As a managed service provider (MSP) for multiple clouds, you play a pivotal role in simplifying customer onboarding, providing value-added services, and helping to manage your customers’ cloud environments. However, this comes with customer expectations around vital components, such as billing and usage reporting. To build a successful relationship with your customers, you must ensure that you report billing and usage back to the customer accurately, timely and segmented in a way that matches your customers’ financial reporting needs in whichever cloud they have chosen to employ for their business.
The challenge
In some cases, your customers might request that you completely manage a few cloud accounts for them. As a result, you might have complete access to all source data required to build artifacts. Meanwhile, other customers might manage another set of independent accounts. However, as part of the billing relationship, you want to add service charges to that bill to represent the cost of your managed services. Maintaining separate bills for select accounts becomes difficult when you need to apply changes to those bills you don’t directly own, not to mention the difficulty in properly reporting costs within a billing artifact shared across customers.
Do you have the skills, time and money to invest in solving this issue? Billing is a critical, high-visibility function. If it doesn’t meet the financial reporting and data segmentation needs of your customer, it can be a nonstarter and cause lost service revenue opportunities.
Become a trusted guide to your customers, regardless of their requirements
VMware Aria Cost™ powered by CloudHealth® has developed the capabilities needed to help you mitigate this billing problem. Using the VMware Aria Cost platform, MSPs can offer all the capabilities of VMware Aria Cost through a single console, allowing them to streamline billing, centralize customer management, and drive profitability. Crucially, you won’t need to invest your valuable time and effort in developing an internal billing system for the cloud environments you offer to your customers because VMware Aria Cost has a Partner Generated Billing engine to help you get there.
As an MSP, it’s highly possible you’re working with customers who require billing data to be segmented according to their business’ reporting requirements. With the Partner Generated Billing engine in VMware Aria Cost, you can help your customers understand and consume their billing information in a simplified manner that matches their unique reporting requirements. This functionality is available for the leading public cloud providers, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Let the Partner Generated Billing engine do the back-end work for you in serving complex customers, while you focus on building unique products, creating value-added services, and broadening your customer relationships.
Conclusion
Utilizing the Partner Generated Billing capabilities in VMware Aria Cost helps you streamline the complex billing relationships that arise as your customer base matures and scales across multiple cloud environments. VMware Aria Cost enables you to aggregate all the information and arrange it in the way your customers want to see it. We want to make sure you can support as many customers as possible, regardless of how that customer needs to be billed or which public cloud they use. Let us simplify cloud consumption and billing for you.
With the Partner Generated Billing engine in VMware Aria Cost, you can:
- Mix and match all your customers’ desired billing needs from a single console.
- Assign one or many accounts, subscriptions or sub-billing accounts to your customers.
- Customize and adjust customers’ monthly statements and reporting.
- Serve customers using AWS, Azure or GCP.