中小企业 (SMB) 领导者深知软件对于员工生产力、管理和其他关键职能的重要性。随着公司规模的扩大或基础设施的变化，SMB 正在不断采用云计算，并经常需要使用独立软件供应商 (ISV) 合作伙伴提供的软件产品来补充云平台提供的原生功能。如果没有仔细的采购策略，这会导致运营挑战。本文探讨了 SMB 在软件采购中面临的四大挑战，并介绍了 AWS Marketplace 如何帮助 SMB 优化软件采购流程，提升效率，降低成本，并更好地管理软件投资。

🤔 **采购合适的软件**：在竞争激烈的 ISV 市场中，选择合适的软件并非易事。SMB 需要考虑软件的功能、与业务需求的匹配度、采购和运营成本以及培训和采用的难易程度。尤其是签署长期供应商合同，如果选择错误，可能会带来难以承受的成本。

🕵️ **发现并消除重复的软件投资**：为了最大化软件投资的价值，企业必须避免购买多个针对相同需求的软件产品。这通常是由于缺乏沟通或不同团队对不同解决方案的偏好所致。解决方法之一是建立软件使用治理指南，提高对可用产品的可见性。

👻 **解决缺乏可扩展性的内部工具**：当业务部门需要解决问题但无法等待 IT 部门或第三方技术供应商提供解决方案时，就会出现“影子 IT”。内部团队会自行采取措施，以最快的速度获得结果。这可能包括使用内部技能构建自定义解决方案，但也可能意味着通过未经批准的渠道采购软件。如果未及时发现，SMB 可能变得非常依赖这些解决方案，并且随着其发展而难以转向其他解决方案。许多影子 IT 可能与 IT 团队的建议或 SMB 的整体业务需求不完全一致。通过定期向业务团队介绍可供选择的方案，并缩短新软件采购的周转时间，可以避免影子 IT 的出现。

💰 **通过更强大的采购策略管理付款和续订**：采购还需单独跟踪每个供应商的账单付款，并做好即将到来的续订或合同重新谈判的准备。可以使用增值经销商 (VAR) 来简化此流程，但这需要与一个或多个专门的经销商保持付款关系。如果软件续订时间过晚，企业将没有足够的时间重新谈判条款或寻找替代方案。这通常会导致续订遵循相同或更不利的条款。拥有一个集中的采购清单，以及能够以最少的文书工作进行续订的选项，有助于使此流程变得顺利。

🚀 **AWS Marketplace 如何帮助简化 SMB 软件采购**：AWS Marketplace 是一个值得信赖的在线市场，为组织提供简化的软件采购、配置和治理。它可以帮助您在几分钟内找到、购买和开始使用在 AWS 上运行的软件和服务。ISV 合作伙伴经过 AWS 审查，并列出了具有价格和服务的采购产品，这对资源有限的 SMB 来说很有帮助。AWS Marketplace 提供了一种方法来解决前面文章中提到的采购挑战。

