Cloud services Channel Activation Toolset

Create, Manage and Accelerate your cloud channel

Suenos offers a hosted application toolset that provides a solution to all challenges associated with (reseller) channel management of multiple cloud services.

Our services allow Cloud Service Brokers (CSBs) to create and manage a reseller channel and provide them with the tools to promote, sell and provision cloud services.

Try out Suenos’ channel activation tool.
Sign up for a free demo account, provisioned by our partner LuxCloud

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The new way of channel activation

Today, cloud services have matured into full-fledged applications that hold many benefits for business and personal users.

New innovations and enhancements make cloud applications safer, better and faster than traditional client applications. Provisioning multiple cloud applications to multiple customers is possible through several solutions, and some of these tools also allow (reseller) channel management. Unfortunately, these tools currently still rely on the channel partner to have a high level of both technical skills and sales knowledge.

With our hosted software solution, potential resellers can easily sign up and start selling your cloud products. They do not need to acquire technological knowledge to get started. Suenos offers a fully featured Cloud Service Broker platform, service management and sales tools and for the necessary sales and marketing information a toolkit with targeted go-to-market information is included.

For any CSB a successful activation of their sales channel is a critical success factor, and Suenos caters to support this by offering functionalities such as Channel Management, Channel CRM, Channel Billing and a Channel Sales Portal.

The Suenos Toolset

Channel Management

Setting up a sales channel traditionally takes a lot of time and investment of people. If the products you sell have a high margin and require specific knowledge it’s common to spend a lot of time in finding the right partner, incentivising and training them. Unfortunately, cloud products do not fall in this category and it is therefore imperative to optimize finding the right partners and guiding them through the program and your products.

Suenos offers a Channel Management solution that offers an easy-onboarding process for new partners, allowing the CSB to offer (free) trial products and experiences without the need to manually do anything.

The Channel Management feature includes advanced tracking software for a deep analysis of customer behaviour and optimized email marketing to quickly create newsletters and other communication towards partners.

Channel CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) enables you to manage the interaction with current and future customers. The partner data and the product portfolio information is centrally located and connected to the Partner Portal. Changes in the portal are immediately updated in the CRM, ensuring you always have the latest partner information.

Part of the Suenos setup is the creation of a CRM tenant, providing access to a fully functional CRM that has a full overview of the partners, their details and their activities. If you already have your own CRM an integration can be part of the implementation project.

Channel Billing

In order to automate the billing and invoicing of partners that are successfully reselling your products, the Suenos Toolset includes a white label channel invoice. This invoice includes Partner Program costs and the service fees of the products that were ordered and provisioned for the partners customers.

This multi-tier bill can also automatically deduct the discount level associated to the Partner Program.

Sales Portal

The Suenos Sales Portal enables your partners to place orders for new products in a simplified manner. The portal interface is optimized to reduce complexity. Create new customers and add services to different users in seconds, easy and fast.

Other options are also available such as connecting a cloud store or an API.

Assist your partners in positioning their cloud services for a successful channel approach, through our targeted sales and marketing toolkit.

The Sales Partner Acceleration Resource Kit (SPARK), is a rich source of content and supports your partners to get started.
The content is structured in interactive sections and is adapted to the needs of the customer.The customer can indicate, through a series of questions, what kind of assistance in the go-to-market process they require.
There is market information, a business case builder, product information and fully white label re-usable examples for marketing content like emails, banners and website content.

SPARK is available on the Partner Portal and allows you to assist your partners to get started, by providing practical advice when selling cloud services and to speed up their time to market.

API

The Cloud Service Layer (CSL) provides developers with an easy and secure solution to access your catalogue of services and to activate them. CSL gives customers and resellers the possibility to use and manage their product offerings, through a complete and simple Application Programming Interface (CSL API).

Users of CSL benefit from a simple, secure and light interface to interact with the service catalogue; guaranteeing a consistent provision of services.

Service Provisioning

For service provisioning Suenos offers a fully integrated solution that uses the so called APS standard to connect to cloud services. APS assists ISVs and service providers to get on the same page by giving them a common platform for distributing applications. If an ISV’s application is costly to adopt for reselling, a provider will be less inclined to market it, or even to select it as one of their offerings. On the other hand, if the ISV packages its applications using a standard that is familiar and convenient for service providers, the risk to the service provider is reduced to almost nothing.

APS introduces a “pluggable” approach to distributing SaaS applications. Once you package your application in APS, it can be easily plugged into the infrastructure of any hosting or telecommunications provider that has adopted the standard “socket” platform for APS applications.

