‘We have this opportunity now to really unlock that ROI that’s been preventing organizations from making that cloud investment,’ says ClearScale CEO Jimmy Chui regarding the company’s new AWS collaboration.
Amazon Web Services is incentivizing partners to drive SMB customer cloud adoption with its new Small Business Acceleration Initiative program, which ClearScale CEO Jimmy Chui is bullish about.
AWS Premier Tier Services Partner ClearScale signed a strategic collaboration agreement (SCA) today with the $115 billion cloud giant to help give SMBs access to all the tools, new technologies and AI guidance to take their cloud transformation to the next level.
“There’s still a lot of small businesses that have not taken to cloud yet,” said Chui, CEO of San Francisco-based cloud consulting specialist ClearScale. “AWS is funding some of the tooling we typically use to accelerate migrations, so it lightens the load on our customers. … We have this opportunity now to really unlock that ROI that’s been preventing organizations from making that cloud investment.”
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AWS Small Business Acceleration Initiative (SBAI) program was launched in 2025 with AWS’ partner territory managers providing support to partners serving SMB customers while also passing leads to partners who have achieved AWS’ SMB Competency.
“AWS also identifies the need for additional support once workloads are migrated, because if we’re doing either modernization or like a VMware exit initiative, there’s going to be a skills gap,” Chui said. “So they’re also investing for us in post-go live additional funding so that we can provide MSP services to help manage that environment for customers for the year following their migration. That’s pretty powerful.”
Not Just For SMBs, But Also Enterprises With Slow Adoption
Andi Rose, vice president of alliances for ClearScale, said AWS’ SCA doesn’t just help her company with small businesses, but also some larger customers who are slow in cloud adoption.
“The classification of SMB from an AWS perspective, it isn’t necessarily small businesses—it’s clients who are either very early in their journey to cloud or haven’t really started their journey to cloud,” Rose said. “So AWS thinks about the market as customers who are cloud potential. They have business profiles that are a good fit for cloud, but they just haven’t started the journey yet or very early in the journey.”
For example, if an enterprise customer is spending less than $100,000 annually on AWS, they fall within the SBAI program, ClearScale said.
“AWS sees, ‘OK, you have either slow adoption or something blocking that adoption and preventing you from getting to the holy grail of consumption-based cost on infrastructure.’ So that’s what’s pushes [enterprises] in there,” said Chui. “That’s great for us.”
The AWS Small Business Acceleration Initiative is a partner-led channel sales motion aimed at growing or building a partners’ SMB practice via incentives and co-sales. ClearScale’s goal with its AWS SCA is to help customers move away from licensed software toward consumption-based pricing.
“That’s really where the ROI is for customers. Our target is how do we move you from CapEx to a consumption-based cost model?” said Chui.
AWS SCA Will ‘Fuel ClearScale’s Superpower’
AWS has also created a Small Business Acceleration Package for partners to have a one-stop shop for all SMB go-to-market materials including marketing campaigns, sales plays and packaged solutions.
The new funding and resources provided by AWS is helping to “fuel ClearScale’s superpower” of enabling customers to see positive ROI when they migrate to AWS by modernizing their entire technology stack.
“Our superpower as a partner is working with AWS to help us rapidly assess for a customer, ‘What is the environment today? What are the blockers? And how can we help them accelerate?’” Rose said. “We help them get to the platform, many times, at a lower cost so that they can start benefiting from the pay-as-you-go model compared to them been locked-in to traditional hardware or data center models that are very Capex heavy.”
ClearScale has more than 400 successful migration and moderation engagements with expertise in workload migrations, cloud-native systems integration, strategic consulting, application development, data and AI.
