AWS Launches SaaS Competency For Partners

“’SaaS-ification’ has become a very important concept for… transitioning to a subscription model,' says AllCloud CEO Eran Gil. 'So it makes perfect sense for AWS to have that competency and have partners along the way that are able to help these organizations go through this period of transition.'

Amazon Web Services is offering a new SaaS Competency for AWS partners to help customers identify those with extensive experience in designing and building cloud-native, software-as-a-service solutions (SaaS) on its public cloud.

The AWS SaaS Competency is designed for Advanced and Premier Consulting Partners that are members of the AWS Partner Network (APN).

Customers want software that is easy to use, implement and operate, and have expressed a strong interest in designing and building cloud-native SaaS solutions on AWS through professional services support, with less reliance on internal resources and hiring, according to AWS. Software delivered under a SaaS model answers that need, because it’s centrally managed and hosted by a third-party provider and available to customers over the internet or cloud on a subscription or pay-per-use basis.

“(Organizations) are looking to reduce time-to-value and obtain access to innovative product features and flexible software procurement on a consumption or contractual basis,” Judah Bernstein, a senior partner solutions architect at AWS, and Oded Rosenmann, an AWS SaaS business lead, wrote in a blog post today announcing the new competency.

“The shift to consume solutions through a SaaS delivery model creates a new market and financial opportunities for all businesses building software products,” Bernstein and Rosenmann said. “As software vendors incorporate a SaaS delivery-model, they can improve customer satisfaction, expand market and global reach, increase agility and innovation, improve operational efficiency, and obtain economies of scale.”

AWS pointed to an October 2018 report from market research firm IDC that indicated 72 percent of businesses globally strongly consider SaaS for new applications and migrations and during contract renewal periods.

APN Consulting Partners can earn the AWS SaaS Competency in two categories. The Design Services category is for partners with extensive expertise in designing and implementing complex SaaS solutions using AWS infrastructure. The Builders category is for partners with expertise in building SaaS applications through software development, including the ability to develop multi-tenant software code for tier-1 SaaS applications using object-oriented programming and software development life-cycle agile methodologies.

San Francisco-based AllCloud, a professional services firm, is one of 22 Design Services launch partners for the new AWS SaaS Competency. AWS highlighted the Premier Consulting Partner for its work in transforming a BMC Software product into a multi-tenant SaaS solution.

AllCloud has been working for many years with independent software vendors (ISVs) -- including through the AWS SaaS Factory launched in mid-2018 -- that have operated under the traditional software licensing model and need to “SaaS-ify” their products, according to CEO Eran Gil.

“These fairly larger ISVs -- to keep themselves competitive and also remain relevant -- have had to change their model, because for every ISV that was traditional, there's a SaaS product out there that's available,” Gil said. “’SaaS-ification’ has become a very important concept for…transitioning to a subscription model. Having said that, without the proper infrastructure and design in their architecture to support that type of distribution of their software to customers and users, they can't do it. So it makes perfect sense for AWS to have that competency and have partners along the way that are able to help these organizations go through this period of transition.”

Other Design Services launch partners are Base2Services, beSharp, Cambridge Technology, ClearScale, CloudHesive, Comm-IT, Five Talent, Flux7, Itoc, Kainos Software, Logicworks, Mission Cloud Services, Onica, OpsGuru, Persistent Systems, Rackspace, SoftServe, Storm Reply, The Scale Factory, Trek10 and ZERO12.

AWS Consulting Partners earning the new SaaS Competency in the Builders category as part of the launch are beSharp, Cambridge Technology, ClearScale, CloudGeometry, Comm-IT, Five Talent, Kainos Software, Onica, Persistent Systems, SoftServe, Trek10, Virtusa and ZERO12.

Atlanta-based Cambridge Technology, an AWS SaaS Competency Partner in Builders and Design Services categories, was highlighted for working with Marco Polo Securities to architect a modular application with a rich interface and multi-tenant SaaS platform on AWS using AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Cognito.

“The Cambridge team was able to protect customer data in order to retain client integrity and confidentiality for Marco Polo Securities customers through data and storage isolation with Aurora by using multi-tenant tables and tenant-based partitioning,” Bernstein and Rosenmann wrote in their blog post.

The AWS SaaS Competency is another way partners can help enterprises unlock value from cloud initiatives, according to Matt Buchner, solution architect lead at Flux7, an Austin, Texas-based IT services firm and NTT Data company that helps customers migrate, replatform and refactor applications to run on AWS.

“Providing operations and product teams with the technical guidance and skills to build and optimize SaaS is especially important as organizations navigate unique challenges and business impacts due to COVID-19,” Buchner said.