Service Management

Offer practically any and every service that customers demand. Using a centralized management console, automate delivery of IaaS services such as dedicated servers, VPS, storage and more – plus SaaS and other services.

Reseller Sales Acceleration

Grow your cloud market share with practical advice and hands-on experience through our business development campaigns. We bring you new business from scratch.
We have an agile approach in our campaigns, fine-tuned to your wishes. Using adaptive planning, evolutionary development, and flexible response to changes. We prepare campaigns by evaluating the solution, define an approach and build an activity planning.
With our industry knowledge and network of relevant business relationships, we provide controlled success.
For our campaigns, we use existing contacts, explore and open up new contacts, attend events, or organize direct (inbound) marketing actions.

Suenos assist you in opening markets, creating new commercial success, new partnerships and new income streams. We believe in cloud solution thinking, acting and active knowledge within your (sales) organization.
The Reseller Sales Acceleration is the start of your cloud revenue waterfall.

Sales Partner (reseller) sign up, Reseller onboarding and Reseller lifecycle management

Measures and collects all partner and portal activity

Invoicing, payments and collection of channel partners

Enable partners to easily add customers and products

Targeted sales and marketing materials to assist your partners in positioning their cloud services

Full Featured API for integration between resellers and CSB’s

Technical provisioning of cloud applications

Tools for customers to manage their cloud products

Let Suenos take care of attracting new business from scratch

Full featured CSB platform
Ready to use toolset
Go to market support
Allround expertise

Partner Case Studies

Open-Xchange (OX) drives down cost and time

Customer:
OX is a highly successful cloud service provider that currently has its hands full with catering to the top Telecom operators in the world. OX is worldwide used to enhance the email experience of roughly 120 million customers.

Challenge:
OX has launched a hosted solution of their product that is lacking provisioning, billing and partner onboarding tools. This means that every customer onboarding is a project by itself.

Solution:
By teaming up with Suenos a new branded Partner Portal and managed platform for OX App Suite was created. OX resellers can now sign up in minutes and try out OX-as-a-service, including sales tools, technical integration possibilities as well as upgrade to one of the two paid partner programs.

Timeline:
Within 2 months the complete portal including sales toolkit was implemented, tailored to the customer’s needs.

Result:
The internal costs were drastically reduced per new reseller, as well as the implementation time.

JOIN Experience reduces complexity

Customer:
JOIN Experience is the first telco 3.0 operator in Europe that integrates cloud services and telco services in one solution. JOIN provides an easy to use, fairly priced, transparent access to communication services, data as well as cloud applications within the European market and beyond.

Challenge:
The process for delivering cloud services was created for SMB customers but JOIN also needed to provide cloud services to consumers. The cloud activation process was too complex for this market segment.

Solution:
Together with the driving forces within JOIN, Suenos developed a simplified cloud activation process.

Timeline:
Within 4 month the process including a API extension was developed and implemented.

Result:
JOIN brought back the consumer customer activation for a cloud service from 41 steps to 4 steps.

LuxCloud doubles number of partners in three months

Customer:
LuxCloud is a leader in Cloud Service Brokerage enablement. They offer a one-stop shop for white label cloud business applications, allowing their Sales Partners to quickly launch and profitably deliver their cloud services under their own brand.

Challenge:
LuxCloud was unable to offer potential partners a way to quickly onboard and start reselling the core cloud applications.

Solution:
Suenos developed a process that allowed the reseller signup to be split into two steps that allowed a 2 minute first setup and onboarding.

Timeline:
Within 1 month the completely redesigned process, including contextual help for new resellers, was implemented.

Result:
In the first three months after the new process was implemented the number of partners was doubled.

Top Cloud XL scales up their reseller network with a minimum of extra costs.

Customer:
Top Cloud XL is a Dutch cloud service broker that specializes in sales acceleration projects and is aggressively expanding their reseller network. Their unique and personal approach allows them to bring down barriers for resellers to enter into the Cloud market.

Challenge:
Their previous software solution was forcing them to deploy a new version of the platform per reseller in order to achieve the channel setup they were looking for. This meant that managing resellers would become a huge task.

Solution:
With the multi-tenant, multi-brand solution Suenos offers Top Cloud XL is able to onboard as many partners as they want without the need to add extra resources to manage each instance.

Timeline:
In a compact two week setup process Suenos provided a fully branded solution including several Cloud solutions.

