News

New AWS SaaS Subscriptions Simplify Access, Billing

• By David Ramel
• 11/17/2016

Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) is now offering Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscriptions to simplify the access and billing processes for the bevy of SaaS wares on the AWS Marketplace.

Whereas independent software vendors (ISVs) offering more than 800 SaaS products on the marketplace previously had to set up their own billing and metering systems -- or rely on a third party to do so for them -- they can now combine usage charges within existing AWS accounts via an API.

The first SaaS subscriptions are availabe in areas such as: application development and monitoring; security and log management; databases, BI and Big Data; media; storage; and more.

"The new SaaS solutions run on AWS infrastructure and you will pay only for the service that you consume, with no monthly fees or subscription costs," said AWS spokesperson Jeff Barr in a blog post yesterday. "For example, you can buy security services on a per-host basis, log processing on a per-GB-ingested basis, geocoding on a per-request basis, or caching on a per-GB-cached basis. Usage charge for the services that you consume will appear on your AWS bill."

The company said the SaaS subscription service is especially useful to cloud computing customers who use multiple SaaS wares. In effect, the new system makes finding, consuming and paying for SaaS offerings as simple as the process for buying traditional AWS Marketplace software, said exec Dave McCann in a statement yesterday.

"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," McCann said. "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."

At this early stage of the program, not all of those 800-plus solutions are available via subscriptions. Although new ISVs will be added regularly, subscription services are now available 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.

On the AWS Marketplace SaaS Subscription site are offerings from those vendors providing services including data transfer, sales tax/compliance, image and video management, backup/disaster recovery and many more.

Dynatrace, for example, immediately issued a news release announcing it was offering a SaaS subscription for cloud application monitoring. "Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers can easily purchase and deploy Dynatrace's cloud application performance management service directly through AWS Marketplace," the company said. "This eliminates many of the discrete steps usually involved in the procurement, deployment and billing of cloud-based software."