Both the cloud market and the number of resellers are expanding. Nothing new there. As the cloud market matures, common issues with billing cloud services are beginning to show up.
Three Stages of Cloud Reseller Growth and Related Billing Options for Cloud Offerings
The issues with billing are mostly the same regardless of the size of the business. The location of cloud service resellers has a significant impact on the solutions, though. In this post, we discuss the three distinct growth phases that cloud resellers can experience, as well as the accompanying drawbacks.
1. Launching a Cloud Reseller: Mostly Manual Processing
The billing of cloud solutions is still fairly manageable for new cloud resellers. Cloud vendors and clients with invoice needs are few in number. It is also possible to address the distinction between pay-per-use pricing and software subscriptions.
Spreadsheet Design Ideas
Most of the billing at this phase is done manually using billing reports from Microsoft, AWS, and VMware. Spreadsheets frequently inspire a lot of creativity in businesses. They investigate the boundaries of the options available to them. Each month, a set of manual processes is taken to arrive at an invoice for each customer.
The next step is to properly handle everything in the administrative systems once the invoice appears from the spreadsheets.
Recurring every month
The major drawback of this method of operation is that the entire process must be performed manually once a month. This leads to a process that is extremely labor-intensive and highly error-prone.
2. Expanding Cloud Resellers: Automating with Scripts
There comes a point when newly established cloud resellers grow to the point where manually processing invoices will take a lot of time. This is the time to start thinking about an alternative solution. For businesses in this stage, a professional billing system can be a little too soon. Using scripts is typically seen as a decent temporary solution - automation within constraints and within the organizational capabilities.
Work as a Developer
Developers are frequently the ones that write these scripts. Although scripts can provide a temporary fix in some circumstances, they are frequently unsatisfactory in the end. The process of carrying out all requested billing operations swiftly escalates from what begins as the creation of a "basic script." As a result, writing such scripts takes longer than anticipated. Developer time that may have been used to advance your technology offerings.
Not Being Flexible
The lack of flexibility in such an arrangement is another drawback. For instance, when one of the vendors modifies the billing reports or when the business development team develops a new cloud solution. The developer will once more need more time to incorporate the adjustments into the scripts.
Is a Professional Billing Solution Still Needed?
Cloud resellers reach a stage when a real billing solution is required during the expansion phase. But when did you reach that stage? Despite the fact that this varies from organization to organization, you can say that this starts to get interesting when the complete billing run—from gathering and organizing the consumption to sending out the invoices—takes 5 or more working days.
The moment has arrived to look into your possibilities as you approach these five days. It really comes down to the make-or-purchase choice.
3. Professional Billing Solution from Enterprise Cloud Resellers
Cloud resellers move into the enterprise market as their business expands. A professional (made or purchased) billing solution that seamlessly interfaces with both your provisioning platform and administrative software has taken care of the billing.
At the very least, a good professional billing solution can:
- Take the use by customers and aggregate it into a single invoice from your vendors' billing reports.
- Allow for sufficient adaptability to handle shifting service architectures, pricing schemes, etc.
- Give the necessary data to your accounting or financial program.
- Give you a fair lot of visibility into your billing data, including expenditures and revenues.
IOTAP offers Microsoft Azure migration services and Microsoft Azure managed services in India to small-medium organizations and large enterprises.