Category: AWS Marketplace

Kamlesh Talreja is the Director of Engineering for AWS Marketplace. 

Do you sell on AWS Marketplace?

If so, you’re likely familiar with the benefits your customers get from AWS Marketplace, including pay-as-you-go pricing and simple deployment options. AWS Marketplace is our fast growing online store that helps customers discover, buy, and deploy software that runs on AWS. It’s an increasingly influential channel for ISVs, AWS Channel Resellers, and Systems Integrators (SIs) to offer software products and services to customers in AWS Marketplace’s multi-region footprint. Amazon EC2 hours deployed by AWS Marketplace listed products in 2015 grew to a record 143 million EC2 hours per month.

At AWS, we’re always adding new features based on the requests of our customers and software vendors. When we launched in April 2012, sellers could only list products on AWS Marketplace using hourly and monthly pricing. In 2014, the addition of new features allowed sellers to price their products under an additional annual pricing model. Even with these options, sellers couldn’t list certain products on AWS Marketplace and customers had to buy products in ways that, in some cases, didn’t match the value they received. Today, the AWS Marketplace team is happy to announce a software metering service that supports new pricing dimensions such as users, hosts, and data. After a seller integrates their product with AWS Marketplace Metering Service, that product will emit an hourly record capturing the usage of any single pricing dimension. Buyers can then easily subscribe to software priced by this new dimension on the AWS Marketplace website and only pay for what they use.

What does this mean for customers?

Many types of software provide value to customers based on the number of hosts the software manages, the amount of data it processes, or the number of users it allows. By permitting AWS Marketplace sellers to list products priced along these dimensions, customers who buy software on AWS Marketplace can now easily scale usage up and down on products that integrate with the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service. This better matches how customers want to pay and better matches the value they derive from software they buy on AWS Marketplace.

What does this mean for APN Partners who sell, or want to sell, on AWS Marketplace?

If you’re a software vendor selling on AWS Marketplace, chances are you are one of the over 100 sellers who have told us that you’d like the option to price your software on dimensions that reflect the value you deliver to your customers. Using the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service, you can now charge along the top dimensions.  This additional pricing flexibility opens the door for you to both modify your current product offering to use this feature, AND to bring new solutions to AWS Marketplace, and enables you to meet your customers’ needs in a seamless and scalable fashion.

“We are winning more buyers because they have the flexibility to buy our software in the way that meets their needs,” said Partha Panda, VP of Global Channel and Strategic Alliance, at Trend Micro. “We were able to quickly integrate with the AWS Marketplace Metering Service and begin selling our Deep Security Manager on a per host protected model. Our customers are now charged in the way that is aligned with the way AWS charges their customers, and they pay in the way they want, on their existing AWS bill.”

Other sellers taking advantage of flexible consumption pricing include Aspera, Chef, and SoftNAS.

When are products that support these new pricing dimensions available?

These products are available now. You can find all of them by searching AWS Marketplace. Visit https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace to get started.

How do I get started?

To register your product to use the new AWS Marketplace Metering Service, take the following steps:

• If you’re a new seller on AWS Marketplace, register by visiting AWS Marketplace, or go directly to: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/management/register/.
• Next, you will have to register your product for a new type of usage dimension. On the form, indicate the dimension you want to meter.
• Next, you’ll be able to acquire the specific productCode and usageDimension. When you register your product, you can download a SDK to help you format your metering records. You will have the option of downloading a SDK for any of the languages the AWS SDK supports.

To learn more about selling software on any of the new consumption dimensions, including the steps to modify your product to use the AWS Marketplace Metering Service, visit the AWS Marketplace Seller Portal.

This is a guest post from David Shurtliff, Enterprise Solutions Architect, AWS, and Gonen Stein, VP Business Development, CloudEndure

Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers who have been using AWS services for a long period may still be using Amazon EC2 instances in the EC2-Classic platform, as well as using instances in Amazon’s newer Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) service. EC2-VPC is your private, isolated portion of the AWS cloud, and became the default network environment on December 4, 2013. Any accounts created after this date support EC2-VPC only, and cannot use EC2-Classic. There are a number of advantages of using EC2-VPC:

• Security—You can control outbound (egress) and inbound (ingress) connectivity to EC2 resources, and you can create network access control lists (network ACLs) on VPC subnets
• Flexibility—You can define IP address ranges (CIDR blocks) and subnets
• Network isolation—You can control internal and external connectivity to EC2 resources
• Features—Certain AWS features and newer instance types, such as C4, M4, and T2 instances, are available only in EC2-VPC. For more information, see the Benefits of Using a VPC

If you want to move your existing workloads from EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC using a manual approach, you would launch new AMIs within your EC2-VPC, install and configure your applications and databases, export the data from your old servers, and import it to the new servers. You would also need to assess the EC2-Classic application stack in advance, and configure your target VPC and servers accordingly, including your networking, instance types, and volume types, to mirror the EC2-Classic environment.

