By using AWS and AWS Marketplace, Crayon Data has been able to operate efficiently while providing a richly functional product that meets client demands. AWS Marketplace provided a centralized online location for the business to find, buy, deploy, and manage software that allows Crayon Data to use the software they want faster and easier. In particular, the business avoided laborious procurement requirements and can now access software on a subscription basis.

“Without AWS Marketplace, I would have had to trial a range of products before selecting one that might meet our needs. I would then have to take up to six weeks to get comfortable with the selected product, while negotiating a contract for the software could take another three weeks,” Vulapalli says. With AWS Marketplace, the trial and subscription process can be completed in three days.

Furthermore, the business can reuse its existing AWS payment terms to do this. Vulapalli estimates the overall reduction in procurement and subscription time across the 10 SaaS products acquired from AWS Marketplace at about six months per year--time that is now allocated to valuable development activities.

The products subscribed from AWS Marketplace have enabled Crayon Data to optimize storage and compute capacity, improve the quality of coding, and reduce testing cycles from 1.5 weeks for each release to about two days. The benefits of the SaaS products available from AWS Marketplace have supplemented the cost, performance, and availability rewards of using existing services offered by AWS. “When we conducted an assessment in late 2016, we were achieving up to 20 percent better performance through AWS than through a rival cloud-service provider. At the same time, we found AWS was at least 10 percent cheaper than the closest competition,” says Vulapalli.

Crayon Data is now well-positioned to realize its longer-term growth ambitions. “The AWS infrastructure is core to our value proposition, and the range of software available from AWS Marketplace is both easy to procure, deploy, and creates a more efficient software usage model for us. We look forward to growing and achieving greater efficiencies with AWS and AWS Marketplace well into the future,” says Vulapalli.