When Kamal Lamba from Palo Alto Networks accepted his award at WorkSpan's Sales Partnership Summit, he described what great partnerships look like: 

"It's all about taking two organizations and having a team where you cannot identify who's part of which team."

-Kamal Lamba, Director, Cloud Engagement, Google Cloud at Palo Alto Networks

That seamless integration, where partner teams operate as one unified force, defined this year's award winners. The Co-Stars of Co-Sell is WorkSpan's annual recognition of customers demonstrating exemplary achievements in partnership operations: innovation in co-sell processes, measurable business impact, successful automation adoption, effective cross-company collaboration, and leadership that advances the entire partnerships community.

This year's honorees span three categories: 

• Partnering Pioneer (design partners shaping the future of partnership technology)
• Accelerator (teams that rapidly scaled proven playbooks)
• Architect (groundbreaking builders designing net-new partnership motions).

Partnering Pioneer Award: Boomi

Joe Estes, Global Alliance Director for AWS, accepted the Pioneer Award for Boomi's bold investment in AI-native partnerships and pioneering work pushing the boundaries of partnership automation. Joe explained what makes their lean team effective: 

"There is simply no other way we could have achieved this type of growth trajectory on our own in a manual workflow environment. We have a very small team that operates highly efficiently, achieving scale much above our weight class."

- Joe Estes, Global Alliance Director, AWS at Boomi

Boomi deployed WorkSpan's Sales Partnering AI Assistant directly inside Salesforce to engage their global AWS sales teams and achieved 100% routing of AWS referrals through a single automated system. The transformation replaced manual email and spreadsheet processes with end-to-end automated workflows for private offer creation, tracking, and approvals. As a WorkSpan design partner, Boomi exemplifies the pioneer spirit: embracing innovation, taking calculated risks, and proving what becomes possible when technology and partnership strategy converge.

Accelerator Award: Hyland

Matt Beyer, Global Alliance Lead for AWS, won the Accelerator Award for Hyland's exceptional commitment to building a strategic, AI-powered partnership ecosystem through significant expansion with WorkSpan in 2025. Matt emphasized the strategic value: 

"As our relationship with AWS has continued to expand, WorkSpan has been pivotal in enabling us to achieve that success. The reactions have been very positive for us internally, which shows well to our leadership team."

-Matt Beyer, Global Alliance Lead, AWS at Hyland

Hyland invested in training a Sales Partnering AI Agent and deployed comprehensive automation across AWS co-sell and MongoDB partnerships. Their team synchronized systems, automated marketplace workflows, and empowered sellers to create a foundation for scalable, AI-guided partnerships. Beyond adopting the technology, Hyland became vocal advocates driving innovation in how partnerships create mutual value.

Architect Award - Tech Partnership: NVIDIA

Karen Rai and the NVIDIA team earned the Tech Partnership Architect Award for their strategic vision in architecting a comprehensive multi-cloud partnership operations platform that grew impressively in investment as they scaled its impact across their ecosystem.

NVIDIA's progression from basic co-sell automation to a unified Lead Exchange and AI Teammates stack spanning AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and Oracle demonstrates sophisticated program design addressing the full partnership lifecycle. They standardized processes like Amazon's incoming referral workflow and co-designed the Run:AI marketplace integration to consolidate Contact Seller, Request Demo, trial, and campaign leads from four cloud providers into their marketing and sales systems. This operational backbone for partnership-led growth sets a new standard for what becomes possible when organizations architect with intention and excellence.

Architect Award - ISV Partnership: Palo Alto Networks

Kamal Lamba, Director of Cloud Engagement for Google Cloud, won the ISV Partnership Architect Award for groundbreaking work designing an operational framework that transformed how alliance pipeline is managed, shared, and executed with Google Cloud.

"We have scaled this to almost a billion dollars between the two companies' partnership. We're not only growing in the region, but taking WorkSpan and scaling this across the globe so other theaters can see the power of bringing two organizations together in a very structured manner."

-Kamal Lamba, Director, Cloud Engagement, Google Cloud at Palo Alto Networks

Palo Alto Networks made WorkSpan the system of record for joint pipeline reviews and embedded real-time dashboards directly into Salesforce for leadership visibility. Their partner operations team improved data quality by updating hundreds of records and removing noise from shared pipeline, demonstrating the discipline required to build trust and drive reliable joint outcomes. Their expansion to AWS co-sell with detailed governance, training, and repeatable processes positions them as a true architect of partnership-led go-to-market innovation.

Architect Award - Services Partnership: Deloitte 

Brad Mitchell (VP of Ecosystems & Alliances) and Matt Garland (Co-Ventures and Technology) accepted WorkSpan's first-ever Services Partnership Architect Award for extraordinary achievement in architecting and scaling a digitized co-sell engine.

"I want to thank the WorkSpan team for all of their extensive work over three months to define personas and roles, criteria to select our CRM entries that fit certain profiles, like Gen AI technologies or marketing campaign codes, and then finally building out custom workflows."

-Brad Mitchell, VP Ecosystems & Alliances, AWS Global Operations Lead at Deloitte

Deloitte's rigorous approach to building a repeatable "unit model" inside Jupiter CRM processed an impressive number of AWS referrals and delivered approximately 1,000 hours of productivity savings. Beyond the results, their commitment to data health, legacy record remediation, and systematic expansion from AWS to Google Cloud and other alliances demonstrates the architectural thinking required to build sustainable, scalable partnership programs. 

Matt explained what happened after proving the model: "It really helped give us the confidence to go all in." Deloitte is now positioning WorkSpan as their co-sell platform of choice across their entire alliance portfolio.

What These Programs Share

Five different partnership models reveal a common approach: the most successful teams architect their way to scale rather than work their way there.

"I'm always humbled and reminded that software is the tiniest part of this battle," said Sam Gong, SVP of Marketing at WorkSpan. In partnerships, you need leadership, you need vision, and you need to herd cats across two companies."

These 2026 Co-Stars demonstrate what becomes possible when that leadership and vision meets the right architecture. From AI-powered seller assistance to multi-cloud frameworks to unit model replication, these teams are building competitive moats instead of just managing relationships.

Congratulations to all our winners. Your innovation, collaboration, and customer advocacy continue to raise the bar for the entire partnerships community.

Watch the full Sales Partnership Summit recording to hear from award winners and featured speakers from AWS, Deloitte, and Cisco on building billion-dollar partnership strategies.

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