Introduction Cloud Services Market Maturity. There is little doubt that the use of cloud, either public, hybrid or SaaS is growing fast. 57% of organizational infrastructure will be digital (vs. physical) in two years and 85% of businesses have moved beyond the cloud discovery phase (451 Research/Microsoft Infographic, right). This research also suggests customers want to stay with their current provider, if possible. But cloud adoption still has a long way to go, and that means there is plenty of opportunities to retain existing customers and win new business from the IT providers that are not transforming towards the cloud quickly enough.

Cloud Usage v Cloud Automation The need for intelligent cloud automation and management with the associated marketplace and ecosystem is driven by cloud usage, but not just one service for one customer but multiple cloud services and many use cases across multiple end-user organizations. It is the cloud service sprawl and the associated pains that create the need for cloud management automation for end customers and their IT advisors.

The Importance of Customer Self-Service Who said cloud computing would reduce IT costs? Cloud IT can be complex to deploy and manage. The ongoing support can be costly and inefficient and margins smaller. This is why Cloudmore has put considerable effort into enabling full, white label customer self-service for our platform. Offering a comprehensive management solution can increase stickiness, margin and customer satisfactionand you customers are safe in the knowledge that you are always on-hand for helpand advice.

Cloud Tip

Get Educated: Check out the book “How to Grow a Profitable Subscription Business” on Amazon. If you are not sure where to start, this book should help

The Opportunity

Three Lane Highway Cloudmore has identified three speeds at which the speed of change for IT providers is happening. In each case, the pace of change has to be appropriate. But we have identified a gap where often the end customer organization is ahead of their IT advisor and is sometimes forced to look elsewhere. Check out our infographic to see how fast you are going.

Slow Lane - Tortoise! Offering a basic portfolio of cloud services to your customers is a good first step into to the cloud market. Using a simple cloud commerce platform will get you started, but you will soon be facing management and billing challenges.

Middle Lane - Fox! Adding your professional services, self-service and online selling is smart. You are on your way to building a cloud business. Your sales and cloud management costs will be lower and customer satisfaction increased.

Fast Lane - Cheetah! Wow! You are one of the few who are seeing a great cloud opportunity for your business. By integrating specific services to create unique offers and, enabling customers to manage their own cloud services makes your cloud offer super sticky and profitable!

Cloud Tip

Get Informed: Use Survey Monkey, a free survey tool to ask your customers what they will need from their IT provider next year. What are their key issues/goals around cloud, mobility, and growth. This information will give you an idea of the pace of business transformation required.

Microsoft Direct CSP

Overview The Microsoft CSP Program allows you to take control of the billing and management of your customers. Currently, the Office 365 suite of services, Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS), Microsoft CRM and Microsoft Azure are included in the program. To become a Direct (1 Tier) CSP provider, Microsoft requires that you have the ability to provision, bill and support your customers. They want these processes to be as automated as possible to create the best possible customer experience.

Cloudmore enables you to meet these requirements significantly enhancing your Direct CSP application. And with a white-labelled self-service management portal, you can offer your customers 24/7 access and support for all day to day operations.

Why Direct CSP? Any IT provider of size is going to want to go Direct. The main reasons for this are:

More margin - Direct partners typically earn 20%+ This compares to typically 10-14% from an indirect provider.

Access to incentive programs - Microsoft boosts margin significantly with incentive programs. It is up to the indirect provider if they pass these on.

Customer Ownership - With Indirect, the distribution partner will have access to your customer data.

Control - Whether you insource or outsource your CSP commerce platform you will have much control over your business processes

Differentiation - Being able to bundle and set pricing in the way you want to will help you meet your specific customer needs.

Cloud Tip

Get Optimized: In a world where margins can be squeezed and agility is everything optimizing everything from marketing and sales to credit control is vital. Follow the mantra: People > Process > Tools. Get the right people repeatedly doing the right things supported by great tools!

