Rackspace and Onica, a Rackspace Company, achieve AWS Competency status for SaaS and Machine Learning

We are pleased to announce that Rackspace and Onica, a Rackspace Company, have achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Competency status for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Machine Learning (ML).

The attainment of these designations provides our customers with the highest levels of confidence in our expertise in both SaaS and ML. We offer a complete end-to-end solution for customers looking to move to a SaaS delivery model. We’re also able to help customers leverage ML and artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance their projects.   

We’re already a part of the AWS Competency Program, which identifies top APN (AWS Partner Network) Partners who have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas. Our combined expertise means we have achieved a total of 14 AWS Competency designations between both Rackspace and Onica. Attaining an AWS Competency allows APN Partners to differentiate themselves to customers by showcasing expertise in a specific solution area. The AWS Competency status is an excellent addition to our previous achievements of both companies being named APN  Premier Consulting Partners in the AWS Partner Network.

We’re particularly excited to share that we are also the launch partners for the AWS SaaS Competency. It involved a rigorous technical validation process, including providing detailed evidence of successful SaaS deployments delivered by our AWS certified experts.

AWS Competency status for SaaS

A SaaS delivery model enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide improved customer experience, increase operational efficiency, and commercial flexibility to invoice customers on a subscription or pay-per-use basis. SaaS is growing in popularity with customers as recent research from IDC indicates that 72% of businesses globally now strongly consider SaaS for new applications, migrations and at contract renewals.

Applying SaaS principles can be challenging as it requires cross-functional insights into a wide array of technical and business considerations. Onica has proven that we understand these and adhere to AWS best practices for designing and building SaaS solutions. ISVs need to be confident they can solve for multi-tenant identity management, data partitioning and tenant isolation – effectively keeping their customer’s information separate. As a one-stop-shop, we’re able to do all of this while helping ISVs move, migrate, re-architect or re-factor applications in the cloud.

The SaaS Competency demonstrates our well-established consulting expertise and experience in helping businesses to design and build software products covering specific phases of the product development lifecycle. We are actively vested in developing our customers’ skills, as well as helping them construct the foundations required to build complex SaaS services on AWS.

SaaS Design Services

Rackspace can design and implement complex SaaS solutions using AWS infrastructure. We also can design, implement and integrate AWS infrastructure for SaaS application architectures.

SaaS Build Services

We can build SaaS applications via software development and can develop multi-tenant software code. This is achieved using object-oriented programming (OOP) which involves defining data types and operations for data structure. The process also uses the software development life cycle (SDLC) methodology which includes the design, development and testing of high-quality software.

During the AWS audit, we were commended for our excellent operational strength, proficiency in designing AWS services and delivering repeatable secure patterns.

Onica has also achieved the AWS Competency status for SaaS, providing transformation services to develop serverless and cloud native approaches to application development. AWS enables automation, scalability and flexibility, allowing ISVs to maximize their cloud ROI and pass along those cost savings to their customers.

Case study: Enabling multi-tenant SaaS and innovation for Alemba

Alemba, an enterprise IT service management (ITSM) software provider, wanted to move from on-premises to delivering SaaS cloud offerings. Rackspace designed a customized environment for them, while keeping prices manageable. According to Alemba’s IT Services Manager, Alex Madgwick: “Moving to Rackspace, was going to save us a fair amount on our support costs.” Alemba now has a single platform on which to innovate and deliver a variety of services.

We are able to assist ISVs in a number of different scenarios including those looking for cloud native solutions or to re-architect applications. We can also help ISVs that might be looking to take on-premises applications to AWS, or are interested in moving from being a single tenant into a multi-tenant application. In all of these situations, ISVs require a partner who can guide them to move in stages or in one-go and we’re able to do all of this.  

AWS Competency status for Machine Learning

Onica has achieved this status by demonstrating its capabilities in building solutions that help organizations solve their data challenges, enable ML and data science workflows. To prove this competency, four customer stories were submitted from different industries, including a management consultancy and an ISV.  

Our expertise encompasses AI and ML capabilities, for example a proof of concept (PoC) which is often the first step on the way a production solution. The PoC defines customer problems, models potential solutions and delivers exploratory analytics. We’re also able to provide full production solutions some of which use the ML Model Factory, a machine learning operations framework that uses open source tools to enable rapid development, training and deployment. It can be tailored to specific workflows and business needs through building customized primary architecture patterns and the ML Model Factory empowers our customers’ own data scientists to be more efficient and productive. 

Case Study: Saving time with Machine Learning solution for McChrystal Group

The McChrystal Group is a Professional Services firm providing advisory services and leadership development. We built a natural language machine learning solution on AWS that automates analysis in survey answers, saving time and effort in a process that was previously manual. The surveys can be multiple-choice or open-ended with up to 20,000 responses to a single survey requiring analysis to pick up key themes.

We proved our comprehensive technological machine learning competencies by meeting stringent criteria that included obtaining certified expertise in the technical course, ‘AWS Solutions Training for Partners: Machine Learning on AWS’.

“When it comes to SaaS and machine learning, we are extremely proud to be able to prove our expertise and experience through this AWS recognition,” said Tolga Tarhan, Senior Vice President and General Manager of AWS Services at Rackspace. “We work closely with our customers, who rely on our deep expertise from data engineering to data science to help them gain enhanced intelligence from their data by leveraging the agility of AWS to make automated recommendations, take pre-emptive action and streamline their decision-making.”

If you’re an ISV looking for valuable insight into, among other things, creating a technical overview and a transformation roadmap for your business book a free ISV Cloud Accelerator Adoption workshop.

Book your place for the Automating Machine Learning Operations on AWS webinar on May 12 to learn how ML & AI can improve efficiency and solve problems for your business.