AWS is retiring the standalone AWS Partner Network portal and moving Partner Central into the AWS Management Console. Sign-in moves to IAM credentials, Partner Central and the AWS Marketplace Management Portal converge into one console experience, and the old interface goes away.
If this is still on your list for later in the year, two things are worth knowing before you schedule it: parts of it cannot be reversed, and finishing the migration is not the end of the work.
What actually changes
- Authentication. The old APN portal credentials are replaced by IAM users or roles in a linked AWS account. Access becomes something your cloud team administers rather than a separate set of logins held by the alliances team.
- Surface. Partner Central lives in the console alongside everything else. Opportunity management, co-sell engagements, reseller authorizations and solution metadata all move with it.
- APIs. The migration comes with a shift to new APIs, which matters if you have CRM integration wired to the old interfaces.
AWS documents the mechanics on its migration page. The cutover itself is quick: typically two to six hours depending on how much data transfers. Alliance leads get an email when it completes, and users then sign in with their new IAM credentials.
The two irreversible decisions
Read this part before you start, because neither is recoverable.
The migration cannot be rolled back. Once begun, there is no path back to the old experience.
The linked AWS account becomes permanent. Before migrating, you can unlink and relink a different AWS account. After migrating, you cannot change it.
The second one causes lasting regret, and it is easy to get wrong for a boring reason: the obvious candidate is whichever AWS account your first marketplace listing was created in, which is often an account someone set up quickly years ago. Choose the account that should represent your company’s global business long-term. You are choosing once.
The dependency on the far side
This is the part most migration checklists omit, and it is why the migration is more urgent than it looks.
AWS launched Partner Revenue Measurement in January. It credits partners for the AWS consumption their solutions drive, and it feeds co-sell visibility and funding eligibility. For most product types it works by tagging AWS resources.
Before that tagging works, AWS asks you to designate an AWS account representing your global business and connect your individual AWS Marketplace accounts to it using Subsidiary Account Connections. Those connections are only accessible after you have migrated to the new Partner Central experience.
So the order is fixed, and it is serial rather than parallel:
- Migrate to Partner Central in the AWS Console
- Link and connect your accounts via Subsidiary Account Connections
- Deploy tagging
- Verify coverage
Any plan that schedules attribution work alongside the migration will stall at step 2. And note that the account you choose in the migration becomes the foundation for attribution afterwards — another reason not to pick it casually.
What breaks if you leave it too late
AWS’s documentation covers how to migrate but does not publish a cutoff date. The date circulating among partner tooling vendors is June 30, 2026, including from WorkSpan, which describes itself as an official launch partner for the migration. Treat it as well-sourced but not an AWS publication.
The reported consequences for partners who have not migrated are specific, and they are all the things a partnership is made of:
- You cannot submit opportunities
- You cannot accept co-sell engagements
- You cannot approve reseller relationships
- You cannot reach your solution metadata
Taken together that is not degraded service, it is a partnership that has stopped functioning. An opportunity you cannot submit earns no AWS account-team involvement. No involvement means no quota credit for the AWS seller on your deal, and quota credit is the entire reason cloud field teams engage on marketplace transactions. The mechanism that makes co-sell worth doing is the thing that switches off.
How to plan it
The cutover is hours. The preparation is the real work:
- Decide the linked account deliberately. It is permanent, and it is also the basis for revenue attribution later. Involve whoever owns your AWS account structure, not only the alliances team.
- Inventory who needs access, and map it to IAM. The people who used portal logins need IAM users or roles with sensible permissions. This is usually the step that needs your security team, so start it early.
- Check your CRM integration. If you sync opportunities, find out whether your connector targets the old or new APIs before you cut over. Useful exception: upgrading from the S3-based integration to the API-based one does not require migrating first, so you can de-risk that track independently and in parallel.
- Schedule it outside business hours. It is a short window, but it is a window, and it cannot be aborted midway.
- Book the account-connection work for immediately afterwards. Migration is step one of a chain, and the chain is what actually gets you attribution.
There are also delivery options in AWS Marketplace itself if you would rather not run it in-house — several partners offer the migration as a packaged service with defined delivery windows.
After you migrate
Finishing the migration is not finishing the job, and because nothing errors afterwards it is easy to assume otherwise. Verify:
- IAM access works for everyone who needs it, including people who only log in at quarter end
- Opportunity submission and co-sell acceptance work end to end, with a real record
- Your CRM sync is still writing and reading what you think it is
- Subsidiary Account Connections are configured, not merely available
- Tagging is deployed and reporting coverage per account
That last pair is where the unfinished work usually sits.
Where CloudX fits
Our advisory service covers sequencing this across your account estate, and PRM tagging handles the attribution layer once your accounts are connected — one CloudFormation stack per target account, with coverage reporting so the number is visible rather than assumed. If co-sell is the reason you care about any of this, that page describes running it as one motion instead of three portals.
The short version
The cutover is quick but irreversible, and the AWS account you link is a one-time decision that reaches into revenue attribution months later. Do not treat this as an IT chore to be squeezed in before a deadline. Decide the account properly, then plan the account-connection and tagging work that has to follow it.