To simplify the journey from EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC, you may want to use AWS Technology Partners such as CloudEndure for an automated, 1-click migration solution.

CloudEndure is an APN Advanced Technology Partner and AWS Storage Competency Partner who provides customers with live workload mobility between data centers, clouds, regions, and networks within a region. You can use CloudEndure’s technology to migrate your live workloads from your old EC2-Classic network into EC2-VPC, while maintaining your existing configuration, including instance types, private IP addresses, and load balancers. In addition to creating the new EC2-VPC configuration automatically and moving the entire workload, CloudEndure lets you select target VPCs that may already exist, as well define specific servers to be migrated.

An automated solution such as CloudEndure significantly reduces the time to complete the migration, without affecting the operation and performance of the current workload while the data migration is in progress. The use of continuous data replication means that no data will be lost during the cutover from EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC.

In addition to EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC migration, you can also use CloudEndure to:

• Migrate physical or virtual servers to AWS
• Use AWS as a dramatically lower-cost disaster recovery site for your on-premises workloads
• Provide cross-region disaster recovery for your cloud-based workloads
• Clone your workloads within or across regions and Availability Zones for dev/test and staging purposes

This blog post walks you through the steps to migrate an EC2 workload from EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC using CloudEndure.

Getting Started

At a high level, the migration process will create instance replicas in a region, VPC, and subnet of your choosing. EC2 security groups are created in the target VPC, and rules from the source security group are copied to the target security group at the time of instance replica creation. The following diagram represents a high-level view of the CloudEndure replication process.

Step 1. Configure Your Account

The first step is to sign up for an account at cloudendure.com. Go to the signup page to create an account, and then log in to the CloudEndure dashboard to connect your CloudEndure account with your AWS account. You will need to enter your account credentials associated with the appropriate IAM policy, and set your source/target regions for the instance migration. You may migrate your EC2-Classic instances either to a VPC in the same region or to a VPC in a different region. You should then select a subnet that will be dedicated as a staging ground to replicate your source instances’ data. This subnet is used to maintain continuous replication of the data until you decide to cut over into the EC2-VPC and stop replication.

Step 2. Install the CloudEndure Agents

Download and install the CloudEndure agents on Microsoft Windows and Linux instances running in your EC2-Classic network. In this example, we will install the agent on these two EC2-Classic Windows and Linux instances:

As shown here in the Amazon EC2 console, the instance is outside a VPC:

The agent installation takes about 1 minute. The agent installation does not require a reboot, nor does it impact the source machine’s performance in any way. After connecting to the source machine, download and execute the appropriate Linux or Windows operating system CloudEndure agent. The following command line sequence shows a successful agent installation.

Step 3. Start Continuous Replication

Once the agent installation completes, the instance name will appear in the CloudEndure dashboard, and replication of the data will begin. During replication, you will see the percentage completion of each replicated instance. When replication reaches 100% for an instance, its status will change to a green checkmark.

Note: While CloudEndure agents are replicating data, either during the initial sync phase or during continuous sync, you should see CloudEndure replicator instance(s) with their attached volumes located within the replication server subnet as defined earlier in step 1.

Step 4. Create the Replicas in the Target VPC

When all servers show a green checkmark, select the instances that you want to migrate into the target VPC and click Create Replica.

Note: Before you create a replica, ensure that the status field for all instances shows a green checkmark, and pay attention to the last update time. Your replica(s) created in the new VPC will be as up-to-date as the time shown. The screenshot below shows the instance selection check boxes, replication status, last update time, and replica creation button.

The replica creation process takes several minutes. Once it is complete, the replica instances will appear on the right side of the dashboard:

Note: The replica instances in the new VPC will carry over any security group configuration, Elastic Load Balancing configuration, etc. In your AWS console, you will now be able to see both your old EC2-Classic instances and the new instances within the target VPC. In this example, the instances outlined in red are the newly created instances within the target VPC.

In the Amazon EC2 console, you can confirm that the instances are now in a VPC.