Microsoft Direct CSP

Direct CSP Requirements Getting a Microsoft Direct agreement will require you to meet certain, minimum criteria. These requirements seem to be relaxing over time and seem to vary depending on which region you are in. Microsoft groups the requirements into four key areas:

Services business model - We say, the key to success for a services business model is reducing operational costs, including the ability for your business to automate a recurring revenue business model, from sales to credit control is essential.

Customer support infrastructure - We say, there is not enough margin to manually manage your customers so you need the ability for your customer to manage themselves as much as possible, including day-to-day operations to break fix.

Customer billing and invoicing capabilities - We say, for each IT provider we speak to there is a different billing model and process, this is OK but we advise to invoice and send a summary and give you customer online access to the detail. This will reduce your billing overhead and improve customer satisfaction.

Ability to scale - We say, the only way to avoid a race to the bottom is to offer more. This can be achieved with expensive people-based activities or programmatically through your CSP commerce and automation tools

Get Your Agreement Start the process with this link or contact your local Microsoft account manager. Having a commerce/automation platform in mind will help your application when you apply.

Cloud Tip

Microsoft expect the majority of CSP providers to be Indirect. They encourage their partners to look at Indirect first. Ensure your Direct application is robust by meeting the Microsoft criteria including the automation and billing requirements

CSP Go-To-Market

Build Unique Bundles Staying ahead of the CSP competition is about differentiating, avoiding commoditization and reducing costs through automation. Cloudmore can help you do all three:

Product And Service Promotion Cloudmore is user-centric, as you add more organizations you will get a complete overview of your customers, users and titles, and their location. This will enable you to map and communicate your propositions more efficiently and effectively. Imagine being able to target all your customer marketing managers or financial controllers?

Identify Opportunities The data that shows usage and utilization shown in Cloudmore business intelligence enhances your ability to target new offers or add extra value to you customers. See utilization of subscriptions and identify sales opportunities for customers with low penetration or gaps in service adoption.

Centrally Manage Pricing And Costs Pricing is managed centrally on a global/customer/service basis. Test out different pricing scenarios and create special offers on a per service or per customer basis. Pricing history, for both costs and sales price is always maintained.

Cloud Tip

Don't be commoditized: Market your business using the same rationale as Audi, who can charge a premium of their cars against similar cars from Volkswagen. How? Because they have built a brand that stands for something. What does your brand stand for? Will it support your business in years to come?

Supporting CSP Sales

Zero-In On Opportunities Customers and users can be grouped by sales region or sales person. Sales people can immediately view penetration, utilization and target the right individual within any organization. Cloudmore can be integrated with your CRM system to share data and reduce data entry.

Easy Cloud Quotes Multi-cloud quoting is achieved in minutes, including hardware, professional services and other offline components.

Self-Service Sales Sell while you are sleeping! Your customer’s e-store supports true, no touch sales and provisioning to keep your customers agile and satisfied. Services can be filtered on a per-customer basis giving you the opportunity to offer a fully customized e-store for each and every client.

Renewal/Contracts Management Implement robust revenue protection by managing the end of Office 365 annual agreement dates and identifying at risk renewals, cross your customer base, due to lack use or utilization.

Cloud Tip

Be proactive: Focus your expensive sales team on the best customer opportunities first. CRM systems only give you 10% of the picture. Knowing much more about your customer’s users behaviors can give you the insight to anticipate needs and become sales heroes

Delegated Management

One Place for Customer and Service Management Cloudmore is built for customer self-service, but you are also able to “impersonate” your customers to manage their environment. Your technical support team members can manage your customers day to day activities without having to access the Microsoft Partner or Azure Portals

Be Pro-Active The best customer service is proactive and surprising. With Cloudmore data, you can anticipate customer needs and issues and reduce inbound support calls.

Integrate With Your Systems Connecting with your support system is as easy as entering an email address, In addition, Cloudmore can also integrate with your internal systems to share data creating end-to-end automation with your CRM, support and billing/ERP systems.

Full Audit Log And Search Everything is logged, so there is no question of who did what and when. This is especially important when enabling self-service for customer administrators.

