Kyndryl, AWS Sign Deal With Aim To Train 10,000 Workers By Year’s End

‘Together, we are committed to educating, empowering, and enabling thousands of AWS certified practitioners and developing joint solutions that will accelerate customers’ journeys and help them innovate on the world’s leading cloud,’ AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said in a statement.

Kyndryl, the IBM managed services business spin-off, has inked a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services. With previous partnerships inked with Microsoft and Google Cloud, Kyndryl now has agreements with the top three cloud vendors.

The partnership will bring industry-focused cloud services to customers, and Kyndryl plans to use Seattle-based AWS as a preferred cloud provider for its internal infrastructure in the cloud, according to a press release Thursday. Kyndryl projects that more than 10,000 of its employees will gain more AWS skills by the end of the year.

New York-based Kyndryl will establish a global cloud center of excellence for joint services around mission-critical infrastructure, application modernization, mainframe, enterprise resource planning and network and edge computing, according to the release.

[RELATED: Kyndryl, Google Cloud Ink New Partnership]

CRN has reached out to both Kyndryl and AWS for comment.

As part of the partnership, Kyndryl and AWS will develop an accelerator for VMware Cloud on AWS, combining capabilities from both vendors. Kyndryl has a “high concentration of customers running VMware on premises.” according to the release. This accelerator should help more organizations bring workloads to the cloud.

Kyndryl announced an expanded partnership with VMware in November.

In the press release, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said the new Kyndryl partnership will result in “helping customers of all sizes to modernize faster than ever before, grow their businesses, and transform what’s possible.”

“Together, we are committed to educating, empowering, and enabling thousands of AWS certified practitioners and developing joint solutions that will accelerate customers’ journeys and help them innovate on the world’s leading cloud,” Selipsky continued.

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram, also quoted in the release, said the three companies “bring together a unique combination of customer focus, technology innovation, and industry leadership that, together, will accelerate customers’ application modernization and cloud initiatives.”

“AWS is VMware’s preferred public cloud partner for vSphere workloads, and Kyndryl and VMware have a partnership built on more than two decades of collaboration,” Raghuram said. “Together, our companies will help customers successfully navigate complex cloud journeys that lead to greater digital innovation while retaining enterprise control.”

Kyndryl has dubbed AWS a “premier global alliance partner,” the same designation given to Microsoft.

Kyndryl is an AWS premier global alliance partner and managed services provider (MSP)-certified member of the AWS Partner Network, according to the release.

The AWS news comes on the heels of a new partnership between Kyndryl and Nokia to boost edge and 5G offerings.

The flurry of partnerships reflect Kyndryl leadership’s message that independence from IBM means Kyndryl can work with IBM’s competitors in cloud infrastructure to offer customers more technical expertise. Kyndryl executives hope that wider offerings married with an intellectual property portfolio inherited from IBM and a large employee base of 80,000-plus technical workers worldwide give Kyndryl heat against competitors such as DXC Technology.