Joe Carroll

Joe Carroll leads the partner business of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the UK and Ireland as its director for partners. In June 2026 he set out his approach to the UK channel in an interview with MicroScope.

Distribution as the route to scale

Carroll has put distributors at the center of AWS’s UK channel. “Because we have thousands and thousands of partners in the UK alone, and each plays a slightly different role, the distributors help the many thousands to get onboarded,” he told MicroScope in June 2026. Distributors, he said, help small and mid-size partners with skills, financial management and access to AWS services. He pointed to the range of partners at AWS Summit London in April as a sign that “that market opportunity is significant”.

He also described his job as orchestration. Large enterprises use several partners for different roles, from data platforms to the value case put to the chief financial officer. “Orchestration is a top priority to make sure we bring the right kind of choice and the right partner for the conversation or workflow discussion,” he said.

The size of the machine

AWS sales rose 37% to $42.2bn (£31.5bn) in the second quarter of 2026, Amazon reported, and the segment made an operating income of $16.6bn. In the UK, AWS is investing £8bn in data centers between 2024 and 2028, part of a wider £40bn Amazon investment in the country. That capacity is what Carroll’s partners sell, migrate customers onto and manage.

Why it matters to the channel

By Carroll’s account, more of AWS’s UK growth is running through distributors and MSPs. For smaller partners, distribution offers a route to AWS skills, financing and services that would be hard to reach on their own. For larger ones, orchestration means working alongside other partners on the same enterprise account.

Carroll has built AWS’s UK channel around distribution for the many and orchestration for the largest accounts, with a larger machine behind him than almost any channel chief in the UK.