The Rise of Cloud Marketplace Driven Digital Economy
There is clearly a growing demand for cloud applications and services...more
Jamcracker Connect
Service Onboarding Portal
Jamcracker’s Services Delivery Network (JSDN) enables organizations to become Cloud Services Brokerages (CSBs), which has become the fastest-growing segment within the cloud computing market. The JSDN is leveraged by dozens of global service providers, distributors, technology providers, and enterprises to aggregate and deliver public cloud/SaaS offerings along with their own service offerings.
The JSDN includes a Services Integration Framework that enables any JSDN-powered CSB marketplace to distribute cloud services from multiple cloud providers. CSB operators’ customers and resellers can view different service offerings from the CSBs’ catalogs and place orders. The JSDN routes ordering and provisioning information from these marketplaces to the relevant cloud providers via service adapters.
Jamcracker Connect provides a self-service “on-ramp” that enables cloud providers to easily publish their application and infrastructure services to the JSDN, gaining access via a single integration to a global services delivery network. This benefits CSB operators by rapidly expanding the number of services they can distribute to their customers and through their resellers. And the CSBs’ customers benefit by having access to a rich catalog of services along with a unified provisioning, billing, user management, support, and access control experience across multiple cloud providers
Service Configuration
Once a cloud provider has been granted access to Jamcracker Connect, they login to a self-service portal and start their on-boarding process using a web-based wizard. The output from Jamcracker Connect will define the catalog content and “adapter” requirements that enable the service to be presented, ordered, provisioned, and accessed from multiple JSDN-powered marketplaces.
Jamcracker Connect has 3 sections that the provider will need to complete–Catalog View, Order Flow, and Service Provisioning. The following steps apply to new services being on-boarded to the JSDN, as well as for making life-cycle updates to services that had been previously published:
Catalog View
- Content Management System: Provides support for customizing the cloud store front and allows for continuous innovation for the store front user experience
- Wholesale services catalog: Allows you to get to market quickly with a core set of well-recognized cloud services offerings. Platform agility brings in speed to build the service catalog as per demand
- Unified services delivery: Enables provisioning, billing, license management, user management and single-sign-on. Allows providers to create bundles to maximize up-sell and cross-sell potential and usage for third-party services and also for own core services or partners’ offerings
- Platform for innovation: Provides tremendous flexibility to experiment with new cloud service offerings and service bundles, and help respond rapidly to changing market opportunities
- Manages the customer life-cycle
- Provides single aggregated bills and settlement to your customers
Order Flow
- Automated billing & metering for cloud stacks & application services
- Provision of a platform billing engine to bill subscription, metered usage, one-time fees, tiers, and other pricing models
- Availability of online payment options (credit/debit cards ) & offline credit based collection to charge customers and present invoices
- Ability to configure the billing solution for volume discounts, tier-based increases, and/or thresholds and groupings defined at the product, package, market segment or individual customer level
- Facilitates integration with external billing systems or ERPs. Export invoice ready data including cost-allocation information to external financial and accounting systems is available
Service Provisioning
- Enabled with Pre-packaged toolkits and APIs for integration with cloud services and existing systems
- Provided with REST-based APIs and toolkits that enable integration with Identity and Access management solutions (LDAP and Active Directories), financial and billing systems, CRM, ITSM, third party helpdesks and others for back-office needs
The output from the Self--Service Portal can be used to build an automated provisioning “adapter” using Jamcracker’s XML--based Services Integration Framework as well as by leveraging 3rd party integration tools (e.g. IBM Cast Iron, Dell Boomi, Talend), or a manual provisioning process is also an option
Conclusion
Jamcracker Connect provides cloud providers with an easy-to-use tool for on-boarding their application and infrastructure services to JSDN–which is used by dozens of service providers, distributors, technology providers, and enterprises globally to distribute cloud services. With this single integration approach, Cloud Providers can broaden their reach into new markets and realize increased revenues with limited effort.
Lorem Ipsum Doler Emit
What are the Features and Characteristics of Software as a Service (SaaS)?
As the global SaaS market experiences a... more
Shadow IT is not a new phenomenon
Shadow IT is a term often used to describe IT systems and IT solut... more