Why Choose AWS SaaS Competency Partners for Top-tier Apps?

If they’ve not yet, organizations worldwide now contemplate adopting the SaaS delivery model. However, transitioning can present challenges like re-architecting for multi-tenancy, migrating infrastructure to the cloud, ensuring reliability and security at scale, and more.

Given these technical and business complexities in implementing SaaS-based delivery, partnering with a SaaS delivery provider with a proven track record of success in the industry can be a great move. Since cloud computing is an integral enabler for delivering SaaS solutions at scale, many companies turn to AWS and its network of competency partners.

Specifically, AWS SaaS Competency Partners can help you create a best-in-class SaaS application with their extensive cloud knowledge, access to AWS resources, proven success with SaaS delivery, and expertise across the entire application lifecycle. Also, these partners’ understanding of both SaaS delivery intricacies and AWS capabilities empowers organizations to focus less on technical complexities and more on core product innovation.

Let’s understand why AWS SaaS competency partners like Simform should be your first choice when selecting a technology vendor for your next SaaS project.

While many SaaS providers can deliver functional applications, not all possess the specialized expertise required to build truly robust, enterprise-grade SaaS products. Regular SaaS providers often lack deep technical capabilities or proven experience implementing and operating SaaS models at scale. This can lead to applications that fail to meet the requirements for performance, reliability, and security demanded by today’s businesses.

Additionally, vanilla SaaS providers may not utilize the most optimal technologies or architectures, leading to higher long-term costs and issues with agility. They also tend to have limited familiarity with challenges unique to SaaS delivery, like multi-tenancy and billing. While decent for simple use cases, relying on an average SaaS vendor for a business-critical application introduces serious risks across metrics like quality, cost, scalability, and time to market. Below, we will explore some potential pitfalls with regular SaaS providers.

1. Inadequate requirement gathering: Regular SaaS providers may oversimplify the requirement gathering process, believing that SaaS is just a change in deployment strategy and does not account for the complexities and nuances that come with this model. Without a structured and thorough requirement gathering by a SaaS provider, you have an application that lacks essential features and fails to address your business’s and customers’ unique challenges, objectives, and expectations.

2. Poor communication: Communication is crucial in any project, but it becomes even more vital when outsourcing a SaaS project. Regular SaaS delivery providers might not put enough emphasis on clear and consistent communication, leading to delayed milestone deliveries, missed project objectives, and, ultimately, a strained business relationship.

3. Insufficient planning and project management: Transitioning to SaaS involves several moving parts, including infrastructure, application development, marketing, and support. Not having a dedicated project manager or proper strategy in place can lead to uncoordinated efforts, missed deadlines, and increased SaaS app development costs. Engaging with an AWS SaaS competency partner like Simform, who also has CMMI 3 certification, ensures strong project management practices and a transparent reporting mechanism.

4. Ignoring scalability and performance: When a regular provider doesn’t consider scalability requirements, your SaaS application cannot handle an increasing number of users, requests, and data volumes as your business grows. This leads to significant performance issues like slow page load times, crashes, and negative customer experiences.

5. Lack of security: Security is a critical concern for SaaS solutions as data is stored and transmitted through the cloud. Companies that do not adequately invest in security measures such as data encryption, access controls, and regular security audits expose themselves and their customers to risks like data breaches and unauthorized access. A data breach could lead to severe financial and legal consequences for the organization, not to mention the damage done to its reputation and customer trust.

6. Poor UI/UX design: Proper UI/UX design ensures an intuitive, user-friendly experience that drives user engagement, satisfaction, and retention. Trusting a regular SaaS delivery provider to design your SaaS application may result in having a poorly designed user interface and user experience. If the users face difficulty navigating your application or find it unintuitive, they may become frustrated with the service and ultimately look for alternative solutions.

7. Improper integrations: To provide your users with seamless workflows, your SaaS application often needs to integrate with other software and services. If a regular SaaS delivery provider does not offer efficient integrations, your users may encounter disjointed workflows, inability to access data across systems, delays in business processes, and poor user experiences.

8. Neglecting ongoing support and maintenance: Your SaaS application requires regular updates, bug fixes, and feature enhancements for sustained performance. If your SaaS delivery provider neglects ongoing support and maintenance, you may face issues such as app obsolescence, security vulnerabilities, and diminished customer satisfaction.

Every SaaS provider cannot offer the same quality of service and delivery as we know now. And you can’t afford to have a failed SaaS product, as it can cause a significant loss of time, money, and resources, ultimately damaging your business’s reputation and growth potential.

AWS SaaS Competency Partners excel in providing software solutions hosted on the reliable and secure AWS Cloud, ensuring superior performance and scalability. These trusted partners like us undergo a rigorous validation process, ensuring that we possess deep technical expertise and proven customer success in the SaaS domain.

As a Premier AWS Consulting Partner, Simform holds the prestigious AWS SaaS Competency designation, along with other competencies in Advertising and Marketing Technology Services, Migration Consulting, and DevOps Consulting. This validates our deep expertise in end-to-end SaaS solution development, from planning and design through successful deployment/migration on AWS cloud infrastructure. Here’s what you get by collaborating with SaaS partners:

The AWS SaaS Factory is designed to help businesses build, deliver, and optimize SaaS solutions on AWS. It offers prescriptive guidance, resources, and support so that organizations can successfully adopt a SaaS delivery model, migrate their existing solutions to AWS, or enhance their SaaS offerings.

