Managed Services are cloud services or products offered to Exoscale end-users via the Exoscale Marketplace. Managed services are not provisioned by OS images (templates) and do not run in the end-user infrastructure. A formal provision mechanism providing synchronous and asynchronous provisioning is in place after realizing the end-user’s purchase in the Exoscale marketplace. Infrastructure costs resulting from running products in the form of a managed service will be billed to the service provider. The service provider can either include these costs in the pricing model of the product or reinvoice the costs to the end-user.

Managed service provider do not only benefit from our broad customer base and the Marketplace vendor programs. Enlarging your portfolio by adding a fully European IaaS provider you can unlock new business potential: While US cloud providers and IaaS providers with affiliates in the US are subject to the US cloud act, Exoscale is full GDPR compliant, does not fall under US jurisdiction and is therefore a good fit for customers conscious about data privacy and high compliance requirements.

Exoscale offers many service-provider-friendly features, such as:

  • Customers infrastructure can be completely isolated by using customer specific organisations delegated to the managed service provider.
  • Managed service providers running their client infrastructure on Exoscale are entitled to a preferential pricing (up to 15% off list price).
  • Support service subscription and custom metering reporting.

Roles and responsibilities

Exoscale

Exoscale is the IaaS provider, providing the infrastructure to run your service. We will provide you with an organization and monthly free credits of 500 CHF to test an develop your product. We take responsibility for a smooth onboarding as well as for billing of your product. Furthermore, we provide documentation for our core product and your product page. We advertise your services to customers via our website and implement sales enablement activities to drive revenue. To support managed service providers on the Marketplace, we provide a single point of contact and support.

Managed service provider

Makes sure that the services run on Exoscale infrastructure. Establishes a provisioning mechanism to provision, deprovision, update or modify and suspend services to customers. In case of a consumption-based billing model, the service provider can report usage to Exoscale using an available dedicated API call.

As a managed service provider, you make sure that you deliver your product or service in line with the Special Product Terms you delivered to Exoscale. You will send a delivery note to Exoscale once the customer is set up and can be billed by Exoscale. Additionally, you are responsible for supporting end-users using your product.

Onboarding process for managed services provider

Contracting Phases

  • (1) Contract – after contacting Exoscale to be listed as a vendor on the Marketplace and a first call, you will receive the framework agreement as the contractual basis for our cooperation. In the Special Product Terms for your product that is provided as a template, you will need to detail the pricing and billing model. After signing the contract, Exoscale will start configuring the metering and billing system based on the conditions in your Special Product Terms. (Note: As of now, there is an expected lead time for of about 3 weeks not impacting the following steps that you need to go through)

  • (2) Integrate your managed service on the marketplace – you will need to integrate with the marketplace provisioning and billing mechanisms. If applicable, you will need to deploy and test your service to run on Exoscale in your own Exoscale organization. If you don’t have an Exoscale account yet, register your company as an Exoscale account via https://portal.exoscale.com/register. Marketplace vendors are granted monthly free credits of 500 CHF to support you in this process.

  • (3) Provide website content – to market and sell your product on the Exoscale marketplace, we will publish a product page. Together with the contract you will receive an Excel file that needs to be filled out by the service provider and giving all the information we need to set up the product page by you. After filling in the content (1 file per product), send it for review to your Exoscale SPOC.

  • (4) Sales enablement – after successfully launching your service on the Exoscale Marketplace, it’s time to set the appropriate sales strategy and promote your service. Together with our sales and marketing experts, we define suitable measures with target-oriented implementation. That could be, for example, sales enablement activities, online communication in social media channels, blogposts etc

  • (5) Start selling

Exoscale support will send a notification once your template has been launched on the Marketplace and Exoscale portal.

Purchase of Managed Services

Your product or service will be advertised on your product page in the Exoscale marketplace. When an end-user buys your product or subscribes to your service by simply clicking on the respective call-to-action button on your product page. This will trigger a prefilled email to Exoscale support who will then hand over your service terms and establish a legally binding contract. The customer and you will receive a purchase notice in which we also hand over all necessary information for setting up the customer and provision the service.

Integration of your managed services with Exoscale

In order to resell your managed serices on Exoscale, you need to:

  • define a compatible pricing model
  • provide an OpenServiceBroker api endpoint for provisioning operations

Pricing and Custom Metering

You can define various plans with or without monthly fees to charge for your managed service.

If you services is metered, you can also report metered usage to us for billing by calling a dedicated API endpoint.

Learn more about pricing and metering

Provisioning Integration

Exoscale use OpenServiceBroker API for provisionning / deprovisioning integration with external vendors.

The following features are currently implemented:

  • Service instance provisioning
  • Service instance update (plan changes, suspensions, users sync)
  • Service instance deprovisiong
  • Synchronous requests support
  • CloudFoundry platform compatibility mode

The following features are under developpement:

  • Asynchronous requests support
  • Automatic catalog management
  • Dashboard URL and SSO support

The following features will be introduced at a later stage and are not yet available:

  • Full service binding support

Manual provisioning process are also available for low volume products.

See Managed Services Provision