Back in 2017, under the direction of a marketing consultant we were working with at the time, The Scale Factory nominated me for recognition as part of Computing Magazine’s DevOps Excellence awards. We completed some paperwork, got one of the team to write a glowing recommendation, and paid for a few seats at the awards dinner. That year I won the “DevOps Leader of the Year” award, and a good deal of entirely reasonable mocking from my friends in the DevOps community who thought that this award was probably bullshit.

And, really, it was bullshit. With the benefit of hindsight, and an inbox full of invitations to nominate ourselves for many other such awards, it’s clear that many of these are cynical money making schemes, the last dying gasps of a print industry trying to stay relevant in a world where people get their news for free from the internet.

(Incidentally, you’d have expected a competent publisher to use this sort of event as a way to generate fresh content for a couple of months, with interviews, thought leadership pieces, and other articles, all of which would have been valuable marketing for us, but none of that ever happened. Draw your own conclusions).

Why am I telling this story today? Well, this week I’ll be bringing home another award.

SaaS SI Partner of the Year - Global

At AWS re:Invent this year, The Scale Factory won the SaaS SI Partner of the Year - Global award.

Unlike my award from 2017, this one isn’t bullshit. We didn’t even have to nominate ourselves: it’s what AWS refer to as a “data-driven” award, because it’s based entirely on measured performance across the whole AWS Partner Network, audited for veracity by an independent third party.

This award recognises our deep expertise helping organisations design and build SaaS and cloud-native solutions on AWS. It shows that, although we’re a relatively small organisation – just 26 people at today’s count – we punch above our weight, competing on the global stage, and delivering world class outcomes for the SaaS businesses that choose to work with us.

At the heart of that is our experience: we understand the unique challenges of building software-as-a-service: tenancy models, control planes, customer provisioning, marketplace integration, cost attribution, scalability, reliability, global expansion, security and compliance, and more.

By focusing on one type of customer, on one public cloud platform, we’ve been able to hone our craft in a way that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, allowing us to quickly deliver high quality results in our engagements.

If you’re building SaaS on AWS, why not get in touch and see what the SaaS SI Partner of the Year can do for you?

This blog is written exclusively by The Scale Factory team. We do not accept external contributions.