How to sell Azure Cloud with complete Automation?

“Cloud computing revenue is expected to grow steadily around the world from 110.27 billion U.S. dollars in 2012 to more than 200 billion in 2016.”  

                                                                                                         Source: Statista

The cloud boom is astounding and organizations worldwide are seeing it as a major game changer. What cloud has brought into the market is a better and efficient way of doing business. The increasing numbers of cloud adopters is a golden opportunity for those who are willing to sell cloud services. But how will they manage to sell a virtual product?

Apparently, the first thing they would need is a cloud solution to sell. From AWS to Google Compute Engine to Azure, the market is flooded with cloud compute platforms and infrastructure providers. Amongst them, Microsoft Azure with a multitude of features and functionalities, stands as one of the most efficient cloud computing service.

Microsoft Azure Cloud – A brief introduction

Azure is the cloud computing platform by Microsoft. It offers a wide range of cloud services for analytics, database and computing, networking, storage, and mobile services for faster and better services. From an IT developer to an IT professional,         anyone can become productive with Azure cloud. The pre-built templates, integrated tools and managed services help users like IT developers to develop apps faster.

Selling Azure Cloud – The pre-requisites

Selling a virtual product requires certain key abilities in the hands of the seller, especially, when everyone in the digital age is looking for faster and seamless service delivery. The payment modes are changing, from one-time purchases, users are shifting towards pay-as-you-go model of paying. Azure cloud is efficient as it delivers computing services at a much faster rate with a pay-as-go-business model. To sell such a product, you need to take forward this legacy of seamless service delivery.

To sell Azure cloud, you need to:

ü Fasten-up the service delivery process.

ü Have an efficient and authentic billing process.

ü Possess the capability to organize your clients’ details, their billing cycle and manage the complete customer lifecycle.

ü Protect the client data and information.

And all these above mentioned points, need to be backed with the power of Automation. Yes! To sell a virtual product like Azure, you need Automation. It will improve the customer’s experience with your product, speed up the billing, make this less complex and overall, give you a faster time to market approach.

RackNap - Automating Azure cloud provisioning

RackNap is the perfect platform to sell cloud based services with complete automation of the business processes like inventory, billing, support, and marketing management. As a complete solution to all business processes, RackNap facilitates Azure cloud provisioning and its complete management at the customer as well as the provider’s end.

Let’s dig deeper into this:

RackNap’s integration with Azure API, simplifies Azure management. RackNap automates the Azure cloud provisioning with a control at:

·        Client’s end,

·        Admin’s end,

·        and manual Azure processes too.  

The entire Azure cloud provisioning process can be understood with a simple bifurcation, explaining how Azure cloud management is handled within RackNap.

1. Azure cloud automation and provisioning.

The moment a customer selects any Azure service, you can manage the complete product-lifecycle from within the RackNap. Due to the API integration, RackNap facilitates provisioning of Azure resources or services in the Azure panel as well as the RackNap’s client panel.

The admin gets the access to overview the entire information associated with the particular Azure plan through the client’s panel. This may even include the username and the password to login to Azure Panel. The client can manage his services directly from his RackNap panel, and admin on the other hand can keep a watch on the resource consumption rate of the client’s VM.  

2. Controlling Azure VM resources

The Azure client can get the complete overview and control of his Azure services through his own RackNap’s panel. Here he can:

· “Start”, “Stop” or “Restart” his running VMs and the same gets updated in his Microsoft portal as well.  Managing services can never be so easy. If the client feels that he is not in need of a particular VM, he can simply stop the service, and later restart it when the need arises. Both the client and the admin get access to this functionality in their respective panels.

·  Azure allows the creation of multiple VMs. RackNap’s built-in automation facilitates the auto-termination and auto-renewal of these VMs based on the payment status.

·  The control over Azure VMs can be done in both ways- manual as well as automated.

3. Azure Billing Automation

Billing is undoubtedly the most important part, both for the seller and the customer. While the seller needs to ensure that the billing is apt and he does not miss out on anything, the customer also should know that he is paying aptly for the services. In cloud, the resources are charged based on the consumption rate, what we call the pay-as-per-use model of billing. RackNap as the cloud automation solution helps in:

·  Setting the bandwidth consumption rate for a particular service, manage it and give regular alerts to the customer on excessive resource consumption.

· For any VM, the admin can set threshold limits while sending any alert messages or notifications to clients. The entire process can be automated.

· If a user over-exceeds the resource consumption unit, will automatically calculate the extra amount payable and send the same information to the client.

· Apart from this, you get access to multiple taxation policies, payment structures to bill according to the client.

· RackNap auto-suspends a service on payment failure.

In order to make maximum out of the blooming cloud opportunity, you as a provider need to completely analyze the market, and sell cloud through intelligent automation software like RackNap. This will not only help in achieving more numbers, but also build a dedicated customer base. Unified service delivery and automation is what defines cloud delivery, and RackNap completely supports this objective.