SaaS Contracts

AWS ISV partners selling software subscriptions through the AWS Marketplace previously had to enact any long-term contracts on their own. But a new contract framework aims to make delivery of Software-as-a-Service from Amazon's partners more flexible.

Customers subscribing to those third-party services through the marketplace, and channel partners managing delivery of those services, will for the first time have the option, through SaaS Contracts, of expanding subscriptions to pre-negotiated contracts of one, two or three years. The AWS service offers APIs the software vendors can use to easily on board and set up customers in those contracts, Vogels said.

"It’s going to be a whole lot easier for any SaaS provider hosted in AWS to be able to provide their subscription-based services to the world," Jarrod Levitan, chief cloud officer at TriNimbus, an AWS partner based in Vancouver, said of the new service.

Doug Merritt, CEO of machine analytics vendor Splunk, a popular product on the marketplace, when invited on stage during Vogel's keynote told attendees: "Our customers want to purchase software with the least amount of friction possible. The new AWS Marketplace SaaS Contracts API enables an automated, online purchasing process, giving enterprise customers a fast and flexible way to buy and use Splunk."