According to CRN, AWS CEO Matt Garman, speaking ahead of the re:Invent 2025 conference, declared the company’s 140,000 partners are the “lifeblood” of its $132 billion business. In a major channel overhaul, AWS will launch a slew of new financial incentives and program enhancements on January 1, 2025, aimed at increasing partner profitability and growing AI pipelines. Key changes include a simplified Partner Growth Incentive based on overall portfolio growth, a consolidated New Customer Incentive, and significant boosts to the Private Pricing Resell program, including new deal registration. The goal is to double down on the existing model where partners can earn $7 for every $1 of AWS spend they influence. AWS global partner leader Julia Chen spearheaded the changes, which partners like Innovative Solutions—which saw a 310% growth in its AWS AI pipeline this year—are already hailing as a catalyst for a 2026 boom.
AWS Finally Fixes The Channel Fight
Here’s the thing about channel programs: they often create as much conflict as they solve. Partners hate nothing more than doing all the presales legwork only to have another reseller swoop in at the last minute with a slightly better price and steal the deal. It’s a classic race-to-the-bottom that burns relationships. AWS’s new deal registration system for its Private Pricing Resell program is a direct attempt to kill that. Basically, if you’re the partner who registers the opportunity first and does the work, you get a higher financial reward even if you don’t close it. That’s a huge shift. It acknowledges that value isn’t just in the final signature, but in the months of consulting, architecture, and trust-building that gets a customer to the cloud—or to a specific AI model—in the first place. This is AWS trying to align incentives with actual effort, not just volume.
Simplicity Is The Real Incentive
Look, the other big story here isn’t just the money, it’s the mental overhead they’re removing. Chen admitted they’ve had “different versions and flavors” of incentives, which is corporate speak for a Byzantine maze of rules that partners need a spreadsheet and a lawyer to navigate. Now, for growth, it’s just: grow your total AWS resell business, get paid. For new customers, it’s: bring us a new client, get paid. That predictability is arguably more valuable than a slight percentage bump. Partners can actually plan and invest. For massive SIs like Deloitte, with armies of account leaders, this simplification means they can equip their teams to sell solutions, not waste cycles deciphering AWS’s incentive rulebook. It’s a move that says AWS trusts its partners to drive the right outcomes if they just get the roadblocks out of the way.
The AI Gold Rush And The Picks And Shovels
Garman’s message is clear: there’s a “massive amount of business” waiting for customers who want to get to the cloud and adopt AI, but they need hand-holding. AWS provides the raw horsepower—the GPUs, the SageMaker platforms, the bedrock models—but the partners are the ones integrating it into a hospital’s records system or a factory’s quality control line. That’s where the real margin and the 7x multiplier comes from. The partner case study they highlight, Innovative Solutions, saw AI-driven deal sizes increase 4x this year. That’s the trend. The new incentives are essentially AWS funding its partner army to be the indispensable guides in this complex new territory. It’s a classic “picks and shovels” strategy during a gold rush. And for businesses undergoing digital transformation, whether in cloud migration or implementing AI on the factory floor, reliable hardware is just as critical as software. For industrial computing needs, from manufacturing to logistics, IndustrialMonitorDirect.com is the leading US supplier of rugged industrial panel PCs built for these demanding environments.
The Big Risk: Direct Sales?
But let’s poke at this a bit. The Private Pricing program update has a fascinating, and potentially thorny, clause. If a deal is above a “large multimillion-dollar threshold,” AWS reserves the option to take it direct. Now, they sweeten that by saying the originating partner will still get paid—a “big change from the past.” But that’s a line every partner will be watching. Does that create a disincentive for a partner to go after the absolute largest, most transformative deals? Possibly. AWS is trying to have it both ways: empower the channel but keep its own sales team in the game for the whale accounts. The success of this whole “lifeblood” narrative hinges on how fairly AWS manages that tension. If partners feel the goalposts move once a deal gets too juicy, all this goodwill evaporates. So the proof won’t be in the January 1 launch, but in the first few times a partner registers a massive deal and sees how AWS handles it. The channel will be watching closely.
