VMware is one of the top leading cloud computing and virtualization technology companies. Using vCenter and Cloud Director (VCD), VMware assists hundreds of partners in hosting and selling cloud services built using VMware technology. While vCenter provides the fundamentals of virtualization, Cloud Director offers the necessary building blocks for effectively segmenting the virtual infrastructure and making it available as a service to these partners’ tenants.

The infrastructure sold by these partners comes in a variety of forms, including "Pay as you go," "Raw capacity", also known as "Allocation based", and "Raw capacity with minimum guarantee", also known as "Reservation based". It can be difficult to assess usage over time and charge fairly when these strategies are combined and made available to the same customers. Tenants’ demands for billing transparency make it crucial for service providers to deliver it, and they must do so promptly.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a software licensing model whereby a company hosts its application in the cloud and customers make use of it via the internet from a web browser.

A SaaS offering doesn’t generally provide access via a one-time payment, rather charges customers either through subscription licenses or API request volumes. This means that subscription management and billing can be challenging, especially if the business is growing. Some of the questions arising are:

How do you meter and bill the usage of your SaaS app?

How do you create a selling strategy that matches the different types of metering and charging units?

In this article, we will address the most common SaaS billing challenges.

Microsoft is currently redoing how companies handle charges for the Azure cloud services and the Microsoft 365 licenses. With an emphasis on long-term contracts, the CSP model is gradually eliminated and replaced with the New Commerce Experience. With this transition, some challenges may arise and Exivity is here to break them down and help your business.

As more organizations are now using some form of a containerised platform such as Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, Tanzu and similar, it becomes harder to identify the exact resources that are being consumed inside your public or private cloud. The layer of abstraction introduced by containers can make it difficult to answer the simple question “what are all these business applications actually costing me?”

In recent years we have continuously improved our automated Azure CSP ETL billing workflow for Tier-1 resellers and Tier-2 providers. Our objective has always been to achieve a unified approach for billing of all Microsoft-based services.

The various Data Extractors and Transformers supplied with Exivity support this mission and include configurations for obtaining Azure consumption metrics, Office 365 licenses, the newer Azure Plan and also Internal Usage Rights (IUR).

As Microsoft continues to increase the scale of Azure CSP we at Exivity have further enhanced our interoperability by implementing the next logical step towards simplifying access to the insights that customers expect from such an advanced cloud as Microsoft's.

The results of this activity start with the Unified Azure CSP Extractor.

In this blog post, we'd like to show you how to use the Exivity Data Connector for Microsoft Power BI to use the billing data that is generated by Exivity in a centralized dashboard.

In November 2019 Microsoft introduced Azure Plans. This is a new way for Azure CSP partners and resellers to sell Azure Pay-as-you-Go services to their clients. In this blog post we've highlighted the 5 most important aspects of this model, and how they may affect your monthly billing.

The open source platform OpenStack is widely used for building IaaS-type product offerings as well as providing a general purpose hypervisor. One of the key components that enables users of OpenStack to collect metrics which can be used for billing and chargeback is called Ceilometer. Although Ceilometer is still live and kicking the Ceilometer API has been deprecated for quite some time now. Assuming you are responsible for a consumption based product portfolio which is driven by the OpenStack platform, how can you integrate OpenStack with your billing system? To answer this question let's take a walk into the forest that is OpenStack Telemetry.

A few weeks ago Microsoft announced during their Ignite event a new extension to the Azure product portfiolio: Azure Arc. With this new offering Microsoft will enable their customers to start using the Azure management tools for any cloud: both public and on premise.

Budgetary control over IT resources has become more challenging for many organisations as they move from capex to opex models for their IT spending. A 2019 study by Computer Economic found that 29% of organisations are actively reducing capital spending on IT. The same percentage of organisations are running more than half their applications already in the cloud, a growth of 300% compared to 2017.

We’re excited to announce our latest release 2.4.7 which has a bunch of new functionality to drive your hybrid cloud costs reporting and billing needs. In this blog post we will give you a brief overview of some of the key enhancements you will see with version 2.4.7, which was released on June 21st, and we will also preview some exciting new features that are coming in our next release.

Cloud is everywhere but so is the need to have in-depth insights into your personal finances. This got us thinking as Exivity is the world’s most flexible cloud metering & billing solution for on-premises, hybrid and public cloud resources and we mean it because it is also deployable for personal use. With some creative ways and a non-standard procedure, our team at Exivity has found a way to deploy Exivity for personal financial insight into monthly credit card expenditure.

With cloud in high demand and IoT at an all-time high, more and more Enterprise organizations and Service Providers are starting to either use Hybrid cloud providers or sell them. Most of the times, they also tend to pick many different types of cloud providers, depending on the intended use case. You would expect that they also have efficient systems in place to track usage, spending and to compile accurate chargeback/showback report. Yet, we have seen many companies struggle with getting these insights and invoicing processes aligned.

Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to Exivity to take advantage of the scalability, reliability, and agility of Azure to drive application development and shape business strategies.

We’re excited to announce today that we’re live on the Amazon Marketplace. The Exivity solution was already available on both the Azure Public Marketplace as well as the Azure Stack Marketplace. But as of today, users of the AWS platform can now easily deploy our solution from the AWS Marketplace. When deploying thru the AWS Marketplace, you are guaranteed to get the latest version of Exivity installed & ready to use within a few minutes. And of course we allow you to run a free trial with our software so you can test it properly before buying.

Exivity are very pleased to announce that as of today Exivity is live on the Microsoft Azure Stack Marketplace. The Azure Stack Marketplace is distinct from the Public Azure Marketplace and separate test and acceptance processes needed to be completed before Microsoft approved the offering.

This is because Azure Stack can run offline in “disconnected mode”, so the availability of an internet connection cannot be assumed. Also some features that are available in the public version of Azure are not available in the on-premises version. Since Exivity is public, private or hybrid compatible the on boarding process went smoothly.

2018 is coming to an end and unfortunately, there are still organizations struggling with costs for cloud deployments. Big public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services rely on the accuracy of the information provided by users.

Microsoft recently introduced a new Azure offer type for partners in the CSP program. This new program allows CSP partners to purchase, track and manage Azure internal spending. As Microsoft describes it:

With Azure Partner Shared Services partners now have the same flexibility to use Azure subscriptions in CSP as they do in the Microsoft Enterprise Agreement and Web Direct programs. Partners in CSP will now be able to do things like: