The adoption of cloud environments continues worldwide. Enterprises are turning to running their workloads on the cloud for agility and cost optimization purposes. According to Statista, Amazon’s AWS captures a third of the overall cloud market, Microsoft Azure 23% and Google’s GCP 10% (as of Q4 2022).
Given the relevance of AWS as the top cloud infrastructure provider, we thought it would be useful for us and our audience to get a view of their services partner ecosystem.
As of Q1 2023, there are 1,129 professional services and consulting AWS partners worldwide, employing approximately 7.2 million professionals overall. Not every professional at these companies is related to an AWS practice; these companies carry 124,000 AWS certifications overall (it is common to have multiple certifications per professional). This services partner ecosystem is one of the most mature we have seen given its scale.
The majority of services partners are in North America (39% of total services partners), followed by Europe and Asia, each with 22%. These three regions are responsible for 99% of the headcount of these companies. Middle East and South America have the lowest average headcount per services partner at 111 and 331, respectively, implying these regions tend to have boutique AWS services partners.
If we sort the data by headcount tiers, we can see that the 79 largest AWS services partners, those with more than 10,000 employees (7% of total), hold almost half (48%) of all AWS certifications from services partners. The remaining 93% of partners, with only 9% of the total headcount, hold the other half of the outstanding certifications. We can interpret there are more certifications per average employee for the smaller players, indicating the average smaller player is more of a pure-play cloud consulting company.
At Alten Capital we focus on investing in the technology services space. We believe the increased cloud adoption, at the infrastructure, data and application layers, is of top importance for enterprise customers and we want to support founders, entrepreneurs and management team members of cloud services companies. Please reach out to connect with us.