AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog

AWS SaaS Competency Partners Assist Customers with Designing and Building SaaS Solutions on AWS

By Judah Bernstein, Sr. Partner Solutions Architect at AWS
By Oded Rosenmann, SaaS Business Lead at AWS

AWS-Competency-2019The AWS Partner Network (APN) is excited to introduce the AWS SaaS Competency. This designation helps customers find top APN Consulting Partners with deep specialization and experience in designing and building software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions on AWS.

Organizations are interested in software that is easy to use, implement, and operate. They are looking to reduce time-to-value (TTV) and obtain access to innovative product features and flexible software procurement on a consumption or contractual basis.

SaaS is a licensing and delivery model whereby software is centrally managed and hosted by a provider and available to customers on a subscription or pay-per-use basis. 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 SaaS Competency Partners follow Amazon Web Services (AWS) best practices for designing and building SaaS solutions through their professional services practices. To qualify for the AWS SaaS Competency designation, organizations have undergone rigorous technical validation by AWS Partner Solutions Architects and demonstrated proven customer success.

Learn more about the AWS SaaS Competency >>

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Watch Our Twitch Broadcast to Learn More

ON-DEMAND AWS TWITCH.Tv PANEL DISCUSSION

The AWS Partner Network hosted a panel discussion on Twitch with leading SaaS Consulting Partners, moderated by Steven Jones, Director of Solution Architecture at AWS. This broadcast provides a unique opportunity to hear from AWS tech leaders and APN Partners about designing and building SaaS solutions on AWS.

The session featured the launch of the AWS SaaS Competency program, including launch partners ClearScale, Itoc, and Rackspace, and an overview of the SaaS partner community at AWS.

Watch the on-demand video >>

Introducing the AWS SaaS Competency

The AWS Competency Program recognizes APN Partners that have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas, industry verticals, or workloads on AWS.

AWS Competencies are built to go beyond the meaning of the word “competent.” It’s one of the toughest designations an APN Partner can achieve and maintain, giving organizations confidence in choosing APN Partners to team up with.

The AWS SaaS Competency includes two categories of APN Consulting Partners—Design Services and Builders.

Design Services

  • APN Consulting Partners that have deep expertise in designing and implementing complex SaaS solutions using AWS infrastructure. They have the ability to design, implement, and integrate AWS infrastructure for SaaS application architectures.

Builders

  • APN Consulting Partners that have deep expertise in building SaaS applications via software development. They have the ability to develop multi-tenant software code for tier-1 SaaS applications, using object-oriented programming (OOP) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) agile methodologies.

AWS customers requiring end-to-end support for designing and building a SaaS solution on AWS can pair a SaaS Competency Partner from each category, or select a partner that has met the requirements for both categories.

Launch Partner Showcase

AWS SaaS Competency Partners included within these categories at launch:

Design Services

Builders

Why Build SaaS on AWS?

Recent research from IDC indicates that 72 percent of businesses worldwide now strongly consider SaaS for new applications, migrations, and at contract renewal periods. The shift to consume solutions through a SaaS delivery model creates a new market and financial opportunities for all businesses building software products. To learn more, you can read Forrester’s ISV business case for building SaaS solutions on AWS.

While organizations have accepted the value of delivering a SaaS offering across all segments, the realization of SaaS principles has proven to be challenging. SaaS requires deep, cross-functional insights into a wide array of considerations throughout the organization. These considerations touch every dimension of how a product is sold, marketed, designed, built, and operated.

Understanding the needs of SaaS providers and equipping them with the technical and business guidance they need to make this transition has been a priority for AWS. We’ve accomplished this through the development of APN programs devoted to companies building SaaS solutions on AWS.

AWS SaaS Factory

AWS SaaS Factory helps organizations at any stage of the SaaS journey. Whether looking to build new products, migrate existing applications, or optimize SaaS solutions on AWS, we can help. Visit the AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub to discover more technical and business content and best practices.

SaaS builders are encouraged to reach out to their account representative to inquire about engagement models and to work with the AWS SaaS Factory team.

Sign up to stay informed about the latest SaaS on AWS news, resources, and events.

APN Navigate for SaaS Enablement

APN Navigate for SaaS Enablement provides prescriptive guidance on how to transform your business by delivering SaaS on AWS. It provides a step-by-step path to help you build, market, and sell as an APN Partner. Organizations new to SaaS can use the APN Navigate for SaaS Enablement track to evolve their internal skills, capabilities, and best practices.

With APN Navigate, consulting partners can distinguish themselves by developing system integration (SI) practices focused on SaaS transformation. This is accomplished by leveraging guidance on how to achieve key APN program designations. Technology partners with software products can use APN Navigate to develop a center of excellence (COE) within their organization to improve their product portfolio using SaaS patterns and best practices.

AWS SaaS Competency

The new AWS SaaS Competency helps AWS customers identify APN Consulting Partners with deep expertise in the designing and building of SaaS solutions on AWS. Customers have expressed strong interest in designing and building cloud-native SaaS solutions on AWS through professional services support, with less reliance on internal resources and hiring, and internal subject matter experts.

SaaS Competency Partners bring a great body of work in supporting AWS customers in building SaaS solutions.

  • AllCloud, an APN Premier Consulting Partner and SaaS Competency Partner in the Design Services category, enabled BMC to transform a product-to-deploy into a multi-tenant SaaS solution. They did so by leveraging SaaS best practices, developing proof-of-concepts, and designing a production viable end-to-end SaaS solutions architecture on AWS.
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    BMC is an industry leader in workflow orchestration, service and operations management, and IT ops and automation. BMC is reinventing its product strategy by adopting a SaaS delivery model for leading applications within its product portfolio.
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    AllCloud worked closely with the AWS SaaS Factory team to strategically enable BMC as an extension of the customer’s team, and to accelerate the momentum to launch the SaaS offering on AWS. “AllCloud and the AWS SaaS Factory helped our business and technical teams to accelerate momentum by providing hands-on guidance, in-person strategy workshops, and proof of concepts,” says Karol Smeczechowski, Vice President of Research and Development at BMC.
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  • Cambridge Technology is a SaaS Competency Partner in both the Builders and Design Services categories that worked with Marco Polo Securities to architect a modular application with rich interface and multi-tenant SaaS platform on AWS. They used AWS Fargate for Amazon ECS, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and Amazon Cognito.
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    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.

With the AWS SaaS Competency, customers can find trusted APN Partners with professional services practices that have undergone a rigorous validation process, third-party audit, and vetted customer references.

How to Join the AWS SaaS Competency Program

APN Consulting Partners with deep experience in designing and building SaaS solutions on AWS can review the AWS SaaS Competency Partner Validation Checklist.

To qualify for the SaaS Competency, AWS Partner Solution Architects technically validate the architecture for each of the provided case studies, thought leadership materials, and consulting practice collateral.

Learn more about the AWS SaaS Competency >>
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