Managing Tenant Resellers
IT Distributors and Service Providers can expand their cloud business by offering to their resellers tools for automation and monitoring of cloud services, increasing revenues and reducing churn. The tenants resellers with their own dedicated tenant have a fully functional system for managing and billing their customers:
Creating a Tenant Reseller
- Initialization of Tenant Reseller Organization
- Tenant Reseller - Preparation Check list — Before creating a tenant reseller, you must run the following checklist
- Activating a Tenant Reseller — This procedure creates a new, dedicated BSS organization, under your root organization, also having its own Storefront portal that can be branded with the resellers marketing material
- Billing Frequency for Tenant Resellers — In this page, we analyze the option of enabling and disabling the Billing Frequency (installments) availability to a Tenant Reseller organization via the Parent organization in BSS.
Upgrading a Basic Reseller to Tenant Reseller
For upgrading a Basic reseller to a Tenant reseller, you need to firstly create the tenant reseller and then copy in the tenant's BSS customers and their subscriptions. This guide explains the upgrade process from lite to tenant reseller in four easy steps. The major milestones for this transition are the following:
- Copying Customers in Reseller's BSS — After completing the creation of the tenant reseller, you can proceed by transferring his customers in his BSS.
- Copying Subscriptions & Assets in Reseller's BSS — After completing the migration of the accounts in reseller's BSS, you can proceed by copying their subscriptions and their assets.
Updating Tenant Reseller Product Catalogue
- Applying Distributor Updates — A tenant reseller can only resell products included in the pricelist assigned to them by their distributor. Changes made by the distributor to the reseller’s pricelist (price updates, new product additions, etc) are propagated to the reseller’s BSS with the following process.
- What Actions are Allowed to Reseller — Below is a list of what actions are allowed to a tenant reseller to do to the copied products
- Update Tenant Log
Back Ordering Mechanism
- Understanding how a Tenant Reseller is Billed — For the distributor to know what to bill to his tenant reseller, we have implemented a "back ordering" mechanism where all orders and subscriptions updates are propagated from reseller's BSS back to Distributor BSS.
- Activating the Back Ordering Mechanism — When a new tenant reseller is created, the back ordering mechanism is disabled by design. We have followed this approach for allowing the reseller to setup his BSS before going live. This mechanism can be activated when your reseller informs you that he is ready to go live.
- Copying Reseller Customers in Distributor BSS — A customer is copied from reseller's BSS to distributor BSS when the first paid subscription is created for this customer in reseller's BSS.
- Creating Orders in Distributor BSS — Every time a new subscription is created or updated in reseller's BSS, an order will be created in distributor BSS for tracking the sales of the tenant reseller. These orders are not copies of the tenant resellers orders, they are created independently from the orders that are placed in reseller's BSS.
- Copying Reseller Subscriptions in Distributor BSS — When a paid subscription is created in reseller's BSS and it's for a service the is offered by the distributor, it is copied automatically to distributor BSS. if this is the first paid subscription for reseller's end customer, we first copy the customer in distributor BSS before proceeding with subscription creation.
- Copying Reseller Assets in Distributor BSS — When an asset (a Software Subscription or an Azure Reservation) is created in the reseller's BSS , it is copied automatically to the BSS of the distributor. If this is the first "paid" record for reseller's end customer, we first copy the customer in distributor BSS before proceeding with asset creation.
Training your Tenant Resellers
- Basic PartnerPlaybook — The functionality that is available to Basic partners is offered through the BSS layer of interworks.cloud. A Basic Partner can thus complete the following activities through interworks.cloud platform:
- Premium Partner Playbook — The functionality that is available to Premium Customers / Partners is offered across both the Storefront and BSS layers of interworks.cloud platform.
Understanding Tenant Resellers
IT Distributors and Service Providers can expand their cloud business by offering to their resellers tools for automation and monitoring of cloud services, increasing revenues and reducing churn. The tenant resellers with their own dedicated tenant have a fully functional system for managing and billing their customers: