Many cloud service providers are interested in supporting resellers as tenants within their cloud.

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1 Reseller Functionality Checklist White Paper Many cloud service providers are interested in supporting resellers as tenants within their cloud. This document provides an overview of the key functionality requirements for a billing and reporting solution to facilitate multi-tenant customers such as service providers and large enterprises. Talligent Inc V2, November 2015 Tallligent

2 Reseller Functionality Checklist Many cloud business models involve a root cloud provider who wants to subdivide their cloud resources in order to resell services or delegate management to a local level (typically to a managed service provider but also to enterprises supporting multiple business units or projects). For the root provider, it is an opportunity to offload sales and marketing costs to resellers, add scale more quickly, and amortize fixed costs across a larger number of cloud instances. For the tenant, it is an opportunity to build a business on cloud while avoiding the upfront cost and ongoing complexity of managing the environment. OpenStack alone does not provide the functionality to support a robust reseller cloud infrastructure. A customer lifecycle solution fills in the gaps for multi-tenant authentication, reseller branding and customization, and end user billing and self-service automation. This report covers the key functionality that cloud providers should consider to properly sell to and support resellers on their OpenStack infrastructure. OpenBook by Talligent OpenBook by Talligent was designed to support a robust multi-tenant model that supports resellers in a fully autonomous way. Resellers on the OpenBook platform have the ability to create their own rate plans; independently on-board customers; make resource change requests of the root provider at the same time processing change requests from the reseller s customers; and customize the branding, look and feel, and terms and conditions for their cloud offering. The reseller s cloud service is enabled within the set of resources provisioned by the root cloud provider (the bare metal owner) for the reseller.

3 Use cases Reseller use cases can broadly be categorized into two segments: managed private cloud and the public cloud. The main difference between the two is whether customers are assigned their own dedicated hardware (private) or the hardware is shared (public). While these descriptions seem obvious, key differences at the invoice level matter when determining the functionality required from a Customer Lifecycle Solution (or when building the solution in-house). Private managed cloud: Root provider pricing for a private cloud is typically a bundle of compute, memory, and storage, and tends to be static or growing. Monthly invoices can be fairly simple and predictable, billing for a limited set of resources on a monthly basis. The private cloud customer (tenant) is usually an enterprise that desires to reduce the up-front investment (Capex) of owning their own IT hardware while increasing the responsiveness of provisioning instances. Larger enterprises will need to charge back the cloud costs to business units or projects running instances, and may want to delegate cloud administration to the business unit or project manager. Clear and actionable reporting allows the enterprise to closely monitor resource usage and align the size of private cloud with the project requirements, reducing the expense of excess capacity. Public cloud: For a public cloud, the base offering starts at the virtual instance with a menu of configuration options and add-on services. Pricing is closely tied to resource usage. Monthly invoices tend to be much more complex, including monthly charges for floating IPs and storage, and hourly charges for compute resources and a wide variety of instance sizes and images. Invoices can be highly variable with possible seasonal dips and surges. Since the public cloud offering is more discrete, service providers can request the exact amount of cloud resources required to support their customers. This actively managed scenario is less likely to be overprovisioned Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 3

4 In either scenario, OpenBook allows the reseller or enterprise tenant to create cloud services that match their business requirements, independent of the root provider model. Reseller rate plans can be based on a menu of monthly or hourly resource charges. Resellers can create unique promotions and discounts to drive new business regardless of the pricing, discounts, or promotions they receive from the root provider. The root administrator has visibility into the aggregate resources assigned to the reseller, as well as the reseller payment status and history. However, due to privacy requests, the root administrator does not have visibility into the reseller s customer information or rate plan configurations. Resellers have the same level of flexibility as the root provider to set up and bill for cloud services provided they stay within the resources assigned to them, are current with their obligations, and abide by the terms and conditions. Functionality checklist Aside from typical cloud billing requests (such as metering, rate plans, payment processing and tracking), these are the top requirements of cloud architects interested in supporting resellers on their cloud: 1. A single solution that can connect to multiple stand-alone OpenStack clouds. Managed private cloud providers are providing stand-alone OpenStack clouds on dedicated hardware. In order to efficiently manage those multiple instances, they need a reporting platform that can collect data from multiple instances at once. OpenBook is architected to support distributed environments with remote data collection and management. OpenBook can be installed in a centralized location and pointed to the individual clouds in the same data center or distributed across the root provider s or customer s many locations. 2. Chargeback for enterprise customers. Enterprise customers may not need payment processing but they do need to charge back the cloud services to a business unit or project ID. The enterprise administrator can create a rate plan that is 2015 Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 4

