What Dr. Ruba Borno’s 2025 re:Invent Keynote Means for AWS Partners

Every AWS re:Invent brings a wave of new services, tools, and capabilities. For partners, however, the real signal lies in how those announcements shape how we deliver customer outcomes. Dr. Ruba Borno’s 2025 Partner Keynote focused squarely on that theme by highlighting how AWS is evolving its partner ecosystem to better support agentic AI solutions, industry-specific innovation, and more streamlined ways to bring combined services and software to market.

Rather than centering on a single headline launch, the keynote painted a broader picture of where AWS sees the greatest opportunity: helping partners package deeper expertise, move faster with customers, and deliver measurable business impact across industries. From AWS Transform reaching general availability to expanded AWS Marketplace capabilities and new agentic AI designations, the message was clear: partners now have more tools than ever to turn innovation into real-world results.

Below, we break down the most important announcements and what they mean for organizations building and scaling with AWS.

A Stronger Foundation for Modernization with AWS Transform

Modernization remains a top priority for enterprises, but the path from legacy systems to cloud-native architectures is rarely straightforward. With AWS Transform now generally available, AWS is providing partners with a more mature, production-ready platform to accelerate and de-risk the customer journey.

AWS Transform helps organizations move beyond one-off migrations by supporting structured, repeatable modernization efforts across applications, data, and infrastructure. For partners, this enables more consistent outcomes, whether the goal is refactoring monolithic systems, modernizing data platforms, or preparing environments for AI-driven workloads.

What stood out in Dr. Borno’s keynote was how AWS Transform fits into a broader modernization narrative. Rather than focusing solely on moving workloads to the cloud, AWS is emphasizing end-to-end transformation: from architecture design and migration planning to operational excellence and long-term optimization. That shift aligns closely with how customers approach modernization today. They want progress that supports growth, performance, security, and future innovation, not just a new hosting environment.

AWS Marketplace Evolves to Support Multi-Partner, Multi-Product Solutions

One of the most practical announcements for partners was the continued evolution of AWS Marketplace, including:

• Express Private Offers
• Multi-product solutions that bundle services and software
• The ability for AWS and partners to jointly package offerings

These enhancements reflect how enterprise buying behavior has changed. Customers increasingly seek integrated solutions that combine consulting services, managed services, and software into a single, cohesive offering. They want simplicity in procurement, clarity in pricing, and confidence that the solution has been designed to work together.

For partners like Caylent, this creates new ways to present complete solutions to customers. Instead of selling individual components in isolation, partners can package AWS services, proprietary accelerators, and third-party tools into one streamlined offering. This approach shortens sales cycles, reduces friction in contracting, and helps customers understand the full scope of what they are buying from day one.

More importantly, it allows partners to focus on outcomes. When solutions are bundled with a clear business objective, such as modernization, data platform transformation, or AI adoption, customers can more easily align their investments with results.

Agentic AI Designations Highlight Proven Partner Expertise

Agentic AI remains one of the most transformative areas of cloud innovation, and AWS is placing greater emphasis on recognizing partners that can deliver these solutions responsibly and at scale. The introduction of Agentic AI Categories for AWS AI Competency Partners signals that AWS is raising the bar for what “AI capability” means in practice.

These designations identify partners who have demonstrated success in building and deploying agentic systems that operate autonomously, are orchestrated, and deliver real-world business impact, which includes designing agents that can reason, act, and collaborate, integrating AI into operational workflows, ensuring security, governance, and observability are built in, and delivering measurable outcomes for customers. Partners with the AI Competency achieve customer results that are 30% more likely to be successfully deployed and are also 25% faster than other partners.

For Caylent, being a launch partner for this designation reflects years of hands-on experience building agentic solutions across industries. It also reinforces a broader trend: customers no longer want experimental AI projects that stay stuck in proof-of-concept mode. They want systems that work reliably in production, integrate with existing tools, and solve real problems.

By formalizing these designations, AWS helps customers identify partners who can guide them through the complexities of agentic AI adoption with confidence.

Industry-Focused Innovation Through the Business Outcomes Xcelerator Program

Another key announcement from the keynote was the expansion of AWS’s Business Outcomes Xcelerator (BOX) Program, which now includes a new GenAI and Data Solutions industry track.

This move reflects a growing recognition that effective cloud and AI solutions must be tailored to industry-specific needs. A generative AI platform for automotive manufacturing looks very different from one designed for media, healthcare, or retail. Each vertical brings its own data challenges, compliance requirements, operational constraints, and performance expectations. By introducing an industry-focused track, AWS is enabling partners to build solutions aligned to specific vertical use cases, develop repeatable architectures for sub-industries, demonstrate measurable business outcomes, and accelerate go-to-market for proven patterns.

For partners, this program creates a structured path to move from generic capabilities to industry leadership, helping customers adopt solutions that reflect how their businesses actually operate.

Turning Partner Capabilities Into Customer Outcomes

Across all of the announcements, a consistent theme emerged: AWS is investing in tools, programs, and designations that help partners translate technical capabilities into business results.

Rather than focusing solely on new services, the keynote emphasized simplifying how solutions are packaged and sold, recognizing partners with real-world AI delivery experience, supporting industry-specific innovation, and creating repeatable paths to measurable outcomes.

This reflects what customers are asking for today. They want solutions that are proven, integrated, and aligned with their business goals. They also want partners who understand both the technology and the operational realities of their industries.

For organizations exploring modernization, data transformation, or AI adoption, the partner ecosystem plays a critical role. The right partner brings not just technical skill, but also the ability to design, implement, and scale solutions that deliver lasting value.

What This Means for Organizations Building on AWS

If you’re evaluating how to move forward with cloud and AI initiatives, the announcements from Dr. Borno’s keynote offer several important takeaways:

1. Modernization is becoming more structured and outcome-driven: With tools like AWS Transform reaching maturity, organizations can approach modernization with clearer roadmaps, stronger governance, and more predictable results.

2. Integrated solutions are easier to procure and deploy: Marketplace enhancements make it simpler to purchase bundled services and software that are designed to work together, reducing friction and complexity.

3. Agentic AI is moving into production: AWS’s focus on agentic designations signals that autonomous AI systems are no longer experimental; they’re becoming operational tools that drive real business value.

4. Industry context matters more than ever: The new BOX industry track highlights the importance of tailoring solutions to vertical-specific challenges, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all approaches.

Together, these shifts point toward a more mature, outcome-oriented cloud ecosystem, one where technology investments are closely aligned with strategic business goals.

How Caylent Helps Organizations Turn Innovation Into Impact

At Caylent, we see these announcements as strong validation of our approach to cloud, data, and AI transformation. Our work with customers focuses on building solutions that are:

• Outcome-driven, not just technically impressive
• Industry-aware, reflecting real operational needs
• Production-ready, with security, governance, and scalability built in
• Designed for long-term value, not short-term experimentation

As a launch partner for AWS’s Agentic AI Designation and an active participant in industry-focused initiatives, we help organizations move from ideas to implementation with confidence. Whether the goal is data modernization, migrations, or deploying agentic AI systems, our teams bring the hands-on experience needed to deliver results. Get in touch today to get started.