That’s it! Once you have confirmed that your application is behaving as expected in the target VPC, you may redirect your users to the new EC2-VPC based instances via public DNS redirection.

Note: This replication methodology will not impact your source server, and you can test your target replica servers in the EC2-VPC without any system disruption, so go ahead and test away.

Should you wish to make corrections to the application and spin up a newer version of your replica instances, you may delete the current replica by using the Delete Replica button, make the appropriate changes to the source instances, and repeat step 4.

When the cutover is complete and replication from your old EC2-Classic environment is no longer needed, you may uninstall the agents by right clicking the instances in the CloudEndure dashboard and selecting Stop Replication. This will stop all replication and remove the agent.

To find out more about CloudEndure, visit AWS Marketplace, or email info@cloudendure.com.

The AWS cloud has been shown to be a natural complement to the flexibility that Docker containers offer organizations, and today Amazon EC2 and and Amazon ECS are very popular places to launch and run Docker containers. Customers continue to expand their container footprint and move their applications from dev to test to production, and look for enhanced support and additional product offerings as they embrace the AWS cloud as a place to run Docker containers. At DockerCon 2015 in San Francisco, we discussed work done by both teams to better support Docker on AWS for our customers, and today we take another step toward supporting those who wish to run Docker exclusively on AWS by announcing support for Docker Trusted Registry in AWS Marketplace. Customers can go from building a Docker application locally on a developer’s laptop and ship to their production Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC) with just a few commands.

Like Docker Hub, Docker Trusted Registry (DTR) is a solution that allows organizations to store and manage Docker containers. However, DTR can be run as an EC2 instance, allowing complete control over how and where the registry is available and accessed from within your environment.

Configuring Your AWS Environment for Docker Trusted Registry

By running Docker Trusted Registry, organizations are able to create custom levels of access control to their Docker images. Certain components of this access control model include support for customer SSL certificates, LDAP integration to limit access to specific users, and leveraging the network access control capabilities of Amazon VPC.

Amazon VPC allows you to configure network settings and isolate cloud resources as much as necessary to meet security or compliance standards. In the case of DTR, we recommend first deciding if your registry instance should be accessible from the Internet or only from within your VPC. If the instance should be available from the Internet, you can launch the DTR instance into a public subnet. However, take care to configure the security group to only allow access from specific trusted IP ranges over ports 22 (SSH), 80 (HTTP) and SSL (443).

Please note that when DTR is launched from AWS Marketplace, the default security group is open to the world, so it’s up to you to restrict access to the IP ranges appropriate for you environment.

The other option is to place your DTR instance into a private subnet so that only resources within your network are able to access the registry. In this case, you’ll need to ensure that you have either a bastion host set up or a VPN into your VPC so you can manage the DTR instance via the web GUI.

We recommend using an Amazon Route 53 private hosted zone with Docker Trusted Registry. A private hosted zone is always queried first by instances in your VPC, and is only accessible from within your VPC- so this allows for the convenience of choosing the endpoint you will use to interact with your registry. This DNS name is what you’ll reference when pushing and pulling images from your registry, so choose something that makes sense- here we’ll use dtr.mydomain.com as an A record that points to our DTR instances IP address.

Because DTR leverages Amazon S3 for back-end storage of your Docker images, we recommend creating an IAM role that will allow your instance to communicate securely with S3. IAM roles are assigned to EC2 instances at instance launch. Here we assume that there is a dedicated bucket for our Docker images, and we can scope our IAM policy accordingly:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "s3:*",
            "Resource": [
                "arn:aws:s3:::my_DTR_bucket",
                "arn:aws:s3:::my_DTR_bucket/*"
            ]
        }
    ]
}

Once you’ve decided on a VPC, how to scope access to your registry, created an IAM role, and decided on a DNS record to use, you’re ready to move forward with setting up the DTR instance itself.

Setting Up Supported Docker Environments on AWS

To begin, we’ll be using the Docker Trusted Registry “pay as you go” AMI from AWS Marketplace.  This licensing model is intended to simplify the deployment experience. To further enhance the experience, Docker have included a 30-day free trial of their software. The details are provided on the product page in AWS Marketplace, which is listed here: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B014VG1SIG

Once you’ve launched the AMI, you can follow the AWS and Docker Trusted Registry guide to configure the DTR instance: https://docs.docker.com/docker-trusted-registry/install/dtr-ami-byol-launch/ 

When launching your instance, you’ll need to choose an appropriate instance size. Docker recommends an M3.Large for initial test deployments. As your environment grows, you can use the monitoring features built into the Docker Trusted Registry web GUI to keep an eye on resource utilization and scale your instance size as needed.