Result:
After deployment Top Cloud XL Signed up 19 new partners in their first month with a zero touch deployment. They could focus all their attention to sales acceleration and product training.

See Website TopCloudXL

By teaming up with Suenos a new branded Partner Portal was created for OX-as-a-service. This portal enables OX resellers to sign up in minutes to try out the complete product.

Suenos provides the cloud brokerage layer between JOIN and Microsoft Office365 and other cloud applications.

LuxCloud uses the full set of Suenos tools in order to manage its 300+ resellers and the associated cloud services.

Providing a multi-tenant solution that requires no additional technical knowledge nor maintenance costs allows Top Cloud XL to scale up their reseller network with a minimum of extra costs.

Ready to try out our channel activation tool?

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Channel Activation Toolset?

Channel Activation is the process of creating or improving a reseller channel for the purpose of selling goods or services via a third party. The channel activation toolset is a set of cloud applications that helps you to reach that goal.

What is included in the Suenos Toolset?

The channel activation toolset that Suenos offers is a series of web applications that include:
• A branded Partner Portal, with an easy sign up page to allow resellers to sign up.
• A guided tour through the portal explaining the different facets of the portal.
• A Sales Acceleration Tool, that allows you to create content for your customers and a step by step explanation of specific products and their go-to-market.
• A technical provisioning platform for provisioning cloud services.
• A billing platform to send out invoices to your customers.
• An integrated payment gateway that will allow your resellers to pay automatically via Credit Card.
• A sales interface that will allow your resellers to place orders for your products easily.
• An online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tenant for your organisation to track the signed up resellers.

All these tools combined allow you to focus on providing service to your resellers and not on the technology of providing them the services.

What does the Channel Activation Toolset cost?

Prices start from 800,- EUR per month for up to 5000 users. Contact us for more info.

Do I need to install software or buy hardware?

NO! The entire platform runs in the cloud, hosted and managed by our seasoned veterans, in a tier IV datacentre and can provision services anywhere in the world. Everything is managed via a web interface.

Can you provide me with a demo account so I can take a look myself?

Yes, please sign up for a free demo account, provisioned by our partner LuxCloud

I would like to connect an application to your provisioning platform. Is that possible?

Yes, by default the following plugins are available for provisioning:
• OXaaS
• OX (on-premise)
• Acronis
• Microsoft Office365
• Microsoft Exchange 2013 (on-premise)
• Microsoft SharePoint 2013 (on-premise)
• Microsoft CloudOS network

The full list of connectors that are available can be found here: http://dev.apsstandard.org/apps

Connectors to remote platforms will be setup and configured according to your wishes. If there is no connector available we have an excellent partner network that can create a custom connector to your application.

Do I need the Suenos toolset if I just want to resell cloud services?

No, the toolset is aimed at companies who want to manage a network of resellers and allow them to resell cloud services.

What is the alternative to using Suenos’ services?

Build your own cloud distribution platform or buy one from software vendors like ODIN. Setup costs, finding a team to manage both services and a provisioning/billing platform is a time-consuming activity.

Can you give examples of use cases for Suenos:

• I want to create a nationwide reseller for OXaaS, or my own OX platform.
• I have several on-premise cloud services but I want to create a reseller network for these services.
• I want to create an Office365 reseller network with local installation partners that can handle migration projects, but the ordering and billing needs to be streamlined.
• I am an accredited BaseKit reseller but want to setup a network of web designers that can create websites with BaseKit, but want to offer a centralised ordering and billing solution for them.

About Suenos

Suenos (Spanish for dreams) aims to deliver a complete Cloud Service Brokers solution that is not limited to only a technical solution but also helps your (reseller) channel to find the right commercial go-to-market strategy.

We offer a solution to all challenges associated with (reseller) channel management of multiple cloud services. It gives a CSB, who wants to market their portfolio of cloud services through partners/ resellers (VARs), a ready to use toolset for onboarding and managing these partners. Partners are enabled to launch their own CloudStore on top of Suenos’ cloud brokering platform. In addition, Suenos offers APIs that partners can use to embed services from their wholesale portfolio into their own commercial and management platforms.

Suenos employs world class developers that are seasoned veterans in the Cloud Service Brokerage. We are committed not to offer more functionality but to limit the choices your resellers need to make, in order to sell the right cloud product(s) to their customer, to get ahead of the competition.

39%

Of cloud resellers say their cloud efforts are “developing” or “not exactly ready”.

5.4%

Of cloud resellers state that their cloud services programs are “mature”

42%

Of IT decision makers increase cloud spending on cloud computing in 2015