As Anthropic pivoted from building large language models to selling enterprise-grade AI tools two years ago, it began combing the channel for practical deployment expertise. When the company launched the Claude Partner Network in early March, Caylent was one of the IT services firms with a foot in the door.
“We’ve been an Anthropic partner for two-and-a-half years,” Jason Cutler, SVP of Anthropic consulting and engineering at Caylent, told Channel Dive.
The firm’s Anthropic practice sprung from an existing partnership with AWS. The cloud infrastructure behemoth forged an early strategic alliance with Anthropic, embedding Claude in the Amazon Bedrock AI services platform.
“Last year, when Claude Code came out, we started using that internally and helping clients understand how to use it,” Cutler said.
Claude coding tools and the Claude Cowork assistant helped boost Anthropic’s enterprise profile. In May, Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in business adoption, according to the Ramp AI Index.
Becky Trevino, chief product officer at IT asset management vendor Flexera, noted the Anthropic buzz in early June at the FinOps X conference in San Diego. “The conversations that I heard on the floor were 90% about Claude Code,” she said. “Just seeing the seismic shift from ChatGPT being the most talked about thing to Claude was pretty tremendous.”
AI enthusiasm hasn’t translated to AI business value for many companies, creating a sizable opportunity for partners that can provide guidance and expertise.
“There's no one out there that's been doing Claude for 10-plus years — that just doesn't exist,” Cutler said. “The amount of help companies need is above and beyond what exists in the market today. We’re meeting the customers where they are right now, which is, ‘hey, we need help. Can you come help us?’”
Building an Anthropic bench
Caylent carved out a dedicated Anthropic practice in April as Claude demand surged. Claude Enterprise was the most requested technology across the firm’s AWS customer base, the company said at the time.
“We cross-pollinate with the AWS practice a ton,” Cutler said. “You can leverage Claude, Claude Code and Claude Cowork on Bedrock so a lot of our Anthropic customers are AWS customers. But we are also working with Anthropic first-party customers who are buying directly through Anthropic.”
Caylent has built a bench of more than 700 Claude product engineers, according to Cutler. In addition to being an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and AWS Managed Services Provider, the firm is an Anthropic Preferred Services Partner. The status gives Caylent access to a pool of $100 million Anthropic set aside for partner training, certifications and forward-deployed engineers.
“We're integrated with their field teams and their marketing teams and their partnership teams,” said Cutler. “As we’ve started doing more projects, we've become much more directly aligned with Anthropic.”
Cutler likened the Anthropic ramp up and AI deployment challenges to the opportunities that surfaced with cloud migrations.
“AWS has hundreds of services available to customers and we're seeing a very similar thing take hold with Anthropic,” he said. “You have models and products that you need to integrate into existing systems and processes and workflows. There's complexity tied to that, there's change management tied to that, there's technology decisions that are tied to that.”
Anthropic expanded its channel program last month, adding a three-tier services track and a self-service partner hub, along with referral credits and deal protection. The move underscores the key role partners have in the enterprise market, according to Gartner VP Analyst Adam Preset.
“If we look at the expansion of the partner program and the partner hub, it’s a clear signal that Anthropic wants to prioritize enterprise customers,” Preset said. “They need experienced partners to help them because the experienced partners are trusted advisors.”
For Caylent and other firms jockeying for position in a newly formed channel, the trick is to specialize.
“In building out hyperscaler partnerships over the last 13 years, you find that they want to create their own swim lanes, but there are additional lanes for partners to swim in,” Cutler said. “The faster you can find your swim lane, the more successful you can be as a partner.”
