Rocketlane Collaborates with AWS to Power its Customer Onboarding Platform with SaaS

By Akshay Patel, Principal SaaS Business Lead – AWS

Rocketlane

Onboarding new customers is demanding. Long implementation cycles, project tracking, stakeholder management, and collaboration leave teams stretched and stressed.

As a result, many businesses need to prioritize effort this during the customer onboarding phase, which is the first real partnership a customer experiences with the business and its people. This phase is riddled with non-conducive processes, clunky tools, and haphazard execution.

This challenge inspired Rocketlane, an AWS Partner with an AWS-qualified software offering to build a purpose-built customer onboarding platform that accelerates time-to-value, brings consistency to the executions, and elevates customer experience through the journey.

Why Customer Success and Onboarding Teams Are Key to SaaS Solutions

Customer success and onboarding teams are adopting Rocketlane’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering on AWS Marketplace to accelerate their own revenue and delivering awesome SaaS onboarding experiences.

Rocketlane uniquely combines project management, document collaboration, communication, and resource management to give teams running customer-facing projects and their customers a tightly knit experience. It helps teams to impress their customers, hold them accountable in the journey, create comprehensive and repeatable playbooks, get on-demand visibility into onboarding projects and customer sentiments, and increase productivity across the board.

Rocketlane selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) to build their acclaimed customer onboarding SaaS platform because the broad tools and services for builders to quickly innovate, get support from programs such as AWS SaaS Factory for business and technical best practices, and go-to-market to reach customers through AWS Marketplace and AWS Activate for startups.

“The knowledge and the value AWS SaaS Factory brought was unparalleled. We leveraged their business and technical expertise to build a platform that’s stable, efficient, and scalable. Working with AWS saved us time and efforts, helping us to get to market faster and deliver a delightful experience for our customers.” ~ Deepak Balu, Co-Founder and CTO at Rocketlane

For example, AWS SaaS Factory provides the best practices to scale SaaS companies in the cloud. The team has SaaS experts who have helped hundreds of customers be successful from both a business and technical lens helps SaaS companies be successful. Transforming, launching, or scaling SaaS can be daunting however the support of AWS helps companies like Rocketlane be successful.

Check out the Rocketlane SaaS Platform >

Q&A with Rocketlane CTO Deepak Balu

We recently spoke with Deepak Balu, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Rocketlane, to learn more about their SaaS platform and the value it brings to customers. We asked Deepak to share insights from Rocketlane’s journey that can help other organizations planning to adopt SaaS delivery model.

AWS SaaS Factory: Can you tell us about yourself and your role at Rocketlane?

Deepak Bala: I am the CTO and one of the co-founders at Rocketlane and run the technical operations. I have a penchant for coding and love building large-scale applications. I am passionate about service oriented architectures (SOA), distributed systems, Spring framework, and APIs. Prior to Rocketlane, I built a mobile engagement platform called Konotor which was acquired by Freshworks and rebranded as Freshchat. The conversation platform became the fastest-growing product in Freshworks’ suite of products.

SaaS Factory: Can you talk about Rocketlane and what problem this SaaS solution aims at solving?

Deepak Bala: Rocketlane is a purpose-built customer onboarding software that helps teams deliver projects with consistency, accelerate time-to-value, and elevate customer experience. It brings order to the chaos in implementations because of siloed and horizontal tools.

Customer onboarding today gets done over shared Trello boards, docs, and trackers sheets. Rocketlane eliminates the need to maintain internal and external versions of these. The platform eliminates the need to jump between siloed tools as it centralizes everything with a unified approach to project management, document collaboration, and communication.

We’re making customer onboarding more predictable and consistent so it doesn’t have to rely on the heroics of individuals to take it across the finish line. We’re bringing transparency into execution so that teams work on the offense instead of dousing fire later due to lack of visibility.

SaaS Factory: Who are your customers and what are some key customer benefits?

Deepak Bala: Our customers are businesses from SaaS, fintech, healthcare, and services verticals, among others that are looking to improve their onboarding process.

Rocketlane streamline the onboarding journey. It helps businesses impress their customers, hold them accountable in the journey, create comprehensive and repeatable playbooks, get on-demand visibility into onboarding projects and customer sentiments, and increase the productivity of their implementation teams.

SaaS Factory: What was the primary objective for adopting SaaS as a business model?

Deepak Bala: SaaS is a great way to iterate on product experiences and add more value to customers over time. We’ve also adopted this approach since we have more than a decade of experience running SaaS companies.

SaaS Factory: What were some of the technical challenges when moving to a SaaS delivery model?

Deepak Bala: It’s important to earn the customers’ trust by staying on the right side of the service-level agreements (SLA) that we promise. This requires an environment where high availability, encryption, and performance are the norm. Our customers expect an environment that adheres to compliance standards and does not let up on quality.

SaaS Factory: Can you tell us which technologies and strategies you used to achieve this?

Deepak Bala: Rocketlane is built on a multi-tenant architecture that can scale horizontally at every layer. This allows us to expand infinitely. No matter how many customers use the product, our uptime SLAs and performance remain best in class.

We have also architected with principles of being global from day one. AWS offers a range of services we have leveraged such as Amazon RDS for managed relational database, Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for managed container orchestration, AWS WAF for security, AWS Global Accelerator for performance, Amazon Elasticache, Application Load Balancer, and several other managed services.

For example, we use AWS Elasticache for reliable queue time-sensitive background jobs. This helps customer keep on top of critical tasks and reduces their onboarding time as much as 50%.

SaaS Factory: What advice would you share to other software providers as they navigate to SaaS?

Deepak Bala: Make core technology decisions keeping the future in mind. SaaS tech architecture forms the struts on which a product is built. It’s important to keep this core flexible and reliable. It allows the product to iterate quickly while remaining robust. Much like a high rise building that’s built with light metals and sways with the wind.

About AWS SaaS Factory

AWS SaaS Factory helps organizations at any stage of the SaaS journey. Whether looking to build new products, migrate existing applications, or optimize SaaS solutions on AWS, we can help. Visit the AWS SaaS Factory Insights Hub to discover more technical and business content and best practices.

SaaS builders are encouraged to reach out to their account representative to inquire about engagement models and to work with the AWS SaaS Factory team.

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Rocketlane – AWS Partner Spotlight

Rocketlane is an AWS Partner whose SaaS platform is purpose-built to run customer-facing projects. It helps to hit your project goals consistently, accelerate time to value, bring accountability, and deliver a five-star customer experience throughout the journey.

Contact Rocketlane | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace | Startup Activate