The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) has announced a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help independent software vendors (ISVs) develop a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model for their business, enabling them to extend their offerings beyond Singapore.

Speaking at the Amazon Web Services Summit on 18 July, Mr Andrew Khaw, Senior Director, Industry Development Group, IDA, noted that Singapore was ranked third in Asia-Pacific in cloud adoption, after Australia and Japan, according to a report by AMI Partners. The report also forecast that cloud adoption will reach 33 per cent of all enterprises in the country by 2015.

Singapore will continue to invest to enable cloud computing to thrive, he said. Through IDA’s multi-agency SaaS Call-for-Collaboration in June 2012, tech companies will develop or adapt almost 30 SaaS products to serve at least 500 small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in 10 sectors at the pilot stage. When fully deployed, the initiative is expected to benefit up to 3,000 SMEs.

On the training front, 500 professionals have been trained over the past few years on cloud computing. Singapore’s Institutes of Higher Learning have also built up an annual training capacity of 700 students. In terms of infrastructure, in addition to investing to be highly connected internationally, Singapore has also put in place the Nationwide Broadband Network and the Singapore Internet Exchange.

Mr Khaw also said IDA is also actively looking for partners who can help local companies to develop capabilities and build new business models riding on tech innovations such as cloud computing. An example of this is the collaboration with AWS, which seeks to support 100 Singapore-based ISVs to train up to 100 SaaS specialists over two years.

Central to the collaboration is a three-month programme where ISVs will be trained to develop a prototype, and go through a process of market validation. Under this programme, ISVs will first undergo an intensive one-month training which comprises:

• Technical training by AWS technical teams to develop SaaS products or convert their existing on-premise solutions into a SaaS-deployable model;
• Business mentoring by the AWS Business Development Venture Capital team, venture capitalists and incubators on topics such as developing a SaaS business model, attracting venture capitalists (VCs) and developing go-to-market strategies;
• Interaction with the SaaS community where they can build networks and gain best practices and tips from successful regional SaaS providers and VCs; and
• Interaction with regional end users who will share their problem statements and experiences in adopting SaaS solutions.

The ISVs will then embark on a two-month rapid prototyping phase to either develop a new SaaS offering or convert their on-premise offerings into SaaS offerings. At the end of the rapid prototyping phase, the ISVs will have the opportunity to place their prototypes in a sandbox environment offered by AWS where their prototypes will be made accessible to regional end users for market validation.