Once the DTR instance is up and running, you’ll also need to launch Docker Engine instances (instances running the commercially-supported version of Docker). You can find AMIs to launch Docker Engine instances here: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B014VG1R4Q

One thing to note about Docker Engine instance configuration: if you’re using a self-signed certificate, you’ll also have to configure your clients to pull the certificate from the DTR instance. This can be done using the following commands passed as a user data script:

#!/bin/bash
export DOMAIN_NAME=dtr.mydomain.com
openssl s_client -connect $DOMAIN_NAME:443 -showcerts /dev/null | openssl x509 -outform PEM | sudo tee /etc/pki/ca-trust/source/anchors/$DOMAIN_NAME.crt
sudo update-ca-trust
sudo service docker restart

This process depends on your OS, so check here for more comprehensive detail: https://docs.docker.com/docker-trusted-registry/configuration/#installing-registry-certificates-on-client-docker-daemons

Once your Docker Engine client(s) are launched, you can begin interacting with the DTR instance, pushing and pulling images to and from your own private registry from another EC2 instance within your AWS VPC, a peer VPC, or remote location connected via VPN.

From Developer Desktops Direct to the Cloud

Continuous Integration and Delivery is a critical workflow for many teams. Docker supports a number of CI/CD tools, like AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy, and a number of deployment endpoints, like Amazon EC2 or Amazon ECS. Docker Trusted Registry can serve as the foundation of these automated workflows that can take code from a developer’s desktop, through integration and unit testing, to a staging or QA environment, and finally to production deployment.

In order to understand how to interact with DTR at the most foundational level, we’ll examine a basic Docker image workflow that can provide the baseline understanding necessary to build more complex CI/CD workflows later.

We’ll first need a client machine that is configured to interact with the DTR instance.

First, we’re going to pull a public Jenkins instance with docker pull Jenkins

Next we’ll tag the image with docker tag dtr.mydomain.com/my-jenkins

Finally, push the image to your local DTR instance docker push dtr.mydomain.com/my-jenkins

A robust and scalable CI pipeline can be built with Docker and Jenkins on AWS to take the code from your developer laptops, directly into integration testing cluster on AWS. Code pushed to a repository like Github can trigger automatic builds of containers using Jenkins, and the resulting container can be pushed to your Docker Trusted Registry instance. This container can then be tested in QA, and ultimately rolled out to production using AWS services like AWS CodeDeploy or AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

We encourage you to take a look at the new Docker commercially-supported software in AWS Marketplace today. We hope the above information gets you started, and we’d love to hear your feedback.

For additional video tutorials, resources and more at the Docker and AWS Resource Center: https://docker.com/aws

PHP is a scripting language designed for web and mobile development, allowing static webpages to become dynamic, interactive, and personalized. AWS offers a number of resources to help developers develop secure, reliable, and scalable PHP applications on the AWS cloud. In addition to the resources, tools, and documentation we provide, Zend Technologies, an Advanced APN Technology Partner, provides an enterprise-grade application platform for PHP through AWS Marketplace.

About Zend

Zend’s roots in the PHP community are very deep—the company’s founders were two of the original authors of PHP—and Zend leverages its PHP expertise to deliver a robust, scalable, and high performing environment that ensures businesses of all sizes can innovate fast and reliably. Zend products have already been used to develop and run thousands of PHP business-critical applications worldwide. An APN Partner since 2012, Zend offers its Zend Server solution on AWS through AWS Marketplace.

Drivers to the AWS Cloud

General trends toward the cloud in application development, along with customer demand, drove the Zend team to build on AWS. “Nearly all new application development is cloud-first; and Zend was an early adopter of cloud-first strategies,” explains Amy Anderson, Zend Director of Business Development. Zend’s customer base, which is focused on agile development and continuous delivery, has been naturally inclined toward the cloud, and the team recognized working with AWS as the most effective way to monetize its cloud offerings.

“AWS makes it so easy for developers to access and use Zend Server,” Anderson says. “From the citizen developer to the corporate development department, AWS lets developers consume exactly what they need. We see developers start with very small development images, which is cost effective. And we also see large organizations running huge clusters that would be impractical in an on premise environment.”

