Dan White, the Head of AWS Enterprise Practice at Devoteam, talks about his 25 years in the IT industry, which included a seven-year tenure as an EMEA leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Notably, Dan’s career has spanned various technical roles, consulting, and leadership positions in cloud, data, and AI solutions.
However, it was his appointment in November 2024 that signaled his commitment to driving enterprise sales for Devoteam UK, which had recently been rebranded from Ubertas Consulting. Before Devoteam, Dan led a team that achieved remarkable results, expanding its customer base and establishing the company as a leading partner in the UK and Ireland for Amazon Bedrock revenue on AWS.
Dan spent more than seven years at AWS, a period he describes as dynamic and constantly evolving. The rate at which new services were launched, along with the culture of continuous improvement, was phenomenal. The biggest change for Dan was the role that partners played for AWS. In 2016, he was one of only seven partner roles in the UK & Ireland as a Partner Solution Architect, with just 20 people across EMEA, and AWS was still in its infancy in understanding the value that Partners could play for their customers. By the time Dan left in 2023, the UK&I partner organization had grown to hundreds, supporting around 30,000 partners who had become one of the key drivers of AWS growth.
In the early days, conversations around AI and machine learning were prominent. In terms of AWS offerings, these conversations began early in 2017, when Deloitte collaborated with the Amazon Lex Product team to develop an AI chatbot for banking customers. In November 2017, the release of Amazon SageMaker (a fully managed service for ML Models) was a pivotal moment for AWS partners. They ran the first EMEA enablement event for partners in January 2018, and this was the point at which they saw a rapid increase in AI Adoption with partners like Peak and Inawisdom becoming the first AWS ML Competency partners in EMEA, enabling them to grow their business in the UK.
The next significant change occurred when AWS accelerated its focus on generative AI. For the first time, it felt like AWS was behind, but they quickly made up for lost time with the launch of Amazon Bedrock in June 2023 and a huge investment in supporting Proof of Concepts for AWS partners. 2023 and the first half of 2024 were focused on experimentation, which then transitioned to valid production use cases as the quality of the LLMs improved. In October 2024, Dan joined Devoteam, one of the few companies with a generative AI competency partner designation. Many of their projects are now generative AI-led, and the ADAPT program has helped them overcome blockers by utilizing prebuilt assets to move faster and a methodology that helps ensure the chosen cases have the highest ROI for their customers.
Having transitioned from a technology role to a sales leadership role, Dan brings a unique perspective that combines technical depth with commercial strategy. This blend has given him advantages at a macro level, particularly in how he approaches customers and partners. He believes that although sales is business-outcome focused, and that’s seen more than ever in generative AI, it really earns trust with the customer in having that foundational technical understanding. The sales team is expected to maintain at least an AWS Cloud Practitioner level of technical knowledge, with a stretch goal of reaching the SA Associate certification. He thinks that sales has also evolved a lot over the past couple of years, now centered on building relationships with the customer on a shared journey to joint success.
When considering his next move, Dan was drawn to Devoteam through conversations with Steve and John, the founders of Ubertas Consulting, which had already established a strong reputation as a leading AWS SMB partner in the UK and Ireland. Their vision of extending that success into the enterprise sector resonated with him, particularly given his experience managing a similar transition in his previous role.
Midway through the interview process, he learned that Devoteam acquired Ubertas, a specialist UK&I AWS partner, in July 2024, to develop its UK&I business on AWS, which was particularly exciting, as it combined the agility of a UK scale-up with the backing of a Premier Tier system integrator, which helped alleviate the risk of scaling quickly enough in delivery to match sales growth.
In addition, Devoteam’s status as one of the selected AWS generative AI Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) partners was a crucial factor in Dan’s decision. This partnership helped ensure additional support and investment from AWS, effectively positioning them as a key player in accelerating Data and AI adoption among their customers. Despite Devoteam’s significant success in Europe, its AWS business in the UK, the second-largest market for AWS in the EMEA region, was still in development. This presented an immense opportunity for growth, which Dan found particularly compelling.
Finally, Devoteam’s cultural values strongly aligned with Dan’s, rekindling the cultural fit he had enjoyed at AWS. The prospect of returning to an environment that mirrored AWS’s vibrant culture was particularly exciting, as it was an aspect he had deeply missed since leaving his previous role.
In terms of key growth priorities, “Think Big” was one of Dan’s favorite AWS leadership principles, and their 12- to 24-month growth targets reflect this goal, with a plan to effectively double their revenue year over year. They have earned the trust of AWS Mid-Enterprise teams over the past eight months and hope to continue growing these relationships by delivering results together. They are now starting to work with members of the large, industry-aligned enterprise teams. Dan believes this will become a significant growth area over the next 12 to 24 months, provided they continue to earn trust with AWS. Their goal is to become the go-to AWS modernization partner for enterprises, focusing on data and AI, within the next 12 to 24 months.
Devoteam’s slogan is “AI-driven tech consulting.” Dan loves this slogan because it challenges the company to integrate AI across all operations, enhancing efficiency and delivering superior customer experiences. For example:
- AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP): Devoteam is collaborating with the AWS MAP team to leverage generative AI in automating the assessment phase. This AI-driven approach enables them to swiftly analyze and summarize extensive customer inventory data for large-scale migrations. This means customers can potentially save valuable time, while Devoteam can also improve the accuracy of their assessments. They recently launched a MAP Ignite campaign using these tools to help customers accelerate stalled modernization projects.
- Bolt – A Custom AI Assistant: They’ve developed Bolt, a proprietary tool built on Amazon Bedrock. Bolt serves multiple internal functions to streamlining operations. For instance, when the sales team encounters a customer from a specific sector, they can quickly query Bolt for relevant examples of projects within that industry. This instant access to tailored information enables the team to provide more informed and targeted solutions.
These AI-driven internal best practices not only enhance efficiency but also generate innovative ideas that can be proposed to customers, helping them optimize their operations on AWS. By embedding AI into core processes, they’re not only improving performance but also equipping themselves to offer cutting-edge, AI-enhanced solutions to clients, thereby augmenting business capabilities on the AWS platform.
The key differentiators Devoteam can provide for its clients and partners are:
- The AWS strategic relationship is one of a handful of GenAI SCA partners in the UK that also possess ProServe capability.
- CloudCare – the reselling service which provides customers with at least a 4% discount from their AWS bill with no obligation, and a wrap-around service which includes enablement sessions and a technical advocate to help guide the customer on their AWS journey, at no additional cost. CloudCare also provides a path to AWS Private Pricing Agreements, which offer bigger discounts for customers in return for committed spend.
- The Elite Partnership status with Databricks and ServiceNow – Devoteam sees a big demand for Databricks from their customers, and they also believe the ServiceNow on AWS proposition is extremely compelling, as they are uniquely positioned as a specialist AWS partner for Databricks and ServiceNow.
