Register now for tomorrow’s 4pm BST webinar, ‘The 10 Biggest Metering & Billing Mistakes that Cloud Service Providers Make’.
If you are considering selling cloud services or are already doing so, you need to get to grips with metering and billing. Our webinar, The 10 Biggest Mistakes that Cloud Service Providers Make, has been created to meet a rising demand among our readers, who are eager to learn more about the common pitfalls in metering and billing.
In our webinar, the first in a series of “Expert Practitioner” webinars currently in the making at Flexiant, our COO and CTO Alex Bligh will provide some cloud metering and billing advice for cloud service providers.
Cloud billing is not a sexy subject. But billing is what keeps our businesses ticking. The challenge many service providers face is how to bill their customers for their cloud services.
Even for private clouds, billing is important. Being able to meter and rate usage, whether it is for internal chargeback or simply to demonstrate what department is using what resources, requires 90% of a billing system; it might not send invoices, but it does the same thing. If you are a service provider offering a ‘wrapped cloud offering’ where one invoice is produced at the end of each month, which is not directly correlated to usage, you still need to know how much it is costing you. So, for just about every application of cloud within service providers, billing really matters.
There are two main types of billing engines in use in service providers that are looking at providing cloud services. These are:
• Hosting billing – This is subscription billing; typically billing a fixed amount each month, on a single bill.
• Telco billing – This type of billing is the sort of billing that your phone company uses, based on CDRs (‘call description records’) which are metered, rated and billed – much like the back page of your phone bill.
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