CSS Centralizes Procurement and Passes Efficiencies to Its Customers Using AWS Marketplace

Common Securitization Solutions (CSS) operates a mortgage securitization platform that supports the Uniform Mortgage-Backed Security (UMBS) of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which bridges the gap between the secondary mortgage markets and investors. CSS receives mortgage data from customers and converts mortgage loans into securities.

When CSS previously outsourced its procurement function, maintaining consistent governance across all third-party vendors was challenging. CSS made a strategic decision to bring the procurement process in-house and manage it end-to-end to reduce risk and gain greater control over its software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers and purchases.

Even after CSS brought procurement in-house, it still had to manage different contracts across multiple vendors, such as Splunk, Akamai, and Appian. Leadership saw an opportunity to increase governance, improve efficiency, and decrease costs—not to mention get continuous support with complex processes—by investing further in its trusted relationship with AWS and procuring SaaS solutions in AWS Marketplace.

Generally, the more suppliers an organization has, the more data security risks it potentially takes on. Procuring SaaS solutions in AWS Marketplace, however, helps CSS reduce that risk while increasing access to thousands of readymade solutions from different independent software vendors (ISVs)—leading to faster deployment and decreased time to market. Transacting in AWS Marketplace also means CSS doesn't have to conduct a lengthy vendor risk assessment process because sellers who want to list in AWS Marketplace have already gone through some level of vetting.

With AWS Marketplace, CSS continues and evolves existing relationships with SaaS ISVs, including Red Hat, Blue Prism, Dynatrace, Check Point, and Snowflake. It can also explore relationships with new vendors. “We didn’t see a risk transitioning to AWS Marketplace because the terms with vendors do not change and we continue to have the same relationships with our vendors,” says Manoj Shetty, vice president, head of infrastructure & cloud services at CSS. “This made moving to AWS Marketplace an easy decision for us.”

CSS also did not have complete visibility across all its vendors—which could be a liability for compliance and reporting to the federal government. CSS needed a single pane of glass through which to view all the details related to procurement, such as tracking spend and acting on upcoming SaaS renewals, and it found that in AWS Marketplace.

Centralizing IT procurement in AWS Marketplace improves efficiency because it simplifies vendor onboarding and management. For example, with Splunk, which provides SaaS solutions for near real-time operational intelligence, CSS anticipated that it could traditionally take three to four weeks to establish the ISV in its backend system as a supplier and set up a purchase order (PO) to start paying for the service. But once negotiating the pricing and terms with Splunk was complete, receiving the private offer in AWS Marketplace and accepting it took no more than 2 days.

AWS Marketplace Purchase Order Management for SaaS Contracts helps CSS enter PO numbers as part of the AWS Marketplace transaction flow when purchasing SaaS contracts. This makes it easier to match POs, subscriptions, and invoices. This level of self-service in AWS Marketplace offers flexibility and less worry by empowering CSS teams to discover, procure, and manage software in AWS Marketplace, without going through a lengthy approval process. As a result, CSS added five new deals in AWS Marketplace in 2022, and it plans to add 16–17 more new SaaS solutions in 2023.