Marketplace for CSPs

Enhance your cloud infrastructure offerings with software services to add value and meet rapidly changing customer expectations.

As a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), you can increase your infrastructure sales by offering value-added software services. Enhance customer value with services like Database-as-a-Service and ensure deeper integration to improve retention. You can reach new markets through ISV and consulting partner referrals, and quickly announce new services with each onboarded ISV without the extra integration work needed. Your services will seamlessly integrate with internal processes, supporting APIs, user management, live metrics, and detailed billing reports. You benefit from a trusted and secure Swiss operation, support, ISO 27001 certification, ISAE 3402 audit, and references in various sectors, all within a revenue-sharing model where payment aligns with customer usage.

Benefits

New revenue streams: By complementing your core offering with additional services, you can get additional revenue streams.
Enhance service offerings: Offering additional services on-top of the already existing offering opens the door for new customers.
Provide added value to customers: Keep your customers happy by providing added value and get more attractive to new customers.
Keep pace with rapid market changes: The market develops fast, don’t be the one running behind.
Become more Cloud Native: Enhance the experience for your users by becoming more cloud native.

What you get

Self-Service Marketplace: A self-service marketplace containing a rich offering from many ISVs.
Deep Technical Integration: Deep integration into your control panel via APIs and complementary a Web UI for your customers self-service needs.
Day-2 Operations of Marketplace: We take care of the Marketplace control-plane to keep it up-to-date and smoothly running.
Joint Marketing and Go-To-Market: We create a plan for joint marketing efforts to promote the Marketplace. A ready-made go-to-market playbook will help to shape the strategy to bring the marketplace offering to the masses.

Revenue Stream

The standard revenue stream looks like this:

End User

The end user pays the CSP for the service usage, including:

the compute resources for the CSP
the managed service fee for VSHN
any licenses or subscriptions for the ISV

CSP

The CSP sends the invoice to the end user based on the reported usage by VSHN. VSHN sends the CSP an invoice about the full service usage. The CSP sends an invoice to VSHN for the compute resources.

ISV

The ISV sends an invoice to VSHN for the consumed licenses or subscriptions based on the usage reporting by VSHN.

Please contact us to learn more and discuss revenue streams.

Managed Service Fee

VSHN collects a fee for the service usage for:

Day-2 operations of the service instance, according to the individual service description and Service Levels, which includes monitoring, logging, metrics, alerts, incident management, etc.
Level 2 support for the CSP handling level 1 support. Orchestrating level 3 support with the ISV. Learn more at Support Model.
Service maintenance: support new versions of the service, best-practice configuration and feature development
Maintenance of the Marketplace control-plane and the Application Deployment Framework

Pricing

Marketplace Integration

To integrate the Application Marketplace into your infrastructure, a one-time effort is required.

Please contact us to learn more and discuss.

Ongoing Marketplace operations

To keep the control-plane and integrations up-to-date and running, including all day-2 operations work, a minimum amount of recurring revenue has to be committed to.

Please contact us to learn more and discuss.

Integration options

There are several possibilities for integrating the Marketplace into a CSP infrastructure. It’s important to note that everything will run on the CSP’s infrastructure: the Marketplace control plane and the actual services workload.

API: We support integration into the CSPs control panel via Kubernetes API, Open Service Broker API, and a custom API.
Web UI: In addition to the API, we offer a white-labeled web frontend for the customer to order and manage service instances.
Authentication: We support federated authentication using OpenID Connect.
Billing: For billing, we support live billing metrics using a Prometheus-compatible API or monthly CSV billing data exports featuring the tenant ID provided at service creation. Furthermore we can provide a modern metered billing system based on Odoo.
Compute: We currently support Kubernetes and OpenShift as the compute platform for the VSHN Application Marketplace.

More information is available at Application Marketplace Software. We’re here for you, please contact us to learn more and discuss.

Prerequisites

OpenShift or Kubernetes. If you don’t have that yet, we can provide Managed OpenShift.
Authentication with OpenID Connect. We can also provide an authentication system, learn more at Keycloak by VSHN.

Behind the Scenes

The Application Marketplace is based on Crossplane - The cloud native control plane framework and leverages Project Syn for configuration management.

All integrations we do are based on our framework, which is available at GitHub under vshn/appcat and component-appcat.

Technical documentation is openly accessible:

FAQ

Where does the Marketplace software run?: The marketplace API, frontend and all provisioned services run on Kubernetes on your infrastructure. Don’t have a Kubernetes service yet? Managed OpenShift can help get you started.
How do I profit from having the VSHN Application Marketplace integrated?: You provide your users access to the services and invoice them; we do the rest, including 24x7 support.
How can I make more money with it?: Announce the availability of new services to your existing customers today and let them onboard themselves.