How Small Businesses Can Modernize Their IT with AWS Partner Network

Many of us interact with small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in our everyday activities, across various industries—from ordering food, shopping for goods, completing financial transactions, to receiving virtual healthcare. But have we ever thought what tradeoffs these small businesses need to make to stay relevant and competitive? How does a 20-person company keep up with bigger or new businesses in the same market?

In this blog post, we’ll explore the issues SMBs face in modernizing their IT needs, how third-party help can fuel growth, and a few stories of small businesses that found success in the cloud.

Why is technology challenge a constant struggle for SMBs?

For many small businesses, it typically comes down to time and talent. We know our SMB customers take on many roles in addition to their official titles and it’s easy for tech to get lumped into an already full agenda without dedicated in-house support. These are the most common challenges we hear:

• Increasing IT costs
• Quickly adopting new technologies which are rapidly evolving
• Continuously innovating while serving existing customers’ demands
• Addressing legacy tech that makes it difficult to scale up
• Addressing data security, regulation, and compliance

That is why SMB customers need reliable experts who can help address these business challenges. The AWS Partner Network (APN) is a global community of 130,000 trusted cloud partners in over 200+ countries with diverse expertise that leverage AWS technologies, programs, expertise, and tools to build solutions and services for customers. APNs provide innovative solutions, solve technical challenges, win deals, and deliver greater customer value. They are experienced consultants who can take on the strategic oversight of helping your business modernize its IT needs within your budget.

How can a tech partner help SMBs overcome IT and business challenges?

Connect with AWS Partners who’ve proven their expertise in leveraging AWS services to deliver real business value across industries and use cases. Harness the latest AWS technologies and popular cloud services to create tailored, cost-effective solutions that scale with your needs. Partners are validated to guide you from concept to completion, designing and implementing integrated solutions that address your unique challenges and drive measurable outcomes.

APNs who specialize in working with SMBs can help you with nearly any use case regardless of your company’s IT maturity level. So, if you need help with something as foundational as migration or advanced as generative AI, we have you covered. To meet this program, our SMB APNs are validated against a high technical bar to not only help you drive innovation but attain greater business value.

Daylight Transport uses an APN to modernize operations

In the fast-paced world of logistics, maintaining a competitive edge is crucial. Daylight Transport, a prominent SMB LTL (Less than Truckload) carrier headquartered in Cypress, California, is steadfast in its mission to revolutionize and modernize its technology stack, which was developed over a decade ago. With over four decades of industry experience, the company has continually expanded its customer base and bolstered its technological capabilities. However, once a cornerstone of operations, the legacy technology stack gradually became a bottleneck, impeding the efficiency necessary for future growth.

To realize its vision, Daylight Transport forged a strategic partnership with APN, Caylent, to embark on a digital transformation.

“With AWS and the AWS IT partner network, we found partners that share our commitment to innovation and agility,” notes Roger Slobe, CTO of Daylight Transport. “Their cloud provides the scalability, reliability, and security that are indispensable for our mission-critical operations, supported by a network of experienced IT partners well-versed in modernization efforts.”

Slobe continued, “Our partnership with AWS has been instrumental in expediting our digital transformation journey. Together, we’ve laid the groundwork for innovation and growth that will propel Daylight Transport into the vanguard of logistics.”

Criteria Corp improves its data warehouse with third-party support

Criteria Corp, is an SMB talent insights company dedicated to helping organizations make better talent decisions. Criteria is an assessment company that helps their customers create, manage, and cultivate high-performing teams at every level of your organization.

To better serve their customers with insights on talent hiring, their data warehouse solution needed to be better, faster, and more cost efficient. They decided to work with an AWS Partner to augment their staff and help move siloed data into Amazon Redshift Serverless. This would allow them to gain insights directly from one data warehouse.

Caylent helped Criteria deploy the solution in four months—three times quicker than previous efforts. But that wasn’t all. Caylent modernized other necessary components of data infrastructure, leveraging AWS Lamda and AWS Step Functions to clean and improve the quality of data before ingestion into Amazon Redshift using AWS Glue pipelines.

“Partnering with the AWS Partner Network allows Criteria a streamlined way to procure a variety of services and products quickly and efficiently, with leverage and support from the AWS team. This collaboration has delivered concrete outcomes for us, enabling us to engage partners to augment our team’s capacity and deliver high value for our customers,” said Chris Daden, CTO of Criteria.

Next steps

Let APNs help you build the innovative solutions and overcome the tradeoffs that small businesses struggle with. They bring value, innovation, and speed within the budget that SMBs need. Contact us for more details or get matched with a partner today.