Act like a CSP/MSP with your Enterprise Agreement (EA)

Posted on August 8, 2018 by de

Today we’re very excited to announce the availability of our Enterprise Agreement support for the Azure Costs Cloud Solutions Providers platform.

Several months ago, Microsoft introduced the Cloud Solution Provider program . This program enables companies from the technical and the business perspective, to resell Azure resources or complex solutions on top of the Azure cloud.

Azure Costs supports the Cloud Solutions Provider program since day one and has a lot of experience in processing Enterprise Agreements. Therefore we’re very happy to now release our Enterprise Agreement support for the Azure Costs CSP platform. This update brings together both business models, Enterprise Agreements and CSP Partners. Azure Costs allows you to use Enterprise Agreements in the same way as CSP accounts.

This new option supports your migration from an Enterprise Agreements based Managed Service Provider to a real Cloud Solution Provider. Just combine all the different costs in a single and holistic portal. In addition, there are some important features dedicated to Enterprise Agreement customers only:

Define customers based on every property of your choice:
As the Enterprise Agreement does not support customers out of the box, Azure Costs adds this functionality and gives every EA contract holder the same features as you have in the CSP ecosystem.

Define Cloud Solution Provider Margins:
This allows every CSP to differentiate between the pricing Microsoft offers to the EA and the price the CSP offers for the customer. Just define the different pricing tier per customer individually.

Generate Cloud Solution Provider Filters:
This allows to hide services which are not charged for the customer. Only services targeted by the CSP filter will appear in the customer portal.

Offer a customer spending portal besides a reseller spending Portal:
This allows your customers to manage the spendings by their own. This portal gives your customers 100% the same features incl. team management as if they would sign up to Azure Costs with an enterprise edition directly and an EA contract.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our new portal just for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. To become part of the CSP support an existing trial account or an enterprise plan is required.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Revised Spending Analytics Engine for Cloud Solution Providers

Posted on October 16, 2017 by de

Today we’re very excited to announce the availability of the revised spending analytics engine for cloud solution providers. All of the enhancements focus on more accuracy and productivity, when working with your customers on a daily basis.

Since Azure Costs is supporting direct cloud solution providers also called CSP Tier 1, we work together with many different CSPs around the globe. The analytics engine in Azure Costs is one of the most important components and ensures that the spending data is aggregated well and all processes like up-scale a resource are outlined and calculated correctly.

As a service in Microsoft Azure consists of many parts we’ve decided to focus on the development of the analytics engine to understand the different meters correctly. This gives us the possibility to invest more in predictions and recommendations based on machine learning and artificial intelligence. Especially complex situations like an out-scale event can now be visualised very easily.

The new engine will be rolled out to all customers within several waves and after an opt-in phase it will become our standard engine. For now every CSP needs to switch directly in the data view generated with the new engine by selecting the action shown above. In addition the spending dashboard of every single customer can be moved to the new engine manually as show bellow:

This prevents that we disturb customers of a cloud solutions provider by accident.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our portal just for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. To become part of the public preview of the CSP support an existing enterprise plan is required.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Cost Management for CSPs

Posted on October 9, 2017 by de

Today we are happy to announce the availability of Azure Costs for Cloud Solution Providers.
Cloud Solution Providers are facing a serious challenge concerning the Microsoft Partnership. The whole process of generating transparency for consumed cloud resources of their customers, managing the billing process and offering support is on the cloud solutions providers desk. Our cost management for CSPs has the intention to deliver all the tools a CSP needs to implement this part of the value chain. The offering targets three important dimensions a cloud solution provider needs to cover:

Manage customers, accounts & partners

Azure Costs allows to manage all accounts, customers & partners in the complex n-tier business model of the Microsoft CSP Program. This includes a custom spending portal to analyse and manage the performance of every partner and customer including alerts and the powerful mail spending report. Supporting custom markups, discounts and margins allows to adjust the cost structure to the dedicated business model of every CSP.

Offer billing portal capabilities

Staying on top of the cloud usage is easy for CSP customers when their KPIs are right in front of them. The Azure Costs Spending Dashboard provides a clear and crisp overview, containing all important cost- and usage-KPIs at a glance for all CSP cloud customers and partners. Last but not least the billing portal offered to every partner and customer allows to deliver the required transparency a CSP is enforced to offer not only for Azure but also for other services like Office 365.

Multi Clouds & Custom Solutions management

Including self-developed cloud solutions and 3rd party services in the spending management infrastructure gives customers a single pane of glass to track, optimize and govern their spendings. As an essential part of the Azure Costs infrastructure, it opens the platform for other cloud vendors like Amazon and Google as well as sub cloud providers like SendGrid. The ability to build and sell cloud solutions e.g. hosted SAP or virtual datacenter implementation allows every CSP to deliver more value instead of just provisioning resources in Azure.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our csp portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. More information about every feature in detail and the available plans can be found here.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

Public Preview CSP Support

Posted on July 31, 2017 by de

Today we’re very excited to announce the start of the public preview for Cloud Solution Providers. After several weeks and months of continous improvements in the azure costs platform, we now start the public preview phase of the CSP support.

The great new CSP portal gives you access to the spendings your customers are generating. There are a couple of use cases we would like to point out:

Enroll into the CSP program: When visiting our new CSP portal the system will require enrolling into the CSP program. You can do this with an existing Azure Costs account or in case you would like to differentiate between internal spendings and customer spendings, just use an additional account!
Register Accounts: Microsoft requires every CSP to sign into the CSP program for every geographical region separately. As an internal reseller you will have accounts for USD, EUR or AUD and several more. Azure Costs allows you to register every single CSP account, to track costs in different currencies and countries separately.
Activate Customers: During the registration process Azure Costs imports all existing customers. This does not mean Azure Costs tracks spendings. If you would like to track spendings for a specific customer, activate this customer in the “New/Not-Activated Customers” widget. The spending information of every activated customer will be imported automatically.

Interested in the new feature?
Getting started with Azure Costs for CSPs is very easy, just visit our new portal for Cloud Solution providers and enroll into the CSP program as described above. To become part of the public preview of the CSP support an existing enterprise plan is required.

Any questions, wishes or ideas? Try our feedback portal or drop a mail to help@azure-costs.com.

A more powerful azure costs portal

Posted on August 28, 2016 by de

After several months of constant improvements in the new azure costs spending portal it now becomes the standard user interface for all of your spendings.

The new portal offers a lot of new features and improvements to make your day by day work much easier. In this article we would like to highlight only the most important ones, to make your start with the new azure costs spending dashboard as easy and fast as possible:

Overall Spendings The new overall spendings widget allows you to stay informed instantly. The widget always contains all spendings accumulated over the last 12 months.
	Daily Burn Rate An important indicator especially in cost optimization projects but also when you observe your costs on a regular basis is the daily burn rate. It’s easy to oversee what the short and mid term trend is.
Responsible Persons for Subscriptions With this new functionality you are able to assign responsible persons to one or more subscriptions. This helps team administrators to oversee who is the single point of contact (SPOC) in case of unusual spendings.
	Switch Team – Multi Team Support For service providers and administrators who would like to oversee the spendings of several teams, the Multi Team support makes it super easy to handle spendings over different organisations in a single portal.
Smart Compare Smart Compare allows you to conveniently compare monthly cloud costs with the costs of any previous month. azure costs highlights cost spikes & deflections, so that you can focus on the costs you are really interested in.
	Full Screen Mode Every widget can be used in the full screen mode as well. This gives you enough space to work on more complex spending optimization projects without scrolling and moving around. The full screen mode is optimized for working with a huge amount of different data.