Relevance Lab has been an AWS partner for almost a decade now. The primary transition in 2021 was moving from a pure consulting partner to a niche technology partner of AWS based on the strengths of two new ISV Product launches with RLCatalyst Research Gateway and RLCatalyst AppInsights.

• RLCatalyst Research Gateway drives scientific research in AWS cloud, especially for Genomic Research and Analytics
• RLCatalyst AppInsights is built on AWS Service Catalog AppRegistry and helps achieve an “Application-Centric” view for cloud assets, costs, health, and security to achieve Governance360

Customers have been demanding a “Solutions” approach from their partners that combine the strength of Products (own + third party) and Services to provide a unique business solution that removes friction and helps deliver key value. This is only possible by unifying the strength of Products + Services to create platform-based offerings delivered with a unique playbook for driving digital transformation.

The top-5 trends we observed in last one year regarding customer needs for cloud adoption are the following:

• Cloud Adoption Acceleration
• “Cloud Only” adoption to accelerate momentum of transitioning all internal systems, applications, and services to IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions with an automation-first approach
• DevOps Automation Led Operations
• Critical focus on AIOps to ensure digital business operations are proactively managed with best practices on operations with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and DevOps, leveraging ServiceNow platform
• Frictionless Digital Workflows and Business Interactions
• End-to-end business process integration with applications across self-developed products, PaaS platforms, and third-party SaaS solutions covering Shopify, Adobe Experience Manager, Demandware, Oracle Fusion, SOA/API Gateways, etc.
• Cloud Data Lakes and Actionable Intelligence
• Focus on agile business analytics with use of cloud-based data platforms leveraging Snowflake, Databricks, Azure Data Factory, AWS Data Lakes, etc., and integration with AI/ML tools with Sagemaker and RStudio
• Security, Compliance, and Cost Management with focus on Governance360
• Critical focus on security, governance, and cost optimization with a proactive model driven by a strong automation foundation

In this blog, we will primarily cover the strategic AWS partnership achievements of our products and solutions leveraged to help our customers use cloud “The Right Way”. The business benefits of this automation and platform led approach helped some of the key customers achieve significant outcomes, as explained below:

• Speeded up product delivery cycles by 3x leveraging Agile + DevOps approach for Product Engineering and Application Migrations
• Cut down cloud cost spending by 30% with better capacity utilization and effective cloud costs tracking at a granular level of business units, applications, customer usage patterns, and transaction costs optimization
• Leveraging Automated Service Management achieved 70% handling of inbound tickets by smart BOTs using our product and RPA tools creating an Automation Factory
• Proactive security and vulnerability management reducing the cost of compliance and reduced outages by 30%
• Focus on effective data management and analytics with more real-time insights to business transactions and actionable intelligence leading to savings in excess of $300K annually for large supply chain use cases

Leveraging AWS cloud is a foundation enabler for all Relevance Lab products and solutions. The diagram below shows a high level overview of our AWS Ecosystem coverage.

The journey snapshot of the last 12 months is captured in the diagram below.

Relevance Lab and AWS Journey Highlights
To recap our key progress for this year, we are presenting a quick brief of the last 12 months in reverse chronological order.