Teaming up with AWS partners with SaaS Competency status offers valuable benefits like opportunity referrals, access to exclusive funding resources, collaboration with AWS SaaS experts in customer engagements, and the availability of ready-to-use resources and tools. This efficiently speeds up the process of migrating to a SaaS delivery model for AWS customers.

Additionally, our alliance with the AWS SaaS Factory allows us to share in funding benefits through program memberships, reducing both the cost and the risk associated with building a SaaS platform on AWS for our clientele.

Also, working with the AWS SaaS Factory team gives us the privilege of collaborating with a dedicated group of professionals at AWS focused on SaaS. Their expertise in business development and solution architecture greatly helps our clients.

According to the AWS SaaS Factory’s framework, transitioning to SaaS requires strategic and operational shifts. Unique challenges arise, like product planning, go-to-market strategy, billing, tenant isolation, security, and efficiency.

Leveraging our company’s extensive expertise in cloud infrastructure management, we have assisted numerous businesses in overcoming these challenges. Our team of 200+ AWS-certified professionals has a proven track record in managing and optimizing cloud infrastructures, enabling seamless SaaS transitions for our clients.

Modernizing infrastructure for an online retail marketplace

One of our clients, the online retail marketplace, struggled with inefficient legacy systems, limited scalability and flexibility, data silos, and lack of insights. As a result, the client faced missed sales opportunities and customer dissatisfaction due to their outdated, on-premise infrastructure and lack of real-time data analysis capabilities.

We designed and implemented a comprehensive AWS-based infrastructure by:

• Creating an integrated cloud-based platform using AWS services, consolidating data and functionalities, and enabling seamless integration between inventory management, sales, and customer relationship management systems.
• Utilizing AWS’s scalable infrastructure, including Amazon EC2 and Auto Scaling, to automatically scale resources based on customer traffic, ensuring optimal performance and accommodating varying levels of demand.
• Implementing a centralized data repository using AWS services for real-time data visibility and advanced analytics capabilities, enabling the client to make data-driven decisions and drive business growth.

These solutions successfully modernized the client’s infrastructure, resulting in a 25% reduction in costs from bypassing physical hardware maintenance, a 99.9% uptime, and a 50% reduction in latency.

And that’s why AWS SaaS partners like Simform are recognized for successfully implementing AWS infrastructure and consistently delivering high-quality solutions tailored to their clients’ unique needs.

Businesses can easily find our SaaS professional services through our offerings on AWS Marketplace. Simform also ensures optimal utilization of cloud resources by identifying the best-fit AWS services and configurations that cater to client’s specific requirements while optimizing efficiency and minimizing costs.

The Forrester TEI study reveals that businesses prefer SaaS architecture for various application categories, making it a top technology for digital transformation. As a result, accelerated time-to-market becomes increasingly important to leverage the full potential of SaaS solutions. With expertise in cloud-based software, infrastructure, and application management, AWS SaaS Competency Partners help customers improve project success rates and reduce time-to-market for their applications.

SaaS solutions also require robust security to effectively and securely manage tenant environments and data, especially for regulated industries. AWS SaaS Competency Partners have extensive experience architecting and implementing security controls to meet compliance requirements. Partnering with them reduces risks and costs associated with achieving security and compliance objectives.

Operational excellence is another crucial aspect of the successful implementation and management of SaaS solutions. The ability to automate and streamline the operational footprint not only enhances the SaaS solution’s overall performance but also lays the foundation for rapid innovation, increased agility, and faster market response. Working with AWS SaaS Competency Partners enables companies to optimize their operational experience with advanced tooling, processes, and insights.

Enhancing digital marketing for Auto Dealerships with optimized cloud-based solutions

Automotive dealerships require efficient and secure digital marketing platforms for improved customer engagement and sales. A major auto dealership SaaS platform provider faced challenges with multi-tenancy, security, and significant operational expenses. Additionally, the platform experienced difficulties in managing data stored in the S3 bucket and API inefficiencies affecting overall system performance and response times.

To address these issues and ensure data security, we implemented a multi-tenant solution with robust security measures, including user authentication, authorization, and data encryption. The team further leveraged AWS compute optimization services to right-size server infrastructure, reducing costs. S3 bucket data management was enhanced with lifecycle policies for economical storage optimization, and API-related inefficiency was resolved using host-based routing, resulting in improved system performance and reduced downtime.

Architecture diagram

As a result of these strategic enhancements, the client’s monthly operational costs were reduced by 52%, system uptime improved to 99.9%, and overall efficiency increased by 400%. Furthermore, the solution contributed to a 113% boost in auto dealership customer sales.

The versatility of SaaS use cases ranges from streamlining business operations to automating customer interactions. No matter the use case, our solutions ensure complete tenant isolation and customized access controls following security best practices. For instance, we implemented a highly secure and low-latency architecture for a live-streaming e-commerce platform serving hundreds of white-labeled tenants. We also developed an IoT-enabled parking management system providing powerful operational insights through real-time sensor data analytics.

As a Premier AWS Consulting Partner with over 200 certified experts and 15 validated service deliveries, we have the proven expertise to cost-effectively create, transition, or enhance your SaaS solutions on AWS. Meanwhile, our status as an APN member provides access to additional technical support and cost benefits from AWS that translate into savings for your business. With the ability to handle complex migrations and integrations and an agile approach focused on security, scalability, and high availability, we are ready to tackle your most ambitious SaaS projects on AWS.