Zend Server on AWS

Zend Server is a complete PHP distribution that also includes value-add features designed to optimize productivity, performance, scalability and reliability. Z-Ray, for example, gives developers real-time insights into how their code is performing and how it’s using systems resources—including AWS resources. Zend Server includes over 80 PHP extensions and supports Apache.

Zend Server on AWS lets organizations scale their applications to meet aggressive growth goals. Applications can get a performance boost with an integrated set of technologies that enables caching of data and code, job queues for asynchronous or offline processing of tasks, job scheduling to improve response and reduce server load, and dynamic cluster configuration.

Zend Server leverages AWS CloudFormation to enable customers to easily scale Zend Server on AWS.  Zend’s clustering technology is integrated with AWS clustering, ensuring that every workload is optimized for the available resources.

How Can APN Partners Work with Zend Server?

Anderson highlighted some of the ways in which fellow APN Partners can use Zend Server to support their end customers, explaining, “APN Partners who are delivering business-critical web and mobile applications, such as e-commerce, can benefit from the performance, scaling, and compliance features of Zend Server. For example, any vendor who wants the ability to deliver applications faster should consider Z-Ray, a technology in Zend Server that gives developers real-time insights into the quality and performance of their code.”

Zend Server and AWS can also help APN Partners react faster to security vulnerabilities. In one case, an MSP that supports hundreds of SMBs had several commerce sites hacked.  It took the MSP two weeks to patch the sites running open source PHP in a hosted environment, while it only took two days to patch the sites running Zend Server on AWS.  “Because Zend Server and AWS both increase the levels of automation, businesses can react faster to a changing environment,” Anderson says. “This is especially critical with commerce security.”

The Benefits of Working with AWS and AWS Marketplace

Zend’s AWS business grew by 3X in 2014, and the company is targeting 5X growth in 2015. A key driver of the company’s growth is AWS Marketplace. “We’re heavily dependent on the AWS Marketplace to market and deliver our cloud offerings. AWS Marketplace helps drive revenue for us. We’ve benefited from being featured on the Marketplace homepage banner and in the featured products section,” says Anderson.

From AWS Marketplace, customers can choose from three different editions of Zend Server: Developer, Professional, or Enterprise.  Each edition is available on both Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux. Once the customer selects their edition and Linux distribution, they can choose from a variety of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instance types on AWS, from the t2.micro to the c2.2xl. “AWS Marketplace gives customers the ability to select exactly what they want, and it presents the options in a logical way,” Anderson says.

A big benefit of offering its solutions on AWS Marketplace is the ability for Zend to support a broad range of customer use cases and customer sizes. “Because of the very small instance types available on AWS, we can offer our product to a broad number of very small customers,” explained Anderson “At the same time, the scalability of AWS clustering allows our largest customers to run configurations that were practically not feasible in an on-premise environment.”

Another common use case for Zend Server on AWS is customers who need to run a supported version of PHP 5.3. Currently the open source PHP community supports versions 5.4, 5.5., and 5.6.  But for a variety of reasons, many customers are still running applications that use PHP 5.3.  Zend is the only company to provide long-term support for PHP 5.3 at this time.  “If you have a production application that uses PHP 5.3, you’re taking a big risk if you’re not under support,” says Anderson.  “One of the easiest ways to run a supported, scalable environment for PHP 5.3 is to set up Zend Server through AWS Marketplace.”

Looking Forward

Zend has been investing in technologies that fuel the API economy and mobile applications for the enterprise, such as its Apigility offering.  “We’re looking forward to using AWS to help more enterprise customers achieve their business objectives in the areas of mobile app development,” Anderson says.

“We’ve been extremely pleased with our relationship with AWS,” she continues.  “And this is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Today, we are announcing the launch of the AWS Marketplace Consulting Partner Program. This program is intended for consulting partners, particularly Systems Integrators (SIs), with expertise in specific independent software vendor (ISV) software products listed on AWS Marketplace. Customers can discover and contact these consulting partners on AWS Marketplace. The Program launches with 2nd Watch, Datapipe, Cloudnexa, Cloudreach, Logicworks, Melbourne IT, Smart421, ClearScale, Slalom Consulting and many other AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners. These APN Partners support AWS Marketplace software from ISVs such as Brocade, F5 Networks, Sophos, TIBCO, Barracuda Networks, Fortinet, SoftNAS, Alert Logic, N2W Software, SafeNet, NetApp, MicroStrategy, Trend Micro, Docker, and Palo Alto Networks.