<p>As a small and medium business (SMB) leader, you know how important software is for employee productivity, management, and other critical functions—but what happens as your company scales or infrastructure changes? SMBs are continuing to adopt cloud and often need to supplement the native capabilities offered on a cloud platform with software products from Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners. This can lead to operational challenges without a careful procurement strategy.</p><h2><strong>What is an Independent Software Vendor and how does it intersect with procurement?</strong></h2><p>ISVs offer products and services that address specialized business use cases—such as <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/smart-business/project-management/&quot;&gt;project management</a>, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/smart-business/collaboration/&quot;&gt;collaboration&lt;/a&gt;, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/smart-business/customer-relationship-management/&quot;&gt;customer relationship management</a>, and more. SMBs arrive at a decision to use specific software after determining these will address their organization’s business needs. Without careful due diligence during ISV procurement, SMBs may face these common issues:</p><ul><li>Paying for too many licenses</li><li>Multiple cost centers paying for similar software</li><li>Managing several invoice payments and renewals</li><li>Underutilizing software investments</li><li>Overpaying for software</li></ul><p>These procurement challenges can become an obstacle to your organization’s focus on delivering business value. You can benefit greatly by simplifying the time-consuming and operationally intensive activities related to software procurement. Later in this blog post, we’ll teach you how to do so.</p><p>IT procurement is a traditional IT function. This is now accompanied by cloud finance management or FinOps (finance operations). The joint objective of these IT functions is ensuring your organization derives the most value from IT investments by aligning with your organization’s financial goals, and measuring return on investment (ROI). Larger SMBs usually have a department dedicated to this effort, but smaller ones view it as an additional responsibility of one or two people, alongside their regular job duties. Businesses can simplify this process, reduce time spent, and reinvest it toward better customer experiences. In the absence of a well-established processes to make software purchases, there are four different challenges procurement teams must contend with.</p><h2><strong>1. Making the right software purchase for an SMB</strong></h2><p>In an extremely competitive and crowded ISV market, it is not an easy choice when it comes to making a purchase for your software needs. You must consider factors such as capabilities offered, their alignment with your business needs, purchase and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/smart-business/savings&quot;&gt;operational costs</a>, as well as the ease of training and adoption. This is especially important when signing long term vendor contracts that are hard to amend or terminate. For many SMBs, they may not be costs they can absorb if it’s an incorrect choice.</p><p>It also helps to understand what other users have to say about the software’s ease of use. Consumption-based models with flexible usage terms and “try before you buy” options are also beneficial to making the right purchase. You may also want to evaluate the security posture and compliance information for the software purchase you are making, so that it aligns with your organization’s compliance requirements.</p><h2><strong>2. Finding and removing duplicate software investments</strong></h2><p>In striving to get the most value from software investments, one thing businesses cannot afford is purchasing multiple software products addressing the same need. This usually happens due to a lack of communication, or preference by different teams for different solutions. This challenge usually extends beyond just procurement, and there are solutions. One such solution is establishing governance guidelines for software usage with better visibility into available products. With shared visibility to available products, teams can more easily adopt approved and already purchased solutions. And when having to purchase additional tooling, they’re also able to easily compare to available software solutions and existing vendor relationships.</p><h2><strong>3. Addressing rogue internal tools that lack scalability</strong></h2><p>Your technical counterparts use the term “Shadow IT” to describe what happens when business units need to solve a problem, but cannot wait for an IT department or third-party tech vendor to provide the right solution. Internal teammates move ahead with what they perceive to get them the fastest outcome. At times, this can be a custom solution built using internal skills, but it often means procuring software through unapproved channels. If not discovered in time, SMBs can become very reliant on these solutions and find it hard to pivot away as they grow. Many may not fully align with the IT team’s recommendations or the SMB’s overall business needs. Shadow IT can be prevented by regularly educating business teams about options available to them, and reducing the turnaround time for new software procurement with centralized IT involvement.</p><h2><strong>4. Managing payments and renewals with a stronger procurement strategy</strong></h2><p>Procurement also separately tracks invoice payments for each vendor, and must be prepared for upcoming renewal or contract renegotiations. You may use a value-added reseller (VAR) to simplify this process, but this requires maintaining a payment relationship with one or more specialized resellers. When software renewals are left too late, businesses have insufficient time to renegotiate terms or look for alternatives. This usually causes renewals to follow the same or less favorable terms. Having a centralized inventory of purchases and the option to renew with minimal paperwork helps make this a smooth process.</p><blockquote></blockquote><h2><strong>What is AWS Marketplace and how can it help streamline SMB software procurement?</strong></h2><p><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/mp/marketplace-service/overview/&quot;&gt;AWS Marketplace</a> is a trusted online marketplace providing simplified procurement, provisioning, and governance of software for organizations. It helps you find, buy, and start using the software and services that run on AWS in a matter of minutes. ISV partners are vetted by AWS and list purchase offerings with prices and services, which is helpful for resource-constrained SMBs. Read on to see how AWS Marketplace provides a means to addresses the procurement challenges shared earlier in the post.</p><div id="attachment_260" class="wp-caption aligncenter c4"><img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-260" class="wp-image-260 size-full" src="https://d2908q01vomqb2.cloudfront.net/c66c65175fecc3103b3b587be9b5b230889c8628/2022/09/27/Procurement-diagram.png&quot; alt="Diagram visually depicting procurement challenges" width="941" height="550" /><p id="caption-attachment-260" class="wp-caption-text">­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Figure 1: Diagram depicting how AWS Marketplace helps address procurement challenges</p></div><h3>Governance</h3><p>You can govern user or group purchase permissions using <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/iam/&quot;&gt;AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).</a> AWS Marketplace allows organizations such as yours to build catalogs of approved products using <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/features/privatemarketplace&quot;&gt;Private Marketplace</a>. Administrators at your company can create unique sets of vetted software available in AWS Marketplace for <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/mp/marketplace-service/procurement/?ref=mp_nav_about&quot;&gt;procurement by different teams</a> within your organization. This helps alleviate duplication in purchases and Shadow IT.</p><p>By curating the list of <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/mp/marketplace-service/governance/?ref=mp_nav_about&quot;&gt;software your organization is allowed to purchase</a>—and only allowing approved groups within the organization to make purchases—helps solve these challenges. Several AWS Marketplace vendors offer a <a href="https://docs.aws.amazon.com/marketplace/latest/buyerguide/buyer-free-trials.html&quot;&gt;trial period</a> through which teams can take advantage of to understand and test if products really are a good fit for their use case, and make a more informed decision about subscribing. As a prerequisite, you must have access to the AWS Marketplace console.</p><h3>Product and service reviews</h3><p>Researching software—especially if it’s not your area of expertise—can be time consuming. Another great source of research is product reviews from users like you. Feedback from other SMBs in the AWS Marketplace provides a useful way to determine what might address your needs.</p><h3>Compliance requirements</h3><p>For organizations that have specific compliance needs, you can make use of <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/features/vendor-insights&quot;&gt;AWS Marketplace Vendor Insights</a>. Vendor Insights can be useful for products that need certifications such as <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/iso-27001-faqs/&quot;&gt;ISO 27001</a> or <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/soc-faqs/&quot;&gt;SOC2&lt;/a&gt;. It helps you accelerate the risk assessment by compiling security and compliance information in a single, unified dashboard, saving you weeks in evidence collection and validation.</p><h3>Better software billing and budget negotiations</h3><p>AWS Marketplace allows consolidated billing for software purchases—a major benefit to SMBs. Vendor software purchase orders are paid for as part of your AWS bill. Depending on licensing terms this may be monthly recurring or a one-time payment. These payments are displayed as a line item on your AWS bill, and utilizes the same payment method. This eliminates the need to maintain separate payment contracts with the vendors directly.</p><p>Software vendors list products in AWS Marketplace with a public price for various contract term options. While this public pricing is available for customers to use as-is, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVL4069oqC0&quot;&gt;you can negotiate a private offer</a> from the vendor while procuring through the AWS Marketplace. With private offers, AWS Marketplace allows you to keep building a relationship with your preferred vendors, while negotiating pricing and licensing terms specifically to your account. It allows VARs and <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/partners/&quot;&gt;Amazon Partner Network</a> consultants to list software products and services, so the value they bring can still be realized. This flexibility allows you to continue to benefit from existing discounts you receive from preferred vendors/resellers, while taking advantage of the features offered by AWS Marketplace.</p><h2>Next steps</h2><p>SMBs using AWS can benefit from the ease of procurement and governance offered by AWS Marketplace. The challenges outlined in this post can be significantly simplified with our unified solution. You can achieve the right outcomes for your business by picking the right tools for the job from a trusted channel. You will spend less time on procurement management overhead and more time deriving value from investments. <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/smart-business/solutions/&quot;&gt;Learn more about software solutions for smart businesses such as yours.</a></p><h2>Further reading</h2>