AWS and MSPs: Amazon Cloud Welcomes Channel Partners

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is getting very serious about MSP partnerships, according to multiple sources who attended the AWS re:Invent 2013 conference last week in Las Vegas. In fact, the cloud computing giant has been reaching out to some MSPmentor 501 companies, exploring ways to better support IT channel partners that move customer workloads into AWS. The moves won’t end there.

Notes one trusted source who attended AWS re:Invent:

“Two years ago AWS had less than 1,000 partners. Now they have 8,000. They are on an expected annual revenue run of $4 billion. This growth supersedes anything I have seen before when compared with Google or Salesforce.com, for example. I expect to see the number of partners and Amazon revenue double next calendar year. Analysts have them [AWS] at $10 billion in 2015.”

Why should MSPs care? The source says: “Lots of value-added services and business will be created on top of [Amazon’s cloud] — representing maybe three to five times AWS’s own revenues.”

Quick math suggests that’s a $30 billion to $50 billion channel and customer opportunity by 2015.

Among the MSP-centric companies already making moves in Amazon’s cloud:

MSPs on AWS

The list doesn’t end there. Several MSPs have confirmed to MSPmentor that they plan to test Amazon WorkSpaces — a new DaaS service — for their customers. Moreover, several MSPmentor 501 companies say they’re increasingly hearing directly from Amazon as the CSP attempts to engage more partners.

“They seem to be getting very, very serious about the MSP market,” said one MSP executive who requested anonymity. “I think they realize a lot of MSPs are getting out of the data center business. Most peers I know are testing Windows Azure, Rackspace and Amazon. But Amazon seems to be the one cloud company that’s really courting MSPs right now.”

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Other CSPs courting MSPs include Artisan Infrastructure, IBM’s SoftLayer Business, Savvis (owned by CenturyLink) and ViaWest, among others. As Amazon opens its arms to more MSPs, we’ll be watching and listening to learn which MSP workloads potentially launch on Amazon’s cloud.