Rachel Mushahwar, AWS Managing Director for North American Partners, talked with ChannelBuzz about her perspective on the Canadian partner community, and how AWS is ramping up enablement efforts with them.
Rachel Mushahwar, AWS Managing Director for North American Partners
On Wednesday, the closing day of the 2022 Canada Partner Summit in Toronto, the AWS Managing Director for North American Partners Rachel Mushahwar spoke to AWS partners about directions and opportunities for them going forward, and with some clear messaging about what they should be doing.
“Our messaging is really around us being partner first – that we are a core part of AWS’s continued success,” Mushahwar said. “We have the ability to turn the ordinary into extraordinary with our partners. Our AWS Partner Network has more than 100,000 partners, and almost 70% of them are headquartered outside of the U.S.”
Mushahwar joined AWS in February 2021 from Intel. She works with both the Canadian and U.S. partner ecosystems
“In Canada, I work closely with [AWS Canada Country Manager] Eric Gales’ organization to solve some of customers problems,” Mushawar stated. “Canadian partners are very important to our growth.” For example, Mushahwar said that they work closely with Managed Detection and Response provider Arctic Wolf, which they classify as a Level One Security status partner.
“We help them where they are working with a Canadian customer and where the customer wants a security ISV that leverages AWS. We also work with Vancouver-based OpsGuru and help them work with customers to expand on AWS.”
AWS continues to see Canada as a very high growth area,
“As we continue to grow here, there are a lot of amazing opportunities in Canada, especially as we prepare to launch our second region in late 2023 and early 2024. We plan to invest $21 billion by 2037 million in the two Canadian regions, which will coincide with the lowering of latency because of the upcoming second region in Calgary.” That region will take so long to go live because AWS Regions are incredibly complex and sophisticated builds. This Calgary one [AWS Canada West] will have three availability zones, each made up of one or more discrete data centres, and each with redundant power, networking and connectivity, housed in separate facilities.
Mushawar said this means that AWS remains on the lookout to add Canadian partners.
“We are continuing to double down on AWS Partner Network partners, especially around the new region we are setting up,” she stated. “We are doing this through a combination of expanding the partner base as well as internal growth. Customers of all sizes in Canada want to adopt cloud at an accelerated pace, and to do that, they don’t want ‘one size fits all’ partners. We have incumbent SIs who don’t have the specialized skills for some types of projects and we have other, smaller partners who do have these specific skills. We try and get them together to meet the customer with the specific requirements.”
Mushawar said that the importance of getting their messaging out to partners is increasing with their major Re:Invent customer event approaching in late November.
“Reinvent is just few months away, and that means that we will be doubling down on our partners,” she said. “We know we are expecting us to tell them what customers will be wanting from them, and there will be some exciting announcements at Re-Invent.”
AWS also announced the winners of the 2022 Canada AWS Partner Awards, on the 10th anniversary of the APN and AWS Marketplace,
AWS Service Partner of the Year – Innovative Solutions
AWS Solution Provider Partner of the Year – Softchoice
AWS Global Software Partner of the Year – Snowflake
AWS Canadian Software Partner of the Year – Arctic Wolf
AWS Enterprise Partner of the Year – Slalom
AWS SAP Partner of the Year – Contax
AWS Migration & Modernization Partner of the Year – OpsGuru
AWS Partner Marketing of the Year – Innovative Solutions
AWS GSI Partner of the Year – Deloitte
AWS Well-Architected Partner of the Year – TeqFocus
AWS Certified Service Partner of the Year. CGICGI is an AWS Advanced Tier Services Partner.
AWS “Customer Acquisition” Partner of the Year – Crowdstrike
AWS ProServe Partner of the Year – RozieAI
AWS Public Sector Delivery Partner of the Year – Accenture
AWS Public Sector Scaling Partner of the Year – Arctic Wolf
