The AWS Marketplace is an increasingly popular platform for companies to explore, try, and buy software solutions and related services. But organizations may be hesitant to move away from their established processes and technology decision makers might not understand why they’d want to look outside their current purchasing channels.

Businesses should be open to new ways of maximizing cost savings, leveraging new efficiencies, and optimizing their technology deployments. With IDC estimating that SaaS already consumes more than half of all software spend—a figure that’s expected to rise to almost 75% by 2026—the benefits delivered by those savings and efficiencies will continue to grow.

If you haven’t yet poked around on the AWS Marketplace, take a look at some of the advantages your business can gain when you buy through the platform.

1. AWS Marketplace streamlines, simplifies, and consolidates procurement and invoicing. Enterprise companies often have long, drawn-out procurement lifecycles. By buying through the Marketplace, that software or consulting offer you just bought is going to go right on your AWS invoice without any additional friction. And everything shows up one a single invoice rather than saddling your internal team with multiple invoices to review, reconcile, and approve every month.

2. Handles validation and displays compliance details. Sellers, referred to as Partners, go through an application process to sell on the Marketplace. As part of that process, validation for established Partners is often handled for you by AWS. Along with products that are validated by AWS, you also enjoy easy visibility into other compliance frameworks that may apply to the product or service you’re considering. Need a vendor with ISO or SOC 2 certification? When you’re assessing vendors on the Marketplace, just click on Vendor Insights – it displays validation and compliance information in a single location. That reduces the extra research you need to conduct as part of your vendor and risk assessment process.

3. Offers multiple ways to save money. Cost saving opportunities abound on the AWS Marketplace. Many Partners are able to extend private offers to customers, helping you save money on your purchase. Further cost savings may be available through the enterprise discount program (EDP) for businesses with long-term and/or high commit levels. And while site licenses and other spend already count toward your final saving level, if your usage isn’t quite consuming your entire commit, your Marketplace purchases can also contribute to that. These options give you multiple ways to bring down costs and take full advantage of everything you signed up for on AWS.

4. Reduces provisioning, testing, and other installation tasks. Products on the Marketplace are typically prepackaged and pre-configured. When you purchase a SaaS solution and you’re logged into your account, you simply click to subscribe. The Marketplace auto-provisions your user account based on your AWS account information, which automates and simplifies the signup process. Alternatively, if you’re buying a software package that is not SaaS, you still get a prepackaged solution for subscribed AWS customers. What does that mean? It means it’s already been proven to work and you can go from buying to using as quickly as possible. Once you click to purchase, AWS spins up the EC2 instance you just bought, for example, or any other resources that are needed to run your new software. The quick-start approach trims implementation time and reduces fiddling with configurations.

5. Provides support and insight. The assistance available from the AWS product teams is a significant benefit that some companies don’t leverage as much as they could. When you’re evaluating products and working through a purchase decision, you can talk with the AWS team about your prospective solutions. By tapping their extensive expertise, you’ll learn more about the product and how it compares to other offerings in the market. During the vendor assessment process, opinions and thoughts from the AWS team are also useful in reducing research time without sacrificing the quality of the data that informs your decision. Real-world customer reviews from verified users are also available on the Marketplace. You’ll see how the product or service has worked out for other businesses, and you may also learn about service experiences and support offered by the seller.

6. Gives you access to powerful partnerships. You may be looking at a solution on the Marketplace but realize you don’t have the engineering staff to deploy and manage it. Without that extra layer of capabilities at your fingertips, what good is the product? AWS has solved those next-step issues for you by providing a broad (and growing!) network of Marketplace Partners with the skills and expertise to deliver advanced support. Partnerships between sellers that deliver complementary products and services to boost the value of your purchase are increasingly common, enabling you to preserve your in-house resources to focus on core business tasks while still taking advantage of the huge variety of offerings through AWS.

7. Delivers visibility across even very large enterprises. For bigger companies, AWS Marketplace offers excellent visibility into all the groups within your organization that are leveraging technology products through the platform. Separate AWS accounts are often managed by discrete business units, a structure that can make procurement and invoicing more complex. In the Marketplace, you’ll have powerful tools to keep a close eye on usage and subscriptions across all of those AWS accounts. If one business unit already has a product or service and another department is interested in it as well, it’s possible to simply push it down across multiple divisions.

Purchasing through the AWS Marketplace provides many ways for your company to save time and money while optimizing and scaling your AWS environment. if you need assistance with the variety of choices featured on the Marketplace, the experts at Cloudnexa are available to help you find the solutions that are right for your organization’s needs.