Find, try, configure, and launch SaaS applications in AWS Marketplace

Kar: Everyone, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your presence and I hope all of you are having a great time at re:Invent. My name is Kar Bora and I'm a senior product manager at AWS Marketplace. My role is to build awesome SaaS features which help you find, try, buy, and deploy SaaS products from Marketplace.

With me here is Andre.

Andre: Hi everyone, I'm Andre Katnik. I'm a principal product manager in AWS Marketplace. I've been on this team for four years and I'm focused on building deployment solutions to make it really easy to consume third party applications on AWS.

Kar: So let's take a quick look at the agenda for today. We are going to provide a quick overview of AWS Marketplace. Then we'll talk about SaaS free trials, how it can help you evaluate the product before you make a purchase. Next, we will talk about vendor insights, a solution that helps you streamline vendor risk assessment. And finally, we'll talk about Quick Launch, a recently announced feature which really simplifies how you deploy SaaS products from Marketplace.

Andre, do you want to take us to Marketplace?

Andre: Yeah, thanks Kar. If you're not familiar, AWS Marketplace is a digital catalog that offers thousands of products from independent software vendors, data providers and professional services providers. AWS Marketplace offers you a broad selection of products from over 70 categories including generative AI, machine learning, dev ops, security, business apps and many others. In Marketplace you can find solutions for all of your business needs.

We offer flexible pricing features for AWS customers. We were the first marketplace to introduce private offers which allow you to negotiate custom terms and custom pricing with software vendors. We also offer standard contracts - these are standardized, unified license agreements between you and the software vendors, which is now available for more than 60% of products in AWS Marketplace. That can simplify the procurement process and cut weeks off your procurement cycle when onboarding new vendors.

Through many different deployment options, we enable your developers to get started with the applications in just a matter of minutes when they buy it from Marketplace, making it easy and streamlined for them to use third party software.

And finally, we offer a number of features to make governance and compliance much easier. For example, the IT and procurement admins can have a single pane of glass consolidated view on all the agreements, all the vendors, and the third party software that they are buying from Marketplace.

We were also the first marketplace to introduce the feature to do risk assessment of third party applications, to put this in context, we partner with more than 4000 sellers who offer over 15,000 products in AWS Marketplace, and more than 300,000 AWS customers are using it on a daily basis for their software needs.

Kar: So let's talk about buying SaaS. Software as a Service continues to be the preferred software delivery option for many customers. Small and medium businesses can use up to 100 applications, and we hear from enterprise customers that they are using over 250 SaaS applications in their portfolio. At that scale, SaaS comes with a number of challenges.

The first challenge is how do I find the right solution with thousands of solutions available in the market? How do I find those products that meet my business needs?

The second one is compliance - you want to make sure the applications you are buying meet your compliance criteria and guidance.

And finally, the deployment - for certain SaaS categories like monitoring, security, configuring and launching SaaS applications can be time consuming and difficult because of the lack of integration between third party vendors and cloud providers.

In the following sections, we'll show you how AWS Marketplace can solve these problems.

Yeah, let's talk about SaaS free trials. Now, we've heard from you over the years how free trials can be essential in your procurement process. And I'm very happy to inform that we have more than 250 SaaS products that offer a free trial through Marketplace.

Now, when as a customer you want to try a product, you don't want to commit to a purchase, right? And your organizations might have spent control policies and they would want to avoid any surprise billing or overage when you are just going to try a product.

So keeping all of this in mind, we designed free trials in Marketplace in such a way that you never incur any infrastructure charge, they're always absolutely free. Also, when you start a free trial in Marketplace, they don't automatically convert to a paid subscription when your free trial period ends.

What that means is you have full control over when your billing starts and when you are ready to make a purchase. So you try a product, you like it and now you want to commit and you want to make a purchase, you can either subscribe to the public offer or you can work with the vendor to negotiate a private offer and then you can simply upgrade seamlessly all from Marketplace.

Now let's take a quick look at how it works. How do you get started with the free trial?

So a quick demo, this is a search page in Marketplace. On the search page, you can easily find SaaS products that are offering a free trial. All that you need to do is on the left menu, you can select the free trial search filter. And when you apply SaaS, you can see there are more than 250 products that have free trials in Marketplace today.

When you decide which product you want to try, you can navigate to the product detail page. Now this is what a detail page would typically look like. On the left, you will see this free trial badge next to the product logo that validates the product is offering a free trial in Marketplace. And there's a "Try for free" button. When you click on Try for free, you can navigate to the offer page to subscribe to the free trial.

Now this is a typical offer page in Marketplace. I want to draw your attention to three things here:

1. The first is on the right corner, you will see that the cost for the free trial is $0. As I mentioned previously, free trials are always free, there's never a charge.

2. The second thing is that in the free trial dimension table, you will notice that you can review the duration of the free trial. This product is offering a 15 day free trial, but it could vary from anywhere between 15 days to 90 days depending on what the vendor wants to offer.

3. And finally, you can also review the scope of the free trial here. You can see how many units of the product are being available to you during the free trial period.

And once you subscribe to the free trial, it's very easy to manage it through the Marketplace console. Now, after subscribing, you'll see your free trial subscription here in Marketplace and you can review when your free trial ends. And when you decide to purchase, you can begin your upgrade right from the console to upgrade to a paid subscription.

You navigate to the offer page again, on the offer page, you can select a paid offer from the offer drop down. It could be the public offer or the private offer you negotiate with the vendor and in one click, you can upgrade all from within Marketplace.

Yeah, I want to take a quick moment to introduce Private Marketplace. Private Marketplace is a governance feature which allows IT admins to create a catalog of products that users in their organization can subscribe to. And we have made it easy for IT admins to bulk add SaaS products that are offering a free trial.

As you can see here, I've applied a search filter for free trial. I can see the list of products and in one click, I can add all of these products directly to the Private Marketplace experience for my organization.

Thanks, good job. Let's talk about compliance now. With the increasing adoption of SaaS, for SaaS applications, you don't have access to the architecture and it becomes absolutely critical to do risk assessment of the vendors before you commit to a bigger purchase, before you go all in with certain solutions.

And risk assessment comes with a number of challenges. Usually what we heard from enterprise customers, they would send long questionnaires to the vendors with hundreds of questions trying to understand how the applications are designed, how they work - for example, where is the data stored, how is authentication done, etc. This can add weeks and sometimes even months to the procurement cycle.

Also this is a very manual process and always requires a lot of back and forth between the vendor and the customer who wants to buy the solution. The responses you are getting from software vendors are self-assessed, so you don't have a way to validate and check them.

And finally, this process in many enterprise customers is usually repeated every year. So imagine you have a portfolio of over 200 SaaS products, you need to do this every year manually with all the questionnaires - that becomes a huge burden for your procurement teams and your IT admins.

But what that means for the builders, for the developers, is that their access to software is usually delayed because of those checks.

To solve that we built AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights. This feature offers consolidated security and compliance information all in a single dashboard.

So first, it allows you to quickly discover products in AWS Marketplace based on specific criteria of the security profiles and security certifications that the application has. Here is the remaining transcript formatted:

Andre: Second, we collect all the information and we add this information on your behalf. We can save up to 8 to 10 weeks of your procurement cycle because you don't need to engage with the vendors - Vendor Insights has already done that.

And finally, we do all the automated checks. So if something changes in the security posture of the application, Vendor Insights will be sending you automated updates so you can take action immediately.

Let me show you how that works. I'll start with the search page again. On the left side, you select the security profiles - today we support over 120 products. And when you select this, it opens an additional menu which shows you the product certificates - for example, ISO 27001 and others. So you can see what certificates were applicable for certain applications.

When you go to the product detail page, you can request, you can view the assessment data. You can find this button under the orange purchase button. When you click it, you're taken to the console, to the Vendor Insights console experience.

That's how it looks like when you first land on this page - you will see the snapshot of all security certifications that are available for this product. If you want to get more information and get a detailed security analysis and security posture snapshot of the application, you need to request access to Vendor Insights.

That's a simple process - you fill in a short form, mostly providing your contact information and information about your business, which goes to the vendor. The vendor takes a couple of hours, up to one day, to approve your request.

And once this request is approved, you will get full access to the Vendor Insights dashboard. That's how it looks. So for example, for our demo product, we have 125 controls available.

What makes Vendor Insights special is that more than half of these controls are automatically checked and vetted through our integration with the vendors. The second half of those controls are self-reported by the vendors, but it's reviewed by our specialists and updated on a regular basis.

