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 the end user’s purchase in the Marketplace. Infrastructure costs 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 re-invoice the costs to the end user.

Managed service providers 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 fully GDPR compliant, does not fall under US jurisdiction, and is a good fit for customers conscious about data privacy and high compliance requirements.

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

  • Customer infrastructure can be completely isolated by using customer-specific organizations 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 and 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 products 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

The service provider ensures that the services run on Exoscale infrastructure. Service providers establish a mechanism to provision, deprovision, update, modify and suspend services to customers. In a consumption-based billing model, the service provider can report usage to Exoscale using a dedicated API call.

As a managed service provider, you ensure 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.

The Onboarding Process for Managed Service Providers

Contracting Phases

Contract

After contacting Exoscale about becoming a vendor and an initial call with Exoscale, 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 you sign the contract, Exoscale will start to configure the metering and billing system based on the conditions in your Special Product Terms.

Integrate your managed service on the Marketplace

You need to integrate with the Marketplace provisioning and billing mechanisms. If applicable, you need to deploy and test your service to run on Exoscale in your own Exoscale organization. If you do not have an account, you can register on the Exoscale Portal.

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 spreadsheet that needs to be filled out by the template maintainer which gives all the information we need to set up the product page for you. After you complete the spreadsheet (1 file per product), send it for review to your Exoscale point of contact.

Sales enablement

After the successful launch of your service on the Exoscale Marketplace, you get 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, blog posts, et cetera.

Start selling

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

Purchase of Managed Services

Your product or service will be advertised on your product page in the Exoscale Marketplace. When a user buys your product or subscribes to your service by clicking on the call-to-action button on your product page, a prefilled email is sent to Exoscale support. Our Support team will then send your service terms to the user and establish a legally-binding contract.

Both you and the customer will receive a purchase notice, in which we also send all necessary information for customer setup and provision of the service.

Integration of Your Managed Services with Exoscale

In order to resell your managed services 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 your service is metered, you can also report metered usage to us for billing by calling a dedicated API endpoint. See our section on Marketplace pricing and metering for more information.

Provisioning integration

Exoscale uses Open Service Broker API for provisioning and deprovisioning integration with external vendors.

The API currently has the following features:

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

The following features are under development:

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

We are also working on full-service binding support.

A manual provisioning process is also available for low volume products. See managed services provision for details.