According to Gartner’s research forecasted that by 2020, 45% of customers implementing, prefer that their connection to public cloud is through a Distributor. While cloud adoption is accelerating you need to be responsive to your resellers needs. How will you do that? With the interworks.cloud platform of course! We constantly release new features that keep you to the top of the CSP program. From the latest release, you can provide your resellers a fully customizable billing engine and a white label marketplace. From now on you will be able to sync back in your BSS, orders from your resellers’ end customers along with their subscriptions, for billing purposes. So, every time a new subscriptions is created in a reseller’s BSS, another subscription will be created back to your BSS, in reference to the reseller’s one. Amazing right?

You can build your own cloud ecosystem and

1. Deliver value to your resellers by solving their main challenges for billing, marketplace creation and management of cloud services
2. Create an open ecosystem with multi-tenant & multi-country implementations by delivering a cloud business-as-a-service
3. Onboard basic and premium resellers with their own billing engine and white-label marketplace and expand your reach

Now let’s dive into the details and help you understand how this will help you scale your CSP business and save time and resources!

As a Distributor in the CSP, you sell Microsoft licenses and other cloud services, such as Office 365, Microsoft Azure etc. As you already know, when you associate a reseller with a new customer account, you are delegating account and subscription management to the reseller. This means that the reseller has administrator access to its customer’s subscriptions and services and can manage them on behalf of the customer. This will still be the case, so we will explain how the Distributor will charge the reseller for the services he resells. We are talking about a white label reseller with his own BSS organization. The innovative feature we offer now, is the flow of information that will be transfered from the reseller’s BSS back to the Distributor’s BSS, when a subscription for one of the Distributor’s products is created or cancelled in the reseller’s BSS.

Having this knowledge in your BSS, a full picture of who reseller’s end customers are and their subscriptions, you will be able to provide an advanced billing process to your resellers.

Image 1 shows the big picture of how this works:
 

In order to understand this new feature and its big value, we will continue with an example. Let’s suppose that we have the BSS of the Distributor (namely Cloud) and the reseller (Cloud Resell). Suppose that Cloud Resell has one account which is lite reseller, Cloud Lite. And Cloud Light has two customers, the Cloud Customer X and the Cloud Customer Y. Cloud Resell has also the end-customer Cloud End-Customer Z. We have chosen a more complex scenario for you to understand how powerful and ease-of-use interworks.cloud platform is (Image 2)!

What information will be synchronized related with the Account?

The account created in Distributor’s BSS will use the Account Name, Accounting No and Email fields which are locked and updated ONLY from reseller’s BSS. Moreover, the Distributor will not be able to add and add-on, upgrade, downgrade, renew, suspend, cancel , delete or change quantity. But the Distributor will be able to generate invoices (related with the reseller), view account hierarchy, add contact and create or relate emails, tasks, event, documents, contacts and cases.

When a new subscription is created in reseller’s BSS will be copied automatically in SP’s BSS. To clear things up, all paid subscriptions that are created in reseller’s BSS will be synced back to SP BSS. There is a 1-to-1 relationship for the subscriptions between the 2 BSSs. Accordingly, when a subscription is changed in reseller’s BSS this change will be applied automatically in SP’s BSS. And when an add-on is added or cancelled in reseller’s BSS will also be copied or updated automatically in SP’s BSS.

It is very important to keep in mind that the Distributor cannot sell any products to the reseller’s customer, cannot have them synced in other platforms and in general doesn’t have any kind of relationship with the customer. The products that the customer can purchase are only through the tenant reseller.

What information will be synchronized related with the Subscription?

When a subscription is created in Distributor’s BSS it includes the Status, Start Date, End Date, Activation Date, Renew Automatically, Product, Billing Cycle, Quantity and Subscription characteristics (i.e. order characteristics) of the subscription is reseller BSS. However, all these fields will be locked in SP’s BSS and will be updated only from reseller’s BSS. As you may understand the reseller will have the total control of his subscriptions, but the Distributor will have the most useful knowledge that can help him generate invoices.

It is clear now that our cloud solution offers an advanced reseller management system that can help you succeed in the cloud industry and be a leading CSP business. Through this multi-tier experience you can offer your resellers the most advanced tool for automation, billing and monitoring of cloud services.

Differentiate from competition and make your reseller’s life easier. Now.