Deployment Scenarios for Country Tenants

A common business scenario, especially for large distributors, is that they have a regional footprint, maintaining operations in multiple countries. interworks.cloud platform can facilitate this requirement, offering a centralized management portal for the product catalogs as well as a streamlined flow for aggregating revenue streams from every country. The logic behind this option is that the company can activate a 'root' environment that will function as the centralized hub and spawn 'child' platform environments for each country, with dedicated BSS and Storefront components, that can be further configured according to specific business requirements.

For deciding how many country tenants you will need for covering all your subsidiaries, you should take into consideration the following:

A tenant can be linked with more than one CSP agreement. If you have multiple CSP agreements, you can configure a tenant to be linked with more than one CSP accounts for provisioning purposes.
A tenant can support multiple currencies. You can have your products in multiple currencies in the same tenant.
The marketing material of your products in your Storefront is advised to be in a single language.
A tenant can have only one Storefront.
You can manage from the same Storefront both your resellers and your direct customers.
A tenant can be linked with multiple payment gateways but not from more than one merchant account per payment gateway.
Each tenant is isolated and its data can be viewed only from the root environment
Each tenant can be integrated with any back-office system via our API

Below we will present three deployment scenarios and we'll discuss the pros and cons per scenario.

The "All-in-one" Scenario

In this scenario, you don't really need to deploy any country tenants, since everything will be managed from a single organization. You will link all your partner center accounts with this single instance and all your customers will log in to a common Storefront for placing and managing their orders.

Setup process

Activate in your organization all your CSP accounts (check Support for Multiple Partner Center Instances for understanding the process)
Create a price list for each CSP account that will include all products that are provisioned to this account. Each price list can be in different currency if you wish.
Publish a single Storefront with all the marketing content of your products to be in a single language. Your Storefront interface (i.e the menus, the categories, the explanation messages) can be in multiple languages, but the products' content will be in a single language
Relate each reseller / direct customer with the corresponding pricelist based on his geographical area. Then, your customers will be able to purchase only services that are offered from your regional partner center account.

Who to consider this scenario

This scenario is a good candidate for organizations that:

They have a common team that manages all their CSP business.
Their geographical reach includes countries with common language.
All their customers are billed from a single business entity.

Advantages

Faster implementation since it requires only one tenant to be configured.
Easier integration with any back-office system since all data are gathered in a single organization.
All CSP team is working together in the same system with full access to all customer data.

Disadvantages

You have a single Storefront with no localization per country and the marketing content can be only in one language.
You cannot have the self-registration option enabled in your Storefront since you will need first to run for every new customer a verification process for understanding with which pricelist must be related to.
If you have separate teams for supporting the CSP business in different geographical locations, the isolation of the data per team can be quite time-consuming.

The "Many-in-One" Scenario

In this scenario, you separate your business to geographical areas that cover more than one country with common characteristics. For example, countries with a common language or common currency or even that they are all managed from a single CSP account.

Setup process

Create a country tenant for each region. You can have for example a tenant for LATAM (because of the common language) or a tenant for Europe (because of the common currency).
For each tenant
- Relate each tenant with all the CSP accounts you are having for this region.
- Create a price list for each CSP account that will include all products that are provisioned to this account. Each price list can be in different currency if you wish.
- Publish a Storefront with all the marketing content of your products to be in a single language.
- Relate each reseller / direct customer with the corresponding pricelist based on his geographical area.

Who to consider this scenario

This scenario is a good candidate for organizations that:

They have dedicated teams for managing the CSP business per region.
The customers of a specific region share some common characteristics like common language or currency.
You want separate Storefronts per region for localization purposes.
The customers of a specific region are managed from a single subsidiary.

Advantages

You can achieve a better degree of localization since you'll have more than one Storefront.
Each team is working in their own environment and it will be easier to setup in their BSS the business processes they want.

Disadvantages

You haven't achieved yet to offer your customers a fully localized system.
If a tenant is related with more than a CSP account, you still can't have the self-registration option enabled in the Storefront.

The "One-to-One" Scenario

In this scenario, you treat each of your subsidiaries as a separate tenant for achieving the maximum localization and configuration our platform can offer.

Setup process

Create a country tenant for each subsidiary or country.
For each country tenant:
- Relate each tenant with the CSP account you are having for this subsidiary.
- Set the prices of your products only in local currency.
- Publish a Storefront with all the marketing content of your products to be in the local language.

Who to consider this scenario

This scenario is a good candidate for organizations that:

They have a dedicated team that manages the CSP business per country.
The customers of a specific country are managed by a single subsidiary.
They want a fully localized Storefront per country.

Advantages

Your Storefront is fully localized for each country.
You can have the self-registration option enabled since all products are provisioned to the same CSP account.
Each country tenant can be integrated with the third-party systems been used by the subsidiary.
You can fully configure our platform based on the feedback you will get from your subsidiary since it's a system solely for them.

Disadvantages

Bigger onboarding cycles since each subsidiary must be trained on our platform.
You have a maintenance penalty since each new process must be configured separately in each country tenant.