AWS Marketplace: Online Software Store for AWS

AWS Marketplace is the fast growing online software store that helps thousands of AWS customers accelerate project success and innovation, by enabling them to quickly search, test, buy, and deploy the right tools and products. AWS customers discover over 2200 software product offerings. They use these products to quickly build web sites, set up new business intelligence projects, automate new media publishing, create new storage environments, and run new applications on the AWS infrastructure.

AWS Marketplace Consulting Partner Program

In addition to the benefits APN Partners receive by being a part of the APN,   AWS Marketplace Consulting Partners also qualify for the below program  benefits:

• AWS Marketplace Consulting Partners get listed on AWS Marketplace, where AWS Marketplace customers can discover and contact them. Customers can filter consulting partners based on software vendor and country, and contact consulting partners using contact information available on AWS Marketplace.
• AWS Marketplace Consulting Partners will gain access to a range of resources and training to help their customers deploy, run, and manage applications in the AWS cloud. This will enable partners to grow their AWS business.
• AWS Marketplace Consulting Partners receive AWS credits to help them try out AWS Marketplace software. Credits can be applied to usage fees incurred while using AWS services, but cannot be applied to fees payable to the Marketplace software vendor for use of the Marketplace software.

ISVs Can Now Grow Their Base of AWS Capable Channel Partners

For the hundreds of AWS Technology Partners (or ISVs) who already sell solutions on AWS Marketplace, the AWS Marketplace Consulting Partner Program can help ISVs build a strong ecosystem around AWS. The program provides ISVs with an easy way to market AWS among their channel partner network and helps train ISV channel partners on AWS using hands on trainings and certifications.

As ISVs encourage their channel partner ecosystem to grow their AWS expertise by joining the APN and the AWS Marketplace Consulting Partner Program, ISV customers will get access to a broad list of supported consulting partners for each ISV. This will help ISVs improve the experience for their customers.

Program Requirements

Consulting Partners who wish to participate in the AWS Marketplace Consulting Partner Program must be a registered channel partner of an existing AWS Marketplace seller.

In addition, AWS Marketplace Consulting Partners need to meet certain AWS requirements. Firms need to register as an APN Partner and obtain certain AWS technical trainings and certifications listed here. This allows us to ensure that the AWS Marketplace Consulting Partner is knowledgeable in working with the AWS platform.

To apply for the program, please follow the detailed instructions listed here.

We’re all about innovation at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Along with consistently increasing our own pace of innovation, our goal is to empower our AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners to utilize AWS Services to become innovators in their respective spaces. When our APN Partners focus on innovation, the result is disruptive solutions for end customers that allow them to focus their resources and development efforts on what matters most to their business.

Today, we’d like to highlight TIBCO Software Inc., an Advanced APN Technology Partner and Big Data Competency Partner, who has developed analytics solutions for customers on the AWS platform that integrate with a number of key AWS Services, such as Amazon Redshift and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS). TIBCO utilizes AWS for its Spotfire Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) data visualization and dashboards offering. In addition, it also relies on the AWS Marketplace to offer both its Spotfire and Jaspersoft data analytics tools in a pay-as-you-go, no upfront commitment pricing model, as well as annual options.

Who Is TIBCO Software Inc.?

TIBCO, headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, provides infrastructure and business intelligence data analytics software to customers to give them the ability to consistently innovate by connecting applications and data in a service-oriented architecture, streamlining activities through business process management, and giving people the information and intelligence analytics tools they need to make faster and smarter decisions. With offices in 20 countries around the world, the company serves customers globally and works with an ecosystem of over 200 partners. TIBCO has worked with AWS for several years.

What Has TIBCO Built on AWS?

“TIBCO’s approach is to empower customers to consume our business intelligence and data analytics tools in the cloud, in the way that is appropriate for the given requirement and audience. We offer solutions for both technical and business audiences on AWS, for a wide range of use cases ranging from hours to years,” said Andrew Lampitt, director, Cloud Analytics, TIBCO.

For business teams, TIBCO Spotfire provides visualization, dashboards, and advanced analytics. TIBCO Spotfire supports Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and more. TIBCO Spotfire Cloud is TIBCO’s SaaS BI service, powered by AWS, and it allows business teams to quickly and easily achieve advanced visualization and dashboards on-demand without having to manage the back-end infrastructure.

For technical teams, TIBCO Spotfire for AWS provides advanced visualization and dashboards in a pay-as-you-go, starting at < $1/hr—for Amazon Redshift, Amazon RDS, and more.