Cloud Tip

Surprise your customers: It is common knowledge that to get your customers to be real advocates you need to go beyond their expectations. Using data to anticipate their needs can create this ‘wow’ moment and win their loyalty for a long time.

The Importance of Self-service

Self-Service - Protect Your Profits Creating a profitable Direct CSP business can be a challenge if you are not creating additional margin from attached services. These services range one of activities such as migration and training and recurring revenue from enhanced support, integrating with other services or systems. Providing a self-service platform can dramatically decrease the day to day support overhead

Cloudmore enables an enhanced customer experience and reduce support costs by enabling 24/7 365 day self-service access to rich functionality to be more agile and efficient and increase customer satisfaction.

Adds, Moves And Changes Simple, non-technical interface enables administrators, managers, and users to quickly manage the day to day tasks. Having all users in one place ensures that there are no risky, ‘orphaned’ users or wasteful underutilized subscriptions.

Try > Buy > Use Shadow IT exposes organizations to unknown risks, help them reduce this risk by offering users a curated portfolio of secure approved services.

Cloudmore Platform Revenue Opportunity Resell the Cloudmore platform to your customers who require specific service integrations or have large, segmented user cohorts or subsidiaries with advanced service needs or system integrations.

Cloud Tip

Self-service - Can you afford to manually manage each user on each cloud service for each change, for every customer? And still make money? If the answer is no, then you need to plan for self-service.

Finance and Billing

CSP Billing Monthly billing, deciphering the Microsoft data and reconciling your income and cost are all significant challenges when moving to Direct CSP. Manual processing is normally the only option for the first few months, and it soon becomes apparent that this is not sustainable.

Cloudmore’s recommendation is to send you customers a summary bill, based on the Microsoft information that is synchronized and displayed within the reports area. Your customer can access a full breakdown of the current and historically invoices at any time seeing the utilization and changes. This will reduce the likelihood of invoice challenges, late-payment and the finance team workload.

Invoicing Control Billing reports are by customer and by service ensuring that recurring invoicing is quick and accurate.

Cost Control The headache of reconciliation of multiple vendor for multiple customers is solved with our snapshot and service reports.

Budgeting And Forecasting is supported by getting a forward facing view of contract renewals, snapshots and historical data to support more accurate forecasting.

Data Flexibility All views and reports can be exported for further analysis or data can be linked to your internal systems.

Cloud Tip

Reconciliation is everything: Cloud margins can be tight, so it does not take too much to drag a profit into loss. The only solution is to have the costs, sales prices and quantities in one system. Getting everything in one place is a journey, but it's a trip worth taking!

More than CSP = Multi-Cloud Cloudmore Distribution

Cloudmore has a portfolio of popular services pre-integrated in the platform, bought wholesale through local distribution. Reselling these services means it is a very fast way to get started.

Bring Your Own License Bring your Google, Microsoft CSP, AWS or other vendor licenses to automate and manage the service through the Cloudmore.

MSP Service Integration Connect your hosted services into the Cloudmore to create a single platform experience for all services, for all users

Cloud Service Integration Any cloud enabled service can be integrated to build a rich solution portfolio for your customers. Integration is not costly and usually paid for by the vendor/ISV

Request A Vendor/ISV Integration Do you have a local or particular cloud service that you would like manage through the Cloudmore. We are waiting to take suggestions and introductions to Vendors.

Cloud Tip

Plan you cloud portfolio. Higher ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is derived from selling multiple services to multiple customers, economies of scale. Your cloud portfolio should encompass at least public and private cloud, communications, collaboration, security and any vertical applications for your specific target market

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What Next? Need To Know More?

We have been supporting CSP Direct Partners to help them drive down costs and improve their customer self-service experience. We are happy to help you too!

Book a meeting with one of our CSP experts

Ready To Get Going? We encourage you to be as self-sufficient as possible to work and proceed your pace.

Your next step is to try Cloudmore with your Direct CSP tenant, Please review the CSP Setup guide and then visit the Request a Test page to get started.

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