Amazon Web Services (AWS) focuses on three things when working with software partners – product development, marketing and delivering it to end customers. If this piece sounds like a fan piece, it is – because we’ve worked with AWS for several years and the relationship has benefited our business immensely.
We’ve been able to scale without needing to buy or maintain physical infrastructure, which has reduced our costs considerably. Our customers and prospects can also access our product quicker. Because we no longer need to think about infrastructure and we can market more efficiently, we now have more time and resources to innovate.
AWS helps us build and scale quickly
AWS allows us to build and scale faster through spinning up new environments for development and testing. In the past, we had to maintain banks of servers and purchase physical infrastructure, but now we just add new servers and create a new environment leveraging the AWS infrastructure whenever we need it.
As a result our entire business has been able to scale quickly, and we’ve saved a significant amount of resources and money. It’s also a lot simpler and easier for us to manage AWS rather than a host of servers and data centers.
Customers can access our product faster
From a marketing perspective, we leverage AWS to create demonstration environments. This enables us to get our software into the hands of prospective customers fast. Our customers no longer have to provision new servers to trial our software. They can do this for an extended period of time on AWS – we just need to turn it on and let them get on with their job.
This has delivered considerable benefits from a marketing perspective. There are no delays for customers who want to try our product, which helps us market our product more effectively.
A number of our partners have built cloud platforms so they can deliver Yellowfin for customers in a completely hosted environment. Several partners have built their entire platform on AWS so our customers have a fully hosted environment from the get-go. Those partners wouldn’t have invested in the infrastructure or built their own data centers themselves, so AWS has also allowed them to scale.
This has accelerated our business by getting our customers started with Yellowfin faster. For example, Toustone has a five-minute provisioning process for customers who sign up to YellowfinCloud so they can get started immediately.
Leveraging AWS has helped us to scale our business. We don’t need to worry about infrastructure, it’s reduced our costs and it gives us time to innovate. We can get on with the job of building a great product and creating new solutions for our customers. For any software vendor building a business, I can’t recommend AWS highly enough.