To grow your business, cloud providers need to continuously innovate, introduce new services and offer features that make life easier. At Flexiant, we aim to arm you with the tools to find new ways to make it easier for you to run and monetize your cloud business, as well as to improve your customer’s experience of your services. As a result, however familiar you already are with Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, you may not be aware of all it has to offer. Here are five things you may not already know that could be of interest.
- Tag-based availability system
As a cloud service provider, you may want to make certain consumable items available to some customers, but not others. For example, you could make certain images available only to premium customers, or sell certain product offers only through particular resellers.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator gives you full control over the availability of whatever you sell, whether by product offer, cluster, image or network, to a given reseller or customer. Also, our tag-based system means that managing this through our control panel couldn’t be easier.
Let’s say you wanted to make the product offer “large server” available only to your top tier of customers. You would simply apply a common tag, say “Gold”, to that product offer as well as to any of the customers you wanted included, and the availability is set up.
- Whitelabeling by reseller or customer
You may already be aware that you can customize, to your own branding specifications, the logo, fonts, color schemes etc. that are displayed on your control panel. But that is only the start of it. Any billing entity between you and the end customer can brand the control panel independently to have their own look and feel, i.e. your resellers and any of their sub-resellers.
You can even display unique branding on a per customer basis if required. For example, you could do this for customers that are of a size where they want their own identity reflected in the interface. Whatever your branding requirements, Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator gives you the flexibility you need.
- Promo Codes
Promo codes are an effective element of many marketing campaigns, and Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator enables you to manage these quickly and simply. You can make any product offer available for free for a given period of time, and can associate these with promo codes.
In addition, by employing different promo codes for different channels or campaigns, you can easily compare the success of each campaign to others. This gives you the ability to intelligently plan promotions based on a successful track record.
You can also use promo codes to offer free trials for your cloud services. Just specify the term that you want the trial to be valid for and what services you want to include, and you’re done.
- Import existing VMware servers
Many service providers who are vCD customers are concerned about the uncertainty of VMware’s product roadmap. Moving these workloads to Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is very straightforward, thanks to our automated process for importing VMs from vSphere.
A simple, 5-step wizard guides you through the import process while letting you keep your customer’s data and network settings, such as IP and MAC addresses. Any mismatch between the original server configuration and the product offers you have made available in Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator is automatically highlighted and can be easily resolved in the Wizard itself.
This means that if you are currently manually provisioning your cloud services with vSphere as your virtualization platform of choice, you can easily add Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator as a self-service portal to that environment, bringing new possibilities to your existing customer base.
- Multi-Tier Storage
You’ve invested a lot in your high performing storage infrastructure and you want to make sure you get the best return on it. Sometimes, however, this can mean charging less to sell more. However, not all of your customers need the lowest latency at all times for example. The ability to offer different tiers of quality of service at corresponding prices can enable you to generate more revenue in the long run.
Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator’s Multi-Tier Storage enables just this. You can define disk throttling limits in IOPS when creating a disk product offer and therefore set different prices for different levels of performance from the same infrastructure.
You can also associate disk product offers with storage units that have different levels of performance, e.g. to SSD and SATA respectively, letting you align what you charge the customer with the quality of service they require from a particular storage device.
With Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator, services providers are armed with a platform to compete in the cloud marketplace. It offers the necessary tools and more, helping to deliver increased revenues, new lines of business and retained customers.
Learn more about Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator by visiting our software features tour or checking out our full features. Want to see Flexiant Cloud Orchestrator in action? Get in touch and we will give you a short demonstration.
