In this episode, we sit down with Carmen Puccio, Senior Manager of Worldwide Tech Partner Solutions Architecture at AWS, to explore how AWS works strategically with partners to create design wins and production-ready solutions. Carmen brings a unique perspective from his 15-year journey at Associated Press building large-scale systems to his 10 years at AWS working across migration, containers, and now partner solutions architecture.

We dive deep into what makes a successful design win - moving beyond sandbox experiments to validated, production-ready solutions that drive real customer value. Carmen explains how AWS's structured partnership approach delivers faster time to market, AWS validation credibility, and established revenue models at scale, contrasting this with partners working in isolation.

The conversation covers AWS's four strategic pillars for 2026: generative AI and agentic AI (including Agent Core's 2 million SDK downloads in five months), AWS Marketplace evolution with multi-product solutions and partner revenue measurement, technical differentiation through co-engineering, and regional expansion for data sovereignty requirements.

Carmen shares concrete examples from partners like Datadog's EKS add-ons, Workday and PGA Tour's Agent Core implementations, and the transformative impact of AWS Transform reducing modernization timelines by up to 4x. We also explore the new marketplace capabilities that allow partners to bundle multiple products and services, plus the game-changing partner revenue measurement tools launched in January 2026.

For partners listening, Carmen provides clear next steps: work closely with your PSA and PDM teams, leverage your partner plan as a go-to-market foundation, and maintain that crucial two-way conversation with AWS about emerging customer needs and market opportunities.

Contact:

E-mail: aws-partner-unplugged-podcast-hosts@amazon.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmenapuccio/

In this special milestone episode, we celebrate 20 years of Amazon Web Services in our very first video podcast. From the launch of S3 on Pi Day 2006 to today's AI revolution, we explore AWS's incredible journey from a single storage service to a global cloud platform serving 500 trillion objects and 200 million requests per second.

We dive deep into the evolution of the AWS Partner Network, which has grown from 50 partners in 2012 to nearly 150,000 partners globally, generating significant service revenue multipliers for every unit of AWS technology sold. We share inspiring customer stories from Formula One's fan base growth to Pinterest's AI-powered discovery engine serving 600 million users, and highlight breakthrough innovations like in silico medicine's accelerated drug discovery process.

Looking ahead, we discuss AWS's massive AI investments, including Project Rainier's Trainium2 chips, Amazon Bedrock's multi-model approach, and the enormous AI opportunity by 2030. We emphasize that partners who embrace AI now will define the next chapter of cloud computing, echoing Dr. Werner Vogels' Renaissance analogy from his final re:Invent keynote.

This episode captures both the remarkable achievements of the past two decades and the ambitious vision for the future, making it clear that the next 20 years will make the first 20 look like just a warm-up.