AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
Varsity Yearbooks Overcomes Market Challenges with SaaS and CleanSlate
By Brad Laughlin, VP of Strategy and Operations – CleanSlate Technology Group
By Rowena Branch, SaaS Partner Manager – AWS SaaS Factory
By Anthony McClure, Senior Partner Solutions Architect – AWS SaaS Factory
By Bill Tarr, Principal Solutions Architect – AWS SaaS Factory
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| CleanSlate |
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Software providers have evolved to survive. Never was that more the case than for educational services during the 2020 pandemic. The changing needs of the institutions they served led companies like Varsity Yearbooks, a leading provider of graduation products since the 1920s, to focus on faster innovation and accelerated time to market with a SaaS delivery model.
In partnership with AWS SaaS Competency Partner, CleanSlate Technology Group, Varsity Yearbooks undertook a strategic transformation of their product offerings to accommodate the new virtual landscape beginning with their yearbook product line. This collaboration led to a SaaS transformation shifting the approach Varsity Yearbooks took to building with a SaaS mindset in order to boost their revenue and market share.
According to Varsity Yearbooks, they were simply trying to stay afloat before they built the SaaS solution. CleanSlate enabled their shift to a SaaS mindset, boosting revenue and market share. The result left Varsity with a solution in which they felt 100 percent confident, allowing them to focus on the future and consider what is possible next. Their team is now focused on delivering features to market within weeks versus months and achieve accelerated market growth. The SaaS solution allowed Varsity Yearbooks to reimagine their yearbook production process and has opened up the possibilities for future markets. The team now continually asks, ‘What else is possible?’.
CleanSlate’s work earned them the TechPoint Digital Transformation Award for enabling Varsity Yearbooks’ success in the booming $1.9 trillion educational services industry.
CleanSlate has experience in designing and building SaaS solutions for customers by taking a holistic approach to designing and building modern applications. CleanSlate has expertise in product design, automation via DevOps, cloud-native and mobile development. CleanSlate’s core values help drive their success with the ultimate goal of leaving clients in a better position than when they started. The team features a group of technologists that are inspired to innovate and deliver. By engaging with clients on modernization efforts, they are working to help define SaaS opportunities and help the client think differently. Clients need to ask how a modern application built in a SaaS way deliver a greater value to the organization such as a growth enabler, revenue enabler, provide a superior customer experience, or enable a better speed to market for features? Thinking differently about modernization and turning it into a SaaS and product play is what helps CleanSlate Technology Group separate from the competition.
Solution Overview
CleanSlate engagement with Varsity Yearbooks was driven by the potential for imminent failure of their yearbook e-design software. The project focused on modernizing and transforming their aging 14-year-old platform and infrastructure into a modern SaaS solution, while also re-platforming the legacy system to run in parallel until the new SaaS MVP (Minimum Viable Product) was released. Using AWS services and the AWS SaaS Factory’s framework, we successfully modernized Varsity’s legacy software into a true SaaS product as seen Figure 1. CleanSlate’s modernization of a legacy platform leveraged a SaaS product approach, integrating business planning with modern cloud-native application development. A multi-tenant solution, designed and built by the team, allows for business growth, competitive advantage, and enhanced customer agility and creativity.
Figure 1: The Architectural Model That Enabled SaaS Delivery
CleanSlate looked at the overall solution from both the business and technology perspective.
The Business Side: CleanSlate worked with Varsity Yearbooks to achieve their business goals, creating a monetized AWS SaaS solution. The process included creating a product roadmap and go-to-market strategy, defining monetization and packaging, setting customer success metrics, using an MVP, and prioritizing modern UX/UI for improved usability and functionality.
The Technical Side: CleanSlate developed the technical side in tandem with Varsity Yearbooks’ business vision, delivering well-built, future-proof technology. This encompassed profiling, analytics, identity/access management, tenant isolation/multi-tenant storage, automation-focused SaaS DevOps, microservice architecture design, partner integration, and AWS, Angular, and Java-based modernization.
CleanSlate built a scalable SaaS application utilizing over 20 AWS services, including a multi-tenant architecture with AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) and microservices for seamless tenant connectivity. Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) enabled automatic horizontal scalability, while auto-scaling rules handled demand spikes. Application profiling, analytics, and observability tools like AWS CloudTrail, New Relic, and Splunk ensured governance and scalability.
The SaaS DevOps approach automated the entire infrastructure with Hashicorp Terraform, incorporating quality checks and continuous integration/deployment. This enabled Varsity Yearbooks to scale development teams, run multiple environments simultaneously, and accelerate feature delivery to an on-demand production push model.
Challenges faced initially included operational inefficiencies hindering innovation, slow go-to-market capabilities affecting customer satisfaction, limited scalability and reliability, prolonged bug-fixing, lack of monitoring and logging, and manual onboarding processes. CleanSlate addressed these challenges through modernization and a new SaaS product approach.
Lessons Learned
Overall, companies like CleanSlate must have a passionate partner mindset, demonstrate empathy for the client’s problems, and work relentlessly to conquer them with a sustainable, long-term solution. CleanSlate’s commitment to building a service quality culture helps clients solve short- and long-term challenges through improvement in process, technology, and people. Partners must work hard to understand customers unique business needs, build trust, and collaborate to deliver the best solutions for our customer needs.
From a technology perspective, leveraging the SaaS Factory frameworks and ensuring AWS Well Architected Reviews are performed along the way, really do help companies achieve success by building and deploying quality projects to leverage the promise of the cloud. Investing in the design of the SaaS components and building a robust SaaS DevOps mindset will allow SaaS products to be developed in a sustainable and transformational way for companies.
The largest lesson with this major digital transformation is that change is indeed difficult to accept, and it takes true partnership to embrace change. Varsity Yearbooks and CleanSlate had a few challenges, but built trust in the end, baking quality into the process, advising, adapting, and working relentlessly to align to expectations proved to be what helped drive success.
Conclusion
Varsity Yearbooks’ successful transformation shows how traditional businesses can reinvent themselves using SaaS strategically. Through the collaboration with CleanSlate and AWS, what began as a pandemic-driven necessity developed into a transformative business opportunity, resulting in sped up feature delivery, enhanced scalability, and operational efficiency. This transformation positions Varsity Yearbooks for continued growth and innovation in the future.
This success story highlights the value of AWS SaaS Competency Partners, who bring extensive experience in designing and building cloud-native solutions on AWS. Like CleanSlate helped organizations reduce migration friction from legacy applications and establish sound foundations for SaaS solutions on AWS, providing end-to-end architecture design and implementation support for businesses seeking digital transformation.
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Cleanslate Technology – Partner Spotlight
At CleanSlate Technology Group, we specialize in designing and building innovative SaaS products, data-driven solutions, and AI-powered applications that help our clients achieve their business goals. As a trusted AWS partner, we offer cloud-native application development, DevOps services, and expert architecture to unlock the full potential of advanced technologies. Our expertise extends to migrating and modernizing legacy applications, ensuring they are future-ready and optimized for the cloud. Whether you’re looking to create scalable SaaS solutions, harness the power of data and AI, or modernize your infrastructure, we are committed to delivering transformative results that drive growth, innovation, and resilience for your organization.