Amazon Web Services Partners launching this week in the AWS Summit Online Americas were greeted by a new face: Rachel Mushahwar, who is now responsible for Partner Sales for the Americas for the cloud provider’s commercial sales team. .

The Intel veteran took on the new role – unofficially known as the Americas Channel and the lead partner role spanning the United States, Canada and Latin America – in February.

Mushahwar replaced Darci Kleindl, who took on another channel position at AWS, according to a person familiar with the staff changes. Mushahwar and Kleindl both report to Greg Pearson, Vice President of Global Commercial Sales at AWS.

An AWS spokesperson confirmed Mushahwar’s hiring and title, but declined further comment.

Mushahwar previously worked for Intel Corp. for more than six years, most recently as vice president and general manager of the US sales company, government and cloud providers Next Wave, according to her LinkedIn page. She held this role for just over two years, with responsibility for vision, people, strategy, sales, marketing, revenue growth and operations for the sales and marketing group of the industry of the Americas.

Global AWS Channel Leader Doug Yeum introduced Mushahwar at the partner portion of the AWS Summit, his first major AWS event.

“Our theme this year is ‘Together We Transform’, and what a really relevant and important theme it is,” said Mushahwar, who hosted partners practically from her home in Arizona. “The past year for me – like many of you – has been fraught with pitfalls, uncertainty and a lot of change. But a remarkable thing also happened in 2020: connectivity has grown; our appreciation for our friends, our family, our communities has grown; our appetite for learning has increased; and our goal to help our clients turn their businesses into a new, accelerated normal. “

Mushahwar shared four AWS priorities: acquiring the customers of tomorrow, accelerating migrations, capturing new workloads and inclusion, diversity and fairness.

“Acquiring the customers of tomorrow is important to all of us,” she said. “And as our customers begin their journey to the cloud, AWS wants and should be their platform of choice. As our customers adopt more cloud services, we must develop customer adaptation with the migration of strategic workloads like those of SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and many others. “

Capturing new workloads and modernizing the application layer will be paramount to client success, according to Mushahwar, who started his career as a civil engineer / software engineer for Analysts International Corp., according to his LinkedIn page.

“They need to modernize their application layers with things like serverless, like machine learning, like containers,” she said. “These will drive the transformation our customers are looking for, and that’s where innovation happens.”

Inclusion, diversity and equity, meanwhile, must be at the forefront of every conversation and part of every decision, Mushahwar said, saying companies that embrace and consider them will attract top talent.

“They will be able to retain that talent and allow employees to innovate and create something amazing,” she said. “At AWS, we’ve made progress, but it’s not enough and it’s not fast enough. And although I believe that everyone has a responsibility to change the outcome, it is a subject that fascinates me personally. We need to increase our ally, we need to increase our mentorship, and we need to tackle the underrepresented. We all need to find our voice and step in and say, “It’s not fair,” when there are inherent biases that impact our business results. This is a topic that I will be telling you more about in the coming months. “

Mushahwar called his new role as AWS an “opportunity of a lifetime”.

“I am delighted to meet all of you and help transform your businesses and deliver results,” she said. “The Americas Channel and Partnerships team is here to help you succeed and make it big.”