ActivePlatform 5.10: trials and promo discounts in Microsoft NCE, integration with Google Cloud Platform

FEBRUARY 24, 2022: ActivePlatform, the market player in automated cloud service brokerage systems, released version 5.10 of its cloud sales automation platform.

In this version, we added new features for the Microsoft New Commerce Experience integration and introduced support of Google Cloud Platform.

Effective now, you can offer to your customers trial subscriptions to Microsoft NCE products. All trials are free and provide 25 licenses. Customers cannot change the number of licenses until they transit to a paid subscription.

By switching from trial to paid, customers can select any of available switching plans and add more licenses. When it is supported on the Microsoft side, our cloud brokerage platform uses the license transfer mode to convert a customer's trial to a paid subscription and keep the licenses assigned.

With ActivePlatform, you can use the advantage of the Microsoft new commerce promotions. Before completing the purchase, both managers and customers can view whether a Microsoft promo discount will be applied to the ordered number of licenses. If a customer is eligible for a promotion by Microsoft and the seat limit is not exceeded, the best available discount will be applied to a subscription automatically. Discounts from Microsoft are applied as a given percentage of the total order amount, regardless of any other discounts in the platform.

Microsoft NCE prices are subject to increase, so we introduce a new tool aimed to keep all Microsoft NCE plans up to date automatically. By the end of the month, the plan updater retrieves the Microsoft price list for the future period and, when the period begins, recalculates, and updates the recurring fees for licenses for all relevant Microsoft NCE products. At the same time, it deactivates deprecated plans and adds new ones for Microsoft NCE products appeared in the Microsoft price list for the first time. The plan updater runs monthly, but managers can also run it manually at any moment. The pricing changes are thoroughly logged, and managers can view and download an Excel report as well as the used Microsoft price list.

The new Microsoft policy may delay the Microsoft NCE subscription activation for a few days. When our cloud brokerage platform gets the "Your Customer account is currently under review" response from Microsoft, it continues to send the provisioning requests to Microsoft Partner Center twice a day until the service is successfully provisioned. The platform also explains this particularity in a message displayed during the subscription purchase procedure. As a result, customers will be aware of the delay, and the provisioning process will be restarted automatically without the tech support stepping in.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is a cloud services platform that provides a series of modular cloud services, including computing, data storage, data analytics, and machine learning under the pay-as-you-go model. Integration of ActivePlatform with GCP is implemented using Vendor Portal.

To become a GCP partner and start reselling the service via ActivePlatform, you need to create a GCP billing account and define a few settings from GCP reseller console in the Operator Control Panel. Your billing account will be used to create billing subaccounts for your customers, one billing subaccount per subscription.

After the GCP subscription purchase, your customer gets two emails. The first one is an invitation from Google with the administrator credentials to access Google Cloud console. The second email includes instructions on how to start using the Google Cloud services within a subscription. A customer needs to log in to Google Cloud console, create a new project in the provided billing subaccount, and add GCP resources to the project. Once a project has resources and runs, the pay-as-you-go service consumption begins.

Managing a subscription in the platform is represented by managing a customer's billing subaccount, including its projects and administrators. It means that stopping a subscription in the platform causes stopping and detaching all projects in a billing subaccount and assigning the read-only role to all its administrators. However, activating a stopped subscription in the platform only restores the full access role of the first administrator of a customer's billing subaccount. The projects detached during the subscription stopping will not be attached automatically. The customer's administrator gets an email with instructions on how to attach the required projects back to the customer billing account.

For every Google Cloud Platform subscription, the non-detailed current consumption data is available in the daily granularity via the Analytics section of the Customer Control Panel. The final detailed consumption data for the previous periods is available in the daily and monthly granularity with the extended filtering options, very similar to Microsoft Azure Plan subscriptions.

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 catalog 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.