Also for technical teams, TIBCO Jaspersoft for AWS provides embedded reporting, dashboards, and business intelligence. The offering has been very successful, with well over 1,000 customers onboarded since its launch in February 2013. Additionally, TIBCO Jaspersoft has received consistently positive customer ratings for business intelligence and Big Data on the AWS Marketplace. With Jaspersoft for AWS, TIBCO offers auto-detect for both Amazon Redshift and Amazon RDS to quickly connect to customer data within 10 minutes from AWS Marketplace. “Technical teams can easily reskin the GUI, integrate BI within their applications with RESTful services and a purpose-built JavaScript framework. Jaspersoft works with a wide variety of other backend data sources: Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR), POJO, XML, Oracle, and DB2, for example,” said Lampitt.

Why AWS?

Prior to working with AWS, TIBCO tried a number of different approaches and providers to develop their solutions. Initially, TIBCO worked with a different cloud provider to develop and run their TIBCO Spotfire Cloud SaaS BI service. They chose to migrate to AWS, which has been successful for the TIBCO team. “We’ve enjoyed dramatic cost savings while increasing capacity since migrating Spotfire Cloud to AWS. Also very importantly, AWS Marketplace gives us the platform to provide business intelligence by the hour in a cost-effective way for customers,” Lampitt explained.

By developing on the AWS platform and utilizing AWS Marketplace as a channel, TIBCO is able to lower the cost of development and pass on their cost savings to their end users. “With TIBCO Jaspersoft, we built our own SaaS business intelligence solution, including our own multi-tenancy capability that still proves to be an important competitive differentiator today. But the niche we were targeting didn’t make sense for a number of reasons, and a particularly compelling one was the cost of maintaining the infrastructure. In offering TIBCO Analytics solutions on AWS Marketplace, we now have a cost-effective channel that allows us to not only manage the operational aspects, but to also offer cost savings to AWS customers,” explained Lampitt.

What’s the Benefit for End Users and APN Partners?

TIBCO offers their BI solutions on the AWS Marketplace, and have priced their solutions on AWS Marketplace in a way that is, in Lampitt’s opinion, most beneficial for end customers. “We’ve been an APN Partner for several years and were an early adopter of AWS Marketplace. We’re pleased to share a common perspective with AWS that customers should be able to prove out value on a daily basis, as opposed to making hefty upfront commitments on uncertain or unpredictable returns,” said Lampitt.

Both the TIBCO Jaspersoft and TIBCO Spotfire solutions are available on AWS Marketplace, starting at <$1/hr with no user limits or extra fees for data volumes. This allows end customers to ramp up their deployment in an economical way. “AWS Marketplace has been a great channel for us to reach new buyers, particularly those that seek granular control and flexibility for their analytics solutions,” Lampitt explained.

For APN Consulting Partners, Lampitt suggests exploring how the different TIBCO solutions can be utilized to build out analytics solutions for end customers with BI needs. Great examples include analytic applications by Artha Solutions, powered by Jaspersoft on AWS Test Drive. There, you can quickly try solutions for investment management, retail, and more. Another example is Full 360, an Advanced APN Consulting Partner and an inaugural Amazon Redshift Partner. Full 360 has expertise in complete managed service business intelligence powered by Jaspersoft for AWS and Amazon Redshift.

It’s easy to see these solutions in action. Business audiences can try Spotfire Cloud on a monthly basis. Technical audiences can take Jaspersoft and Spotfire for a spin on AWS Marketplace by the hour.

To learn more about TIBCO Software, visit the company’s AWS Partner Directory listing and check out its listings on AWS Marketplace.

Read more about APN Big Data Competency Partners here.

Security is our top priority at Amazon Web Services (AWS). We invest heavily in security and compliance measures to ensure our cloud computing environment meets and exceeds the stringent standards of our diverse customer base. Further, we view security as a shared responsibility with our customers. AWS manages and controls the components from the host operating system and the virtualization layer down to the physical security of the facilities in which our services operate, and our customers are responsible for building secure applications.

There are a number of AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners who have developed disruptive, comprehensive security solutions on the AWS platform to provide additional value to AWS customers, particularly as customers work to build secure applications. Today, we’d like to highlight Barracuda, one of our first APN Technology Partners to make their security solutions available on the AWS platform.

