Streamlining AWS Competency Programs

From Amazon AWS's marketing material:

The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a global community of organizations that leverage AWS technologies, programs, funding, and tools to build solutions and services for customers.

At it's core, the APN is a distribution channel. AWS account managers are incentivized to increase the ARR (annual recurring revenue) of their client accounts. They collaborate with third-party consultancies to fund activities that could lead to an eventual increase in spend (such as migrations). A system like this is prone to abuse, so AWS employs a framework for establishing credibility called the AWS Competency Program.

To gain competencies, partners undergo various automated and manual technical audits. The number of requirements for each competency varies, with some being much more intensive than others. The most important aspect for some of these competencies, is that they make additional funding available to the partner. For example, the funding available through the Migrations and Modernization Competency can be substantial.

For the competencies that "matter", the barrier to entry is significantly high. They typically have other competencies as a prerequisite, and require investments into tools and personnel. Looking at everything together we can get an idea of what the most difficult (and potentially most lucrative) competencies are.

So, how is this information helpful? Consider this version of the competency chart that is for offerings that have neither a SaaS or customer-deployed aspect. What is perhaps slightly more apparent in this chart (putting aside the fact `gnuplot` ran out of colors…) is that nearly all of these competencies pull requirements from ACCT, IAM, OPE, and a few other requirement categories.

By now the astute observer will have realized that even for the largest competency programs, there are optimized paths to completion. Beyond reducing the time and effort to gain competencies, multiple related competencies can be gained simultaneously to enforce a differentiation. For example achieving both the Generative AI Competency and Healthcare Competency signals a good candidate for consulting with healthcare providers around the new HTI-1 regulation.