Alliances and partnerships
How ecosystem orchestration will lead the next era of IT services growth
Article
Feb 16, 2026
By Pankaj Kumar, Vice President, AWS Alliance at Kyndryl
Kyndryl has entered 2026 with new AWS capabilities and accelerated alliance momentum to address our enterprise customers’ needs. Customers are focused on building resilient and secure systems, advancing digital trust, and adopting AI at scale. Our deepening collaboration with AWS reflects these priorities — combining Kyndryl’s mission‑critical technology services expertise with AWS’s leading cloud and AI capabilities to help enterprises modernize with confidence and speed.
Across a three-week period in December and January, Kyndryl achieved three AWS Competencies, in Mainframe Modernization, AI and Digital Sovereignty. These competencies each validate specialized expertise in areas critical to customer transformation this year. Together, they reinforce our consult-led alliance approach and our commitment to delivering secure, scalable and innovation-ready IT environments for global organizations.
Advancing trust and transparency through sovereignty expertise
Against the backdrop of heightened geopolitical pressures, organizations are increasingly focused on choice and control with respect to their data governance and business continuity. Kyndryl’s achievement of the AWS Digital Sovereignty Competency affirms our leadership in helping these organizations assess their IT estate to meet those objectives.
As the pace of AI and cloud innovation grows, so does the need for customers to have control over how they secure and manage their data. Customers across the public sector, financial services, healthcare and telecommunications rely on us to support the controls, transparency and operational discipline required for sovereign architectures.
AWS recently launched the AWS European Sovereign Cloud to give customers additional choice when considering digital sovereignty goals while enabling continued innovation. Kyndryl is one of the first launch partners for this European Sovereign Cloud, collaborating with AWS to help customers meet their expectations, support data residency and protection, and achieve their digital transformation objectives.
The evolution of the Kyndryl and AWS alliance into a transformation‑first partnership capable of guiding customers through their most critical modernization challenges.
Unlocking core business process innovation through mainframe modernization
Kyndryl also earned the AWS Mainframe Modernization Competency, recognizing our ability to help customers transform the mission-critical systems that matter most — their core platforms.
With rising cost pressures, talent challenges, and cloud‑first mandates reshaping modernization priorities, enterprises are seeking partners with proven capabilities for modernizing, integrating and migrating legacy workloads to the cloud. Kyndryl’s attainment of the AWS Mainframe Modernization competency demonstrates our ability to fully support customers in transforming their complex IT environments. Kyndryl has deep expertise and decades of mainframe experience and is partnering with AWS to introduce new mainframe modernization services by tapping into the agentic AI capabilities of AWS Transform. The new competency demonstrates that we can help customers on their multi-year transformation journeys, from migrating and optimizing mission‑critical workloads to preparing their environments for AI and automation.
Accelerating AI at scale with the AWS AI Competency
The achievement of the AWS AI Competency highlights Kyndryl’s ability to design, deploy and operationalize AI, generative and agentic AI solutions that drive measurable outcomes. Our work spans MLOps, responsible AI frameworks, GenAI use case delivery, and enterprise‑grade model deployment, helping customers turn AI ambition into adoption.
Backed by real-world deployments across industries, this recognition enables joint conversations with business and technology leaders who are advancing AI‑powered productivity, customer experience, and operational excellence. It also strengthens the alignment between AI and modernization initiatives — helping to ensure AI becomes a natural extension of a modern technology estate.
The attainment of these three AWS Competencies in such quick succession reflects the evolution of the Kyndryl and AWS collaboration into a transformation‑first partnership capable of guiding customers through their most critical modernization challenges. As organizations prioritize sovereignty, core IT modernization and pragmatic AI adoption, our combined strengths and partnership progression position us to help customers modernize securely, operate efficiently, and innovate confidently.
