For many partners reselling cloud can be difficult, especially when it comes to billing. More and more there is a drive for customers to have access to view their cloud spend during a billing cycle not just when an invoice arrives. This is very difficult with most vendors unable to offer a way for your customers to view their spend. In many cases this is completely understandable, as with many of these resell programs it is the Partner how is effectively setting the price, not the vendor.
Cloud Ctrl provides you with a simple and flexible way to share cloud cost with your customers with the same feature set and data timeliness you experience as a partner.
Creating a Cloud Account copy
A cloud account represents a connection to a vendor and all the data that is associated with it. Cloud Ctrl allows you to create a copy of Cloud Account, apply filters, and pricing changes to get a custom view of that data.
To create a copy of Cloud Account you will need to access the Cloud Accounts list from the Settings > Cloud Account menu in Cloud Ctrl.
Identify the Cloud Account which has the source data (your cost from the vendor) and click the ellipsis icon and select the Copy option. This will start the Copy Cloud Account wizard.
Follow the steps to create a copy of the cloud account.
1. Choose a Customer and Cloud Ctrl Tenant
In this step you will need to specify your Customers' name and select or create a tenant where this Cloud Account copy will be created in.
If you already see your customer name in the list select them, otherwise create a customer by clicking the Create Customer.
Once you have your customer selected you will need to select or create a Cloud Ctrl tenant for that customer, it is recommended that you only have one tenant per customer, and it is a good idea to name the tenant with the customer name.
In this example we are using a demo customer called Cloud Ctrl Team (Demo)
2. Specify any pricing changes
This is where you can mark-up or down the customers view of the cloud costs, if you want to pass through the data with no change in pricing jut click Continue.
If you need to change the price of services shown to the customer you can adjust it by setting the Markup Percent on this screen. You can also add a negative percentage to effective reduce the price.
Initial Price represents the source pricing figure to use, in many cases the only option is Base Cost (default), but for some vendors there may be other source price options available, for example RRP.
3. Filter the source data
So far we are creating a copy of the cloud account and changing the price for the customer. But it many cases like with with Microsoft CSP your Cloud Account will actually include the subscriptions and usage data for more than on customer. This step allows you to add a list of tags for which data will be copied.
Any spend associated with the tags added to this white list will be included in the copy. If you do not add any tags all data from the source cloud account will be included in the copy.
4. Allocations
This step allows you to allocated a percentage of each tags spend to this customer copy, effective allowing you to share a tags value between multiple customers. This is generally not required this scenario.
5. Name the new cloud account
Give the cloud account a descriptive name, it will be what the customers sees under their cloud account list and should explain where this data comes from.
To complete the process click SUBMIT.
NOTE: It may take anywhere between a few minutes to a couple of hours to create the initial copy depending on how much spend data there is in the source Cloud Account.
6. Check the data and invite your customer.
To confirm the new Customers data copy swap to that Cloud Ctrl tenant by click your avatar in the top right of Cloud Ctrl and selecting switch profile, then select the name of the new Cloud Ctrl tenant you selected or created in step 1.
Once you have reviewed the data in the copy is showing the correct data at the right price you can invite your customer.