AWS Unveils New Open-Source ‘SaaS Boost’ Tool For ISVs

‘Our SaaS Factory Team, through their hundreds of partner engagements, have learned a lot of best practices,’ says Doug Yeum, AWS’ head of worldwide channel and alliances. ‘They’ve taken those best practices and come up with a prescriptive framework and set of tools to minimize the undifferentiated heavy lifting that’s required for launching SaaS applications.’

Amazon Web Services Thursday unveiled SaaS Boost, a new open-source tool to help independent software vendors (ISVs) more quickly modernize their solutions for Software-as-a-Service delivery models on the AWS cloud.

The free Saas Boost is a ready-to-use reference environment available in private preview starting Thursday.

“Our SaaS Factory Team, through their hundreds of partner engagements, have learned a lot of best practices,” said Doug Yeum, AWS’ head of worldwide channel and alliances. “They’ve taken those best practices and come up with a prescriptive framework and set of tools to minimize the undifferentiated heavy lifting that’s required for launching SaaS applications.”

With SaaS Boost, AWS is providing core software tools for running SaaS workloads in the cloud, including an application configurator, multitenant manager, dashboards to analyze the metrics and a user interface for on-boarding new customers.

“Because this is open source, customers can take this code as is, or they can modify it to fit their own requirements,” said Yeum, who debuted Saas Boost at the AWS re:Invent conference Thursday. “I’m really excited to see what our ISVs and customers will be able to do by using SaaS Boost to develop and accelerate their application development. This is also going to provide a really good tool for the SaaS competency partners … to continue to accelerate and scale the support that they’re providing their customers.”

Australia’s MAGIQ Software, an AWS Select Technology Partner that provides enterprise solutions for local governments and organizations, has been an early user of SaaS Boost.

“Our initial strategy was lift and shift, however SaaS Boost has allowed us to move to a SaaS delivery model in months instead of years,” Nick Parnham, MAGIQ’s software development manager, said in a statement. “This allows us to take advantage of cloud-native architecture such as multitenancy, high availability and an automated release process.”

SaaS Boost allows MAGIQ to reduce its deployment and operational costs, a savings that can be passed on to customers, according to Parnham, while MAGIQ teams get more time to adopt and innovate with artificial intelligence and machine learning.