Intel Vet Rachel Mushahwar Named AWS Americas Channel Chief

‘I am so excited to meet all of you and to help transform your businesses and deliver results,’ Mushahwar said during an AWS Summit Online Americas event for partners. ‘The Americas channel and partnership team is here to help you succeed and accelerate to amazing.’

Amazon Web Services partners tuning into the AWS Summit Online Americas this week were greeted by a new face: Rachel Mushahwar, who’s now serving as the Americas partner sales leader for the cloud provider’s commercial sales team.

The Intel veteran took the new role – known informally as the Americas channel and partner chief role covering the United States, Canada and Latin America – in February.

Mushahwar replaced Darci Kleindl, who has taken another channel position at AWS, according to a person familiar with the personnel changes. Both Mushahwar and Kleindl report to Greg Pearson, vice president of worldwide commercial sales at AWS.

A spokesperson for AWS 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 U.S. sales enterprise, government and next-wave cloud providers, according to her LinkedIn page. She held the role for just more than two years, with accountability for the vision, people, strategy, sales, marketing, revenue growth and operations for the Americas industry sales and marketing group.

AWS global channel chief Doug Yeum introduced Mushahwar during the partner portion of the AWS Summit, her first major AWS event.

“Our theme this year is ‘together, we transform,’ and what a truly relevant and important theme this is,” said Mushahwar, who welcomed partners virtually from her home in Arizona. “Last year, for me — like many of you — was fraught with challenges, with uncertainty and a lot of change. But a remarkable thing also happened in 2020: Connectivity grew; our appreciation for our friends, our family, our communities grew; our appetite for learning increased; and our focus on helping our customers transform their businesses into the new normal accelerated.”

Mushahwar shared four AWS priorities: acquiring tomorrow’s customers, accelerating migrations, capturing new workloads and inclusion, diversity and equity.

“Acquiring tomorrow’s customers is important for all of us,” she said. “And as our customers begin their journey to the cloud, AWS wants to and needs to be their platform of choice. As our customers increase their adoption of cloud services, we need to grow 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 for customers’ success, according to Mushahwar, who started her career as a civil engineer/software engineer for Analysts International Corp., according to her 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 that our customers are looking for, and that’s where the innovation is happening.”

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

“They’ll be able to retain that talent and enable employees to innovate and create something incredible,” she said. “At AWS, we’ve made progress, but it isn’t enough, and it isn’t fast enough. And while I believe that everybody has responsibility to change the outcome, this is one topic that I am personally passionate about. We have to increase our allyship, we have to increase our mentorship, and we have to address the underrepresented. We all have to find our voice and step up and say, ’That’s not right,’ when there’s inherent bias that is impacting our business outcomes. This is a topic that you’ll hear more about from me in upcoming months.”

Mushahwar referred to her new AWS role as an “opportunity of a lifetime.”

“I am so excited to meet all of you and to help transform your businesses and deliver results,” she said. “The Americas channel and partnership team is here to help you succeed and accelerate to amazing.”