Let me show you an example of one of the security controls available through Vendor Insights. So for example, if your policy requires an application to have support for two-factor authentication, that's one of the controls that we're checking when onboarding vendors to Vendor Insights.

So you will see from this dashboard if this application is compliant or not with this requirement, and you can also see additional comments and information from the vendor on how that works.

Alright, so let's talk about SaaS Quick Launch. I'm super excited about this feature - we announced it in the partner keynote yesterday. As I mentioned, this feature really simplifies SaaS deployment through Marketplace.

But before I dive into what is Quick Launch, let's try and take a moment to understand the challenges you face when you're deploying a SaaS product.

So for certain categories of SaaS like security and monitoring, you might need to deploy resources in your account. And it could be something as simple as a cross-account role or deploying a monitoring agent.

And there's not always clear guidance available on how to go about deploying these resources. And there are security considerations when you're deploying them manually or when you use a third party Terraform module to deploy these resources.

The Terraform modules or the manual process can introduce security risk - it may not follow AWS security best practices. And finally, due to all this, it could be a really lengthy drawn out process which can take hours and sometimes days to even get started with your SaaS product to have it fully functioning.

So, SaaS Quick Launch solves these challenges - and how does it do it?

When a product has SaaS Quick Launch enabled you get a guided experience in Marketplace on how to configure the SaaS product. And this really saves time - it speeds up your deployment process.

And because of the automated configuration, you can avoid going through or combing through the product guides or user guides. And you can in a few clicks deploy all of these AWS resources following AWS security best practices.

Finally, we support the deployment through CloudFormation. CloudFormation is an infrastructure as code service in AWS which really simplifies the deployment.

We work with the vendors to build these CloudFormation templates for the SaaS product and these templates are validated by AWS making sure they follow the security best practices.

Let's take a quick look at how you can get started with Quick Launch in Marketplace. So for Quick Launch, when it's configured on a product, you get a guided experience in four simple steps.

You would deploy the product in step one. You can review the required permissions for deploying the product. Now, let's take an example of say you need to create a cross-account role and for that you need IAM permissions to create role. So you can review that in step one.

In step two, you create an account with the SaaS vendor - this is basically registering your account with the SaaS tenant.

In step three, you provision the required resources and this is through CloudFormation, as I mentioned previously.

And step four, after you complete the first three steps in a click, you can launch your product.

Now let's double click on these steps to understand this a little more.

In step one, you create a service-linked role which allows Marketplace to manage deployment metadata in your account. What I mean by deployment metadata is say API keys or app keys.

Now when you buy a SaaS product, they will typically generate these keys for you and they can pass that to Marketplace programmatically so we can save it in your account.

And the second thing that you do here is you can review the list of permissions that you need to deploy the SaaS product. And we made it easy by providing a link here which you can easily share with your IT admins, so they can review the permissions and they can grant you the permissions required to complete the steps.

In step two, you create the vendor account. So after you register successfully, the vendor might pass these API keys to us through the API integration we have with the vendor. And the real benefit here is that you don't have to manually generate these keys or copy and paste them - the vendor is automatically passing them to us.

And we'll see how we are going to use those keys in step three when you're actually going to deploy the template.

In step three, you in a couple of clicks, you would deploy the CloudFormation template which creates the resources in your account.

Now, if you go back to the analytics example, where you're deploying a cross-account role you would have - so let's say you don't use Quick Launch, you'd have to manually go to the IAM console, create the role and add a reference to the API key that was generated for you.

But with CloudFormation, you're just deploying that role in a click. And so we have automated the whole experience through Quick Launch.

And finally, after you're done with deployment of your resources and your AWS environment is connected to the SaaS product, you can in a single click launch your software which should be ready for you to use.

Andre: Thanks Kar, I'm really excited about this Quick Launch thing. It's we heard from our beta customers that it reduces the time to get started from hours, sometimes seven days to just five minutes.

So I encourage you to get started and try some of the features that we talked about today. On the left side is a shortcut to all the free trials products, free trials available in Marketplace.

In the middle is the QR code for the products that support Vendor Insights if you want to learn more about security posture of the applications.

And on the right side, you have some of the logos of the applications that are already supporting SaaS Quick Launch and you can deploy just in a matter of minutes and clicks.

Thank you for joining us today. It was a pleasure. If you have any additional questions, Karan and I will be around for a couple of minutes after the session. If you want to learn more about Marketplace, please stop by at our booth - we're on the other side of the expo.