5 the duplicate of the root provider so that the costs are directly distributed to the various tenants representing the business units. For larger environments, the administrator can create project level administers and delegate responsibility to manage resources to the business unit or project level. 3. Separate payment processing for the reseller to the root provider and from the customer to the reseller. While the root provider is interested in supporting resellers, they do not want to be responsible for the invoicing of, and collections from, the resellers customers. The reseller must maintain a separate set of payment processing credentials and be responsible for working with their customers for timely payment. The charges from the root provider to the reseller are not linked in any way to the charges from the reseller to the end-customers. 4. Rate plan customization for the reseller Similar to the way that the service provider maintains their own invoicing and payment processing, they also maintain their own rate plans. The cloud services they create are independent from those of the root provider, only constrained by the resources available to them. The reseller can change packaging or add typical managed services such as back-up & recovery and application deployment & maintenance. Reseller customization applies to sales and marketing activities as well. Promotional codes, new customer discounts, and volume discounts are managed independently at the root and reseller levels. The root provider can provide promotions and discounts to encourage new resellers to sign up for cloud and reward resellers that are buying large volumes of cloud services. These volume discounts and promotions may or may not be passed from the reseller to the end customer, depending on the reseller s business plan. 5. Reseller branding (powered by the root provider) Cloud services are a quickly commoditizing business, affecting IT service providers across the board. Managed service providers have to provide meaningful differentiation for the services they provide or risk losing their clientele to the big, deep-pocketed public cloud operators. Examples of differentiation include support relationships, localization, auditability, unique packaging, or preconfigured application stacks. For a managed service provider, the differentiation they create must be unambiguously tied to their brand. Helping resellers to customize the branding, look, and feel of the cloud services they 2015 Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 5

6 provide will result in stronger relationships for the root provider and more successful resellers as tenants. OpenBook provides a range of customization options. Resellers can replace their logo on the sign-up portal and invoices, or go much deeper with customizing the look and feel by updating the CSS or embedding the registration fields into their own website. 6. Invoice and notifications The reseller needs to control what and when to communicate with their customers. Threshold notifications (i.e. you have exceeded 80% of your monthly budget for the month ) are controlled at the reseller level. The reseller administrator can maintain a customized set of and invoice templates that include their terms and conditions and other important notifications. 7. How much money am I going to make this month?!? This is a key piece of information for any cloud business what are the current cloud charges that have accrued and how fast are those charges growing. Talligent defines unbilled charges as the partial month-to-date cloud charges that have not yet been invoiced. OpenBook provides the reseller with this current information in the dashboard, showing the aggregated charges across all tenants as well as the charges of the largest customers. The root provider does not have to calculate or manually update the reseller with this information. 8. Automated workflow To maintain high service levels, quota change requests and onboarding must be automated and managed independently at the root provider and reseller levels. The root provider does not want to manually respond to resellers change request s or tickets or the onboarding of the resellers customers. Reseller quota change requests automatically flow to the root administrator for processing (or denial) as the reseller grows or shrinks their resource pool (hopefully growing!). The 2015 Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 6

7 reseller s customer s quota change requests are automatically routed to the reseller administrator for processing (or denial). The reseller is also responsible for onboarding their customers. Summary Reseller support is just a subset of features that cloud providers will consider when selecting a billing solution for their cloud platform. For more information about the metrics and billing/chargeback options available in OpenStack, please download our white paper: Billing for OpenStack Cloud Services. For more information about the OpenBook customer lifecycle solution, please download the Talligent Data Sheet. Glossary We have tried to keep terms consistent throughout this report but the descriptions and context can be confusing. Here are our definitions of the terms used in the report: Root provider We start with the root provider definition. This is the organization that owns the bare metal and has created the cloud infrastructure. The root provider then sells cloud services to customers that are resellers or enterprises. The root provider determines whether their cloud service model will be public or private cloud. Cloud types Customer types Private cloud At the root provider level, a private cloud is a single tenant with dedicated compute resources. Public cloud At the root provider level, a public cloud has multiple tenants sharing compute resources. Tenant Generic term for a customer in the cloud. A tenant will have a set of resources assigned to them for the purposes of billing or chargeback Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 7

8 Reseller A reseller buys a set of infrastructure resources from the root provider, subdivides and possibly adds additional services, then charges their customers for the cloud services. Enterprise An enterprise is an organization that pays for cloud services from the root provider or the reseller. Enterprise customers may have multiple tenants that represent distinct business units, projects, or other cost centers. Managed service provider A managed service provider is a type of reseller. Managed service providers sell services in addition to the basic cloud services in order to help customers deploy, maintain, grow, and/or offload their IT related projects Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 8

9 Talligent empowers enterprises and service providers to deploy production ready OpenStack clouds by dramatically improving the visibility and control of cloud infrastructure consumption. We are OpenStack experts we know its capabilities and are developing solutions that take advantage of OpenStack s key benefits without vendor lock-in. Whether you have a public or private cloud, if it is deployed on OpenStack, Talligent Openbook provides the functionality to turn your cloud into an efficient and automated multi-tenant environment. Contact us for a demo or evaluation of Openbook. openbook@talligent.com E. Huntland Dr., Suite 440, Austin, TX twitter.com/talligent 2015 Talligent, Inc. All rights reserved. Reseller Checklist v2 9