‘Traditionally, services businesses scaled head count with revenue. In this new model that is more outcome-value-based, that doesn’t have to be the case,” says Caylent CEO Valerie Henderson.
Caylent’s new CEO, Valerie Henderson, is betting big on AWS’ AI strategy and its own agentic AI innovation as the all-star AWS partner says sales and head count growth are no longer tied together.
The Irvine Calif.-based AWS Premier Partner has around 950 employees globally and is innovating with AI both internally and for its growing customer base.
In an interview with CRN, the Caylent CEO explains how businesses can scale revenue without needing to grow head count, if AWS is a partner-friendly company in 2026, and how Caylent is always looking at M&A targets to fill in gaps.
[Related: 5 Huge AWS Departures And Hires Of 2026]
What does Caylent look like right now, and how are you growing?
Traditionally, services businesses scaled head count with revenue. In this new model that is more outcome-value-based, that doesn’t have to be the case.
So for us, it’s ‘How are we training and enabling our teams to be able to do more?’ And when you’re helping package and price outcome-based work and value-based work, you don’t have to just attach time and materials and head count.
So you should be tracking things like revenue per head count and what that looks like over time.
The way we think about AI is not as something separate—where there’s an AI team or you’re an AI engineer—the entire Caylent business needs to be fueled by our AI platform.
We have our own knowledge base and innovation called Evo. We leverage Claude Enterprise.
Every single person within Caylent should be using it to power and automate where they can because that’s the beauty of AI—the compounding effect of having more time to create and to innovate as you’re automating some of those repetitive pieces of work in foundational parts of the business.
From a growth trajectory, we always expect ourselves to be growing at the same pace, if not higher, than AWS.
We always have lofty goals, but it doesn’t necessarily tie to head count in the same way it has historically, which is great.
Talk about how customers can now scale revenue but not need to increase head count.
We acquired Trek10 [last year]. They spent a ton of time and effort building a true agentic MSP offering and how that offering can be truly on all the time and be proactive for customers and not necessarily tied to head count.
Humans don’t have to be doing some of this work because it’s automated. So really they can function on the most critical pieces of the infrastructure layer of the AI operations and provide the best customer experience. I feel like the bar for the customer experience has to continue to be raised.
AI has really equalized a lot of things in this industry.
I think experience and depth of pattern recognition and understanding of the AWS platform at the level that we have is the differentiator. Because using that and how we automate on top of it should be what really helps customers get to the next level.
Talk about Caylent’s AWS partnership. Are you still all in with AWS?
We’ve always had an opinion about building on AWS is the way to go.
There were times where people questioned what that strategy was, but from my perspective, they have done what they always do in really being obsessed with the customer. And trying to give the customer the optionality, but also the core foundation to scale this.
What they’ve done with Amazon Q and Agentcore is incredible. And our job is to operationalize those capabilities for customers.
We’ve always believed we take what AWS builds and turn it into outcomes, and that is what defines us.
And now, we should be able to turn those into predictable outcomes faster and cheaper.
There was a period that you always felt like you had to pick [one]: Is it faster? Is it cheaper? Is it better? And that’s not the case anymore. You can have all three.
It’s just beyond impressive to me how AWS grows—hundreds of billions of dollars continue to compound on itself.
Is AWS a channel-friendly vendor and a good partner?
I have worked with every cloud partner in my career, and AWS is unique in their not only customer obsession, but their partner obsession.
The way that they ask for feedback and then implement that feedback, and the speed at which they implement the feedback, is best in class.
It’s a two-way relationship, We’re always bringing customer signals back to AWS, and they continue to innovate on services, the infrastructure that customers depend on. But they’re never satisfied.
And it’s that ‘day one’ mentality, and they’re always trying to figure out how they can be doing better on both sides: customer and partner. That’s unique.
A lot of partners build these programs and then they just kind of let them run. They may make a tweak here and there, but the changes that AWS has continued to make are special.
It’s why we believe that AWS is the best foundation platform to build on. Because it benefits not only the customer, but the partner ecosystem.
What Ruba [Borno, AWS’ vice president, global specialists, partners] has done and what her team has done over just the past few years is remarkable. They’ve made some big changes that are rewarding partners for having an opinion and driving innovation on AWS and moving fast, having a bias for action as well, which I think is special.
What’s another AWS market differentiator in the AI space?
Security and the guardrails around AI.
People used to talk all the time about shadow IT, which was really just people within the business that were using different technology platforms.
How people are leveraging AI and the different LLMs and what data they are getting— there’s real concern there for customers.
And that is the beauty of Amazon Bedrock and of how they built Bedrock. How AWS has built AgentCore with the guardrails in mind because that is going to differentiate the companies that can scale this and scale it safely.
It’s a very real fear for clients, and we feel a great responsibility to help them architect—from the infrastructure, the data through the application layer—with the appropriate security harness for this work.
Is Caylent looking to do more M&A?
Yes, we’re always looking at the market. There’s so much opportunity right now.
We want to create a very solid platform, so if M&A happens in the future, those companies can come in and move fast and just be immediately integrated into Caylent, helping our active customers do more and exciting work.
The Trek10 acquisition was specifically unique because it was a capability that we did not have.
I think that that’s one area that we continue to look at: Where are their capabilities? Where are these trends that we don’t have today that can make sense to add in an inorganic fashion?
So we’ve got an incredible team that is always just asking customers, ‘Who’s doing great work in this ecosystem and why?’ We’re always trying to act with curiosity.
How has the Trek10 integration been?
Trek10 is amazing. I really feel like that team and that leadership team has been so fantastic and has come in to work with Caylent customers about how they can continue to innovate.
Their team has said, ‘Listen, we can be agentic first. We can help be the MSP for AI operations because that’s going to be a need as people are standing up these agentic platforms. And how do they actually build and run and manage those over time?’
MSPs seemed to be a platform that people just thought of in a very specific way, and that is changing.
We’re always looking at potential M&A, and we’ll continue to do that.
