting to see the perspective of some of my peers as well.
For some context, Riskified is a leader in the fraud prevention space of e-commerce. Essentially, we work with the world's largest retailers , helping them approve more transactions in a safe manner and prevent fraud in real time. We sit at the checkout and help them assess the risk of those transactions. The interesting piece here is that everything we've built as a company since our foundation is on top of AWS. All of our data is stored in AWS, and we utilize a lot of the microservices and security mechanisms of AWS.
So the question of whether we should expand the relationship with AWS is not necessarily new to Riskified. However, we had two biggest challenges when we looked at this. The first one is that we are targeting very large retailers, and we were skeptical about those types of companies buying multi-million dollar software or services through the marketplace. We didn't think that was a thing. Riskified has very long sales cycles, very complex, high-touch processes, and we thought that someone wouldn't do that through this channel. We were wrong.
The second challenge was that we didn't know enough about how to get set up and where to start. I think this is the theme that we've been hearing across the board as well. The advice we received was that we should work with an external company that specializes in doing this, taking potential ISVs like ourselves and bringing them to the marketplace. They will know what to do. If you committed the same mistake that I did in the past of trying to figure this out yourself and reading through the documentation, you probably got lost or thought this was too complex and overwhelming. Honestly, it probably is, but there is a strategy to it. There's a way of doing it in a smart way and doing the things that matter first and then expanding from there.
We worked with Connect to try and understand and bridge those two gaps and concerns that we had. From the first conversation we had with them, number one, we understood that we were wrong. Multi-million dollar contracts were being signed through the marketplace, and large retailers were utilizing that as a channel. So that was great. One of our concerns was dealt with and is no longer there.
The second thing is that Connect really helped bring a lot of clarity to the process for us. We're a small team, and we're doing what we're doing very successfully, so we needed to make sure that if we're putting resources and time away from what we've been doing, it will be the right call. They explained to us all the key milestones and things that we have to do first in order to get the flywheel effect of the marketplace and AWS as an ecosystem. That's what we set out to do.
We also luckily had the support from the program that Connect had with AWS and Catalyst in helping fund this. Again, everything we were worried about was no longer a big deal for us, and this was being funded as well, so we had nothing to lose but to try and make this work. When we started working with Connect, we put together very specific deliverables that we would be working on within a timeframe of four to six months. That was also very specific in terms of what Connect would handle for us versus what would be required from Riskified's team, whether we were just supporting with information or had to be hands-on as part of the process.
Just a few weeks later, we had our technical review done. We were listed officially on the marketplace, and that was great news for us, but we were just starting that process. We didn't have a lot of go-to-market motion. Shortly after that, we finally got our competency approved in retail, which is obviously the biggest industry for someone like Riskified.
From there, things started to catch up and it started to get interesting. We were done with all of the very important but somewhat bureaucratic and technical steps that we had to accomplish, and we did so in probably around a month and a half. We would never have been able to do that ourselves. From there, we started to participate in multiple programs that helped us collect additional funding. Our CMO was very happy with the amount of MDF that we were getting as well, and we became an ISV Accelerate partner very shortly during that period.
Once we became an ISV Accelerate partner, that's when we had access to start co-selling with AWS and access to the sales teams. I heard the word "intentional" being used, and I completely agree with that approach. We took the same approach in making sure that when we were pumping opportunities through AWS, we were looking for, connecting with, speaking with, and engaging with the sales teams. We were very intentional, meaning we only submitted opportunities that were real opportunities where we had context and background and something to share. We weren't just trying to be overly optimistic and do a moonshot through that.
When we spoke with those teams at AWS, they clearly understood that we had some footprints. Some of those opportunities were existing clients of ours who were just looking to extend the contract or do an upsell or a cross-sell. That led to them wanting to speak with us again. They understood how Riskified's deal could help them upsell their AWS services. Our information was valuable to them.
To close off with some of the high-level results, this has been 12 months or nearly 12 months now that we finally decided to start this process. We have a pipeline of close to $40 million. We closed about 3 to 4 deals already this year, which is a huge win. Our deals are large in nature and size. We've accomplished much more than what we thought we would be able to do, and we have a lot more to do next year. In 12 months, AWS became a hyper-growth engine for Riskified. They were super excited to double down next year. Thank you very much, Jeff. Back to you, Jeff.
Thanks, yes, that's a great example. When you talk about anybody who knows navigating FTR and navigating ISV Accelerate and what you need to do to reach ISV Accelerate, to do that in around 2 months is phenomenal. That is a great testimonial to how this can accelerate. Originally, we were taking customers that were only ISV Accelerate, and we were thinking why are we doing that? Now let's help some of the customers that have a great product. They still want to grow. They've yet to be mature in the partner motion. Let's help them get there. So we removed that requirement, and now any customer, if you're not on the marketplace, you can also use this as a springboard to get there.
How to Join Global Passport: Eligibility Requirements and Next Steps
So how does this work? We have a nomination process. You can go through your account manager. You can even just do a Google search for AWS Global Passport, and it should come up. You can nominate yourself there, and then we have sessions. We've done these in 22 different cities. We try to come as close to you as possible. We've done them all over the world, and typically it's about once every month and a half. Schedule that discovery workshop. You review the action items from the report that comes from the partner, and then there's a one-hour follow-up session to identify those next steps. That's the logistics of how this works as we schedule it.
We do have a minimum revenue threshold. We have gone beyond ISV. We have gone to some startups that are below that threshold. If there's a great growth story, I'm a sucker for that. We'll definitely take that into consideration. We're looking at success in the home market. We certainly want executive sponsorship. The maturity stages we've kind of changed, but we certainly want you to be in an APN and know what's expected.
Because it is a commitment you do need to be prepared for that path. As we've talked, we have individuals that can help guide you through that path. Who do I want in these sessions when we have them? We typically say I want the person who's responsible for the target in the new region who owns the number to reach that sales target in that new area. That person's going to really care about making sure that this plan is solid.
At the other side, I want the person who pays for that cloud bill, who's going to pay for that new region. Whose responsibility is it in their budget to have those increases in expense and take that risk? We often see great debate happening between these people in these sessions. There's often a debate about where we go first. We've had large customers come to us and say, "Can you help me force rank the next three areas that we want to consider growing in?"
We've done that. We go and we have used partners to get data in some cases, or we've used some AWS data. What type of customer are you selling to? How can we help inform you to make a decision to break that tie if there's a challenge internally? These are the individuals that we want in order to have that session.
This is a summary of what we learned today. We talked about the strategy pillar. We talked about technical readiness. We have a regulatory element as well. And then we had some great examples on go-to-market because initially, go-to-market was our biggest challenge and is still our biggest challenge. When you land in a new region, you can put an instance up today. You can put a new instance up if you don't have those technical problems, you can open up and be available.
But how do you generate sales and get that motion working? That's the biggest challenge, and that's why we are relying on some great partners in order to make that happen. Here's a path to the public site if you don't have an account team covering you. This is a path to scheduling a workshop. We do have some operations people that can help, and that is how we operate. Thank you, and I hope you learned something. Hopefully this is something you can take advantage of. Appreciate it.
; This article is entirely auto-generated using Amazon Bedrock.
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