AWS Marketplace to feature SaaS & API subscriptions

Amazon Web Services has made its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications subscriptions available to customers directly through AWS Marketplace. According to the company with SaaS subscriptions on AWS Marketplace, customers can start using third-party SaaS and Application Programming Interface (API) products and pay through their existing AWS bill.

Benefits

With SaaS Subscriptions on AWS Marketplace, customers who use dozens of SaaS products across their organizations can manage all of the procurement, subscriptions, and payments in a single place, avoiding the hassle of dealing with separate bills from multiple ISVs (independent software vendors). Customers get a single monthly bill that includes their SaaS usage charges along with charges for the other AWS Marketplace products and AWS services they use. Wider and easier access to SaaS products helps customers focus squarely on what differentiates their business, with less time and effort spent managing applications, infrastructure, procurement, and billing. Dave McCann, Vice President, AWS Marketplace and Catalog Services, Amazon Web Services said, “Customers rely on AWS Marketplace to take the heavy lifting out of procuring and deploying the software and services they need to run their business. As SaaS becomes a strong preference for certain types of applications, customers have asked us whether we can make it as easy to find, subscribe to, and manage their favorite SaaS solutions as it is to buy traditional software on AWS Marketplace.”

“No other cloud infrastructure marketplace has a combination of broad SaaS selection and a production API and SDK that enables software vendors to deliver unified metering and billing for their SaaS products with such a wide range of metering options. We’ve focused on making this as simple and flexible as possible for ISVs, which will result in deep and broad choice for our customers. With SaaS Subscriptions on AWS Marketplace, we’re making it easier than ever for customers to get the applications they want in one place, with one bill.”

The SaaS products and APIs can be subscribed from Alert Logic, Aspera, Avalara, Bitium, Cloudinary, Cloudyn, Datadog, Datapath, Dome9 Security, Druva, Dynatrace, HERE, NetApp, New Relic, Pitney Bowes, Qubole, Signiant, Solano Labs, Solodev, Sumo Logic, and Trend Micro, with new ISVs to be added regularly, states AWS.

Why ISVs?

AWS Marketplace claims to already offer more than 800 SaaS and API listings. Now, ISVs can let AWS handle the metering and billing when customers purchase these products. With a flexible range of metering dimensions, ISVs can give customers options to pay in ways that best suit their needs. Deploying applications is simple, so customers can get SaaS applications up and running more quickly and get the security and scalability benefits of software built on AWS without having to manage the infrastructure it runs on.

How will help the Vendors?

Previously, ISVs that wanted to deliver a SaaS application to AWS customers needed to build their own metering and billing system, or purchase and integrate a third-party billing product. With SaaS Subscriptions on AWS Marketplace, ISVs can integrate their usage charges with a customer’s existing AWS bill through a new API, removing the need to build and maintain their own billing platform. This allows ISVs to focus on their products without diverting resources for billing, and can drive faster sales cycles with a streamlined purchasing experience.