• December
• Solid partnership with AWS APJ teams for go-to-market in the region for scientific research with RLCatalyst Research Gateway. There is a strong endorsement from AWS business teams and Solution Architects on RL solutions being a relevant offering for regional needs
• Launch of Cloud Academy to train a new batch of people based on a platform-led model for the ability to rapidly create a large and competent workforce for cloud opportunities
• CoE (Center of Excellence) teams pursuing new use cases High-Performance Computing (large and growing ecosystem) and AppStream-based training labs for education customers.
• AppInsights product on ServiceNow emerging as a brand new product conceptualized and launched in 2021 with joint efforts with AWS Control Services group
• November
• Relevance Lab’s focus on addressing the Digital Transformation jigsaw puzzle with RLCatalyst and SPECTRA Platforms
• ServiceOne and RLCatalyst Intelligent Automation Reference Architecture
• SPECTRA Reference Architecture for agile analytics applications
• Relevance Lab Hyperautomation approach to business optimization
• Relevance Lab Service Maturity Model
• October
• Taking AWS cloud & ServiceNow solutions to multiple new prospects interested in understanding our offering across cloud management, automation, DevOps, and AIOps managed services
• Showcasing RLCatalyst Research Gateway solutions to multiple public sector institutions, non-profit research centers, and health care providers
• September
• Key tracks of RL Cloud CoE covering Cloud Management, Automation, DevOps and AIOps shared
• Summary of 10 year journey for RL Company and Product lifecycle shared
• Launch of MyResearchCloud, An easy way to enable small and mid-sized customers to use the RLCatalyst Research Gateway SaaS product using “Bring Your Own Account”
• RLCatalyst AppInsights launched on ServiceNow Store
• August
• RLCatalyst Platform, Solutions and Products consolidated offering for automation published
• Automation-First approach for Plan-Build-Run of cloud adoption detailed
• Maturity model for BOTs design published
• RLCatalyst Genomics Pipeline work with Nextflow started
• June-July
• Joint efforts for the co-development on the open-source solutions for scientific research in cloud that emphasize on Health Informatics and Genomic processing space using RStudio
• RLCatalyst Research Gateway solution has been reviewed and approved for ISV Path – a special program exclusively meant for the Independent Software Vendor (ISV) capabilities
• Listing of Relevance Lab products and professional services on AWS Marketplace, which includes RLCatalyst Research Gateway SaaS and Governance360 solution built on AWS Control Tower
• Selection of the AppInsights ServiceNow solution as the partner-built solution for AWS AppRegistry
• Partnership with a specialist HIPAA governance solution provider for integrations into our Governance360 solution
• Collaborating with the AWS recent solution announcement teams driving AWS Management and Governance Lens (part of AWS Well-Architected Framework prescribed offering)
• May
• RLCatalyst Research Gateway “test drive” by the first prospect with useful inputs to make the onboarding process much simpler and frictionless. Expectation to go from “No-Cloud” to “Full-cloud” experience for scientific researchers in less than 15 min (Uber-style)
• Relevance Lab enters the elite AWS Service Delivery Program for niche partners for AWS Service Catalog
• Relevance Lab SmartView, built on AWS AppRegistry new concept for dynamic application CMDB, getting significant appreciation and visibility from AWS Management and Governance teams
• Ongoing co-development and collaboration with AWS Service Workbench groups to scale up RStudio on AWS Cloud with shared AWS ALB (Application Load Balancer) architecture
• April
• RLCatalyst Research Gateway common use cases implementation
• “Automation-First” model for Cloud adoption elaborated
• Common use cases for Cloud migration with focus on Application Migration
• Original concept of SmartView Solution (later renamed AppInsights) for Application CMDB created.
• March
• “Automation-First” approach to use AWS cloud “The Right Way” detailed
• Common use cases for scientific research published
• AWS ISV Partner Path program adoption initiated
• February
• Research@Scale Architecture Blueprint created for an integrated offering combining strengths of Relevance Lab product, solutions and services
• Conceptualizing Governance360 Solution built with AWS Control Tower customization framework
• Started evaluation of AWS Service Workbench with BioInformatics Blueprint, RStudio, Sagemaker
• ServiceOne Transition Blueprint created
• January
• Relevance Lab RLCatalyst Research Gateway product positioning in market with focus on “Blue Ocean Strategy” shared to create a niche offering
• RLCatalyst Research Gateway launched as a SaaS product on AWS Marketplace
• ServiceOne team worked on the Compliance as a Code Framework involving AWS Control Tower

RLCatalyst – Our Platform through 2021

ServiceOne: Our Cloud CoE Stories in 2021

Partnership Journey through Blogs, Webinar & Videos in 2021

It was a busy year at Relevance Lab. We published a number of blogs covering our solutions powered by our partnership with AWS. The following is a collection of blogs published on our website throughout the year:

Product Related

• Leveraging AWS HPC for Accelerating Scientific Research on Cloud
• How to speed up the GEOS-Chem Earth Science Research using AWS Cloud?
• 8-Steps to Set-Up RLCatalyst Research Gateway
• Health Informatics and Genomics on AWS with RLCatalyst Research Gateway
• RLCatalyst AppInsights-Dynamic Application CMDB with AWS and ServiceNow
• Relevance Lab and AWS collaborate to release new EC2-RStudio-Server solution for Service Workbench
• Inventory Management Solution Using SPECTRA Platform
• Enabling Researchers with Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) Leveraging Nextflow and AWS
• Simplify and Speed-Up Oracle Fusion Reporting with RL SPECTRA
• RLCatalyst AppInsights Now Available for AWS & ServiceNow Customers to provide Dynamic Application-Centric View of Cost, Health, and Security
• Enabling Frictionless scientific research in the Cloud with a 30 Minutes Countdown Now!

List of product knowledge videos on our YouTube channel.

Solutions and Consulting Related

• Automated Insights to your Application using AWS X-Ray
• How to achieve Auto-remediation and continuous compliance for Cloud Governance?
• Are you using your AWS Cloud, “The Right Way”?
• Intelligent Automation with AS/400 based Legacy Systems support using UiPath
• Relevance Lab Integrates Governance360 with Dash ComplyOps Platform
• Get Started with Building Your Automation Factory for Cloud
• Automated Patch Management with Dynamic Insights
• Re-imagining CMS-1500 Claims Processing with RL SPECTRA
• Relevance Lab Playbooks for Frictionless IT and Business Operations

We have also published blogs listed below on APN blog network in collaboration with AWS teams.

• Get Dynamic Insights into Your Cloud with an Application-Centric View
• Automation of User Onboarding and Offboarding Workflows

In addition, we successfully conducted a webinar with AWS and Dash Solutions. You can watch the recording here and download the presentation pdf here.

Summary
With the start of the new year 2022, we are very bullish about leveraging our AWS cloud Products and Solutions that help in driving Frictionless Business for our customers. There are 100000+ AWS Partners in the ecosystem worldwide, but Relevance Lab has created a unique differentiator and positioning leveraging the power of our IP Products as a key technology provider to complement our deep services competencies that are leading to tremendous momentum on new customer solutions.

Customers are continuing to face challenges with their business and supply chains in the pandemic era, and new business models are emerging that demand a new level of Agility + Automation. At Relevance Lab, we are constantly enhancing our offerings to help our customers navigate the Digital Transformation Puzzle and provide a unique value proposition with our global workforce across regions, critical investments in our IP platforms, and constant efforts on building deep competencies across cloud, data, and digital platforms.

To learn more about our cloud products, services and solutions, feel free to contact us at marketing@relevancelab.com.