Chris Casey, AWS
Chris Casey is the head of partner management for Asia Pacific and Japan at Amazon Web Services. Chris is an experienced leader of leaders and general manager in the technology sector. With more than 18 years of experience, Chris has a proven track record of launching, leading, and scaling technology and data businesses globally. His experience includes building, directly managing, and inspiring teams of 400+ individuals across strategy, product management, sales, business development, support engineering, user experience, quality control, marketing, partnerships, operations, and engineering (indirect).
Today, Chris is responsible for AWS's all-inclusive partner strategy and partner development for AWS Partners across all of Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ). Chris' organisation spans 11 different countries in APJ including Australia, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Philippines, helping AWS customers migrate new workloads or grow existing workloads on AWS via AWS Partners.
Prior to taking on this role in APJ in 2024, Chris was responsible for AWS's strategic partnerships with technology companies specialized to industry use cases, across all of AWS's key strategic industries, including automotive, energy & utilities, financial services, gaming tech, healthcare & life sciences, media & entertainment, retail, sports, telecommunications, and travel & hospitality.
Prior to joining AWS, Chris was the global head of Bloomberg's reference data & regulatory solutions businesses, and prior to that he spent nearly a decade in KPMG's consulting practice.
Number of years in current role:
Less than a year
Number of years in current company:
5
Number of years involved in indirect sales:
10
Reporting to:
Ruba Borno - AWS worldwide channels & alliances
Does this person report to the CEO?
No.
What percentage of your sales come through the channel?
Do not wish to disclose.
What is your personal channel philosophy?
Partnerships are built on trust, transparency, and clarity. Clarity on goals, strategic objectives, and mechanism to drive execution are paramount to set organisations up for long term success in any partnership. Partnerships also need to be clearly mutually beneficial to both organisations, understanding each other's measurements of success early and revisiting progress to these often underpins any philosophy, strategy, or plan.
What were your biggest personal channel accomplishments over the past year?
Elevating the strategic priority within AWS of partners whose Intellectual Property (IP) is specialised to industry workloads & use cases. Customers who have these use cases can now migrate workloads to AWS as part of the next phase of their transformation journey because these partner solutions run on AWS.
What were your organisation's biggest channel accomplishments over the past year?
We've been able to secure and/or double down on strategic partnerships in all of AWS's key strategic industries including automotive, energy & utilities, financial services, gaming tech, healthcare & life sciences, media & entertainment, retail, sports, telecommunications, and travel & hospitality. This includes strategic partnerships with companies like Amagi, Guidewire, Goldman Sachs, C3 AI, GE Healthcare, HERE Technologies, Halliburton Landmark, Amdocs, & Cordial.
How is your company working to build equity and inclusion in the channel?
Amazon's culture of inclusion is reinforced within our 16 leadership principles, which remind our leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. We also just launched our Inclusion Powered by AWS playbook at re:Invent 2023 that targets data-driven results, moving AWS beyond good intentions to measurable action and a collective understanding of what it means to be diverse, equitable, and inclusive. We created this playbook and made the information publicly available to inspire collective change from everyone including all of our customers and AWS Partners.
How is your organisation's market development strategy (MDF) changing this year?
AWS and our partners will continue to utilise MDF to help grow awareness and demand for their solutions running on AWS. We are continuing to simplify the programmes for Partners in order to make their onboarding and GTM execution with AWS more streamlined to their needs.
What are your top channel goals for 2024?
Key partner programme goals include Increasing overall percentage of company revenue that comes through the channel, improve partner profitability and increase the amount of net new accounts coming through partners.