New 5.1 version of ActivePlatform released

March 30, 2021: ActivePlatform, the market player in automated cloud service brokerage systems, announced a new 5.1 version of ActivePlatform. The latest version adds more flexibility to the postpay model and brings UX improvements to help reseller's staff and customers manage subscriptions like Microsoft CSP and Google Workspace more conveniently.

For postpaid subscriptions with annual payments (Microsoft CSP, Google Workspace, and other integrated cloud services), the amount for an order is now calculated for the whole period. This value lets your customers be informed in advance about the amount of a payment in the upcoming billing period. It is now also possible to place the payment amount for the whole period into email notifications — using the plan or reseller currency.

Managers can now configure sending notifications to customer's users with a given role. For example, it may be necessary to CC all administrators of a customer for emails with invoices for cloud services. More responsible people to reach out means a higher probability that the invoices will be paid in time.

After customers paid for their postpaid subscriptions, it usually takes several days to process the payments. For a bank, it is a few days for the transaction process. It may require a few more days until the reseller's staff manually arranges the received payments in third-party ERP systems. This delay may be longer than the payment grace period in the cloud brokerage platform, causing the expiration of the payments and blocking the subscriptions.

We understand how critical it can be to keep the customers' subscriptions running. Therefore, we brought in a grace period for postpaid subscriptions linked to an expired payment. A manager can now set the duration of this period so that postpaid subscriptions will remain active for these several extra days after the expiration of the payments.

We added automatic paying for the convenience of those customers who prefer to pay for their postpaid subscriptions from the account balance rather than via bank transfer or other payment methods. The billing process completes a payment linked to the postpaid invoice on the due date if the account balance has sufficient funds. If not, the payment can still be completed manually.

Ordering a pay-as-you-go subscription itself is free. The subscription may start blocking funds on the account balance within the first hour after using its resources. To ensure covering the consumption costs and continue the subscriptions running, resellers can now include mandatory balance top-up when a customer orders a prepaid pay-as-you-go subscription (like VMware vCloud or Microsoft Azure) via Storefront of a multi-vendor marketplace. Provisioning of the ordered subscription is started only when the linked top-up payment is completed.

Speaking of Storefront, its category and product pages now have friendly URLs based on the category and product names. For non-Latin characters, transliteration to Latin is used. Old URLs based on IDs continue working in all ActivePlatform installations.

When a manager or customer stops a subscription linked to a non-completed order or payment, the platform suggests cancelling the order or payment. This alert may help to avoid unintentional activation of the subscription later.

Version 5.1 also include a few essential technical updates:

• Pay-as-you-go subscriptions to the VMware vCloud service can now be migrated to ActivePlatform. Previously, migration was available only for subscriptions with fixed monthly payments.
• Improved billing of software costs for resources reserved within a subscription to Microsoft Azure RI service for better reconciliation.

ActivePlatform is a full-service automated cloud brokering solution for cloud service providers and internal IT hubs that makes it easier to manage and control the cloud delivery and profitability. ActivePlatform unites vendors, providers, developers, and resellers into a single ecosystem for buying, selling, and managing cloud services. With its open vendor integration framework ActivePlatform creates a vibrant catalogue of cloud services ultimately helping businesses gain access to the services they need to thrive.

ActivePlatform enables SaaS, PaaS, IaaS aggregation, delivery, and monetization, provides simplified administration through central management, and enables critical visibility into resellers and cloud services consumption and usage. The platform has implementations with distributors, cloud solution providers, and telecom operators. ActivePlatform is headquartered in Europe.