About Barracuda

Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Campbell, CA, Barracuda focuses on the development of solutions that help customers address security threats, improve network performance, and protect and store their data. These solutions are delivered as cloud-connected appliances and virtual appliances, as well as cloud-only solutions. Barracuda’s storage solutions are designed to backup and archive business-critical data, and to make such data accessible from anywhere, including within the network or via mobile devices. The company’s security solutions are designed to protect and optimize the performance of the most critical points within the customers’ IT infrastructures, including email servers, web applications, data centers and core networks. An APN Partner since 2013, Barracuda works with more than 150,000 customers in 100 countries across a number of industries.

Drivers to the AWS Cloud

The needs of Barracuda’s customer base and the company’s overarching philosophy around simplicity drove the relationship with AWS. “We strive to bring simplicity into the entire lifecycle for our customers – easy to purchase, install, deploy, manage, and use,” said Nicole Napiltonia, VP Alliances at Barracuda. As they began to recognize that many of their customers were moving some or all of their infrastructure to the AWS Cloud, they began to explore a relationship with AWS. “Barracuda has a fairly significant overlap of customers who are deployed on AWS. This relationship became increasingly important for us, to ensure we are where our customers need us,” explained Napiltonia.

Another key driver for Barracuda in working with AWS was the AWS shared responsibility model for security. “A shared philosophy around security was a key reason for moving forward with AWS. Under the AWS Shared Responsibility Model, AWS provides a global secure infrastructure and compute, storage, networking and database services, as well as higher level services. AWS provides a range of services and features that complement the advanced security features that Barracuda offers, creating additional value for our shared customers,” continued Napiltonia.

Barracuda Solutions on AWS

Barracuda offers solutions on AWS through the AWS Marketplace and through a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) option. Since November 2013, Barracuda has released a number of solutions on AWS, including:

• Barracuda Web Application Firewall: The Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides robust security functionality to address threats that happen at the application layer so customers can securely move applications on to the AWS Cloud.
• Barracuda NG Firewall: Delivering next-generation firewalling capabilities and high-speed (>1Gbps) site-to-site remote access to customers deploying in public cloud environments, the Barracuda NG Firewall also provides advanced threat detection, application-layer security, VPN and secure remote network access between customer networks and the AWS cloud platform.
• Barracuda Spam Firewall: As one of the first dedicated anti-spam solutions available in the AWS Marketplace, the Barracuda Spam Firewall provides a robust security feature set for organizations migrating their email infrastructure to the AWS Cloud. This solution is available on-demand or through an annual pricing option.
• Barracuda Load Balancer ADC: The Barracuda Load Balancer ADC enables organizations to run applications securely across public and private cloud infrastructures. It offloads compute-intensive SSL transactions, and offers optimization features such as caching, compression, and TCP pooling to enable faster application delivery and ensure scalability.
• Barracuda SignNow: Barracuda SignNow cuts document turnaround time by as much as 90%. Get legally binding signatures from customers, partners and employees in seconds – from any device. SignNow gives organizations control over document workflow and easily integrates signed documents with other electronic systems.

The Benefits of Working with AWS

According to Napiltonia, “The speed with which we were able to deploy on AWS was remarkable. We quickly moved from a single product offering to now eight different combinations of options. That number continues to expand.” Working with AWS, particularly through the AWS Marketplace, “gives us added flexibility in our deployment options, continuing to illustrate our commitment to giving our customers freedom, choice, and flexibility in how they deploy,” she continued.

The Barracuda team also sees the potential for a high level of continued collaboration with APN Consulting Partners. “We have a true understanding of the customer requirements and deployment scenarios on the AWS Cloud. We understand how to work with APN Consulting Partners and integrators so that they can build businesses around the services that complement our suite of security solutions. Barracuda sells 100% through its channel partners, and we are excited to continue building out that Barracuda Partner Program with those firms who are growing their businesses around AWS Cloud services.”

Looking Forward

Barracuda plans to continue to develop its relationship with AWS and expand its presence on the AWS platform. “Internal AWS teams have been very easy to work with in all regards: Everything from concept and design, to implementation, to promotions and lead-generation, and to delivering on customer commitments.  Because of this, we continue to expand our product availability on AWS, both in terms of licensing availability of existing products available on the AWS platform as well as bringing to Barracuda solutions over to the platform. We are excited about what the future of the Barracuda and AWS relationship looks like as more customers look to move to the AWS Cloud,” said Napiltonia.

To learn more about Barracuda solutions available on AWS, please visit:

Overview Page – https://www.barracuda.com/programs/aws

AWS Marketplace – https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile/ref=_ptnr_web_Programs_AWS?ie=UTF8&id=3524ff0f-4c9b-4ce5-b1a2-b944b3c4a813