Sales Model

Now you are familiar with possible sales models in OSS/BSS, it is time to analyze which application services you sell and how you will offer them through service providers to their customers.

Sales Components

When presenting an application on the market, an ISV defines it as a single service or a set of services and possibly sub-services. It is important to identify which of them the ISV wants to sell.

Consider the following simple examples when deciding on the list of services that you are going to sell.

Multi-Tenant Unlimited Service

Suppose there is a cloud application providing a single service with unlimited resource usage for each tenant. For example, an organization uses the acquired tenant to get access to all application resources, such as legal documents, or technical standards, or online movies.

In this case, a service provider can sell the single service, for example, called tenant, that allows customers to access the cloud resources.

Cloud Servers

A cloud system provides virtual private servers (VPSes) with limits on resource usage. Depending on the system capabilities, a provider can sell the following services:

• VPS management. This allows a customer to create and manage VPSes using resources limited by the subscription.

• VPS sub-service. This has the following possible uses:

  • VPSes can be shared for the company.

  • VPSes can be assigned to service users.

• VPS offers. These are references to VPS limits preconfigured by the provider.

• Resource usage. This is total resource usage, for example, disk space, RAM, or CPU power.

Backup Application

A cloud backup system allows its customers to backup servers and personal systems. A customer can back up the servers belonging to the company as well as provide access to the backup service for the company’s staff to back up the computers they use. A provider can think of selling the following components:

• Tenant: an object that represents a customer on the backup cloud services

• Storage: total use of the cloud storage containing the customer’s backed up resources

• Server backup: the total number of servers to backup periodically

• User backup: the total number of users that can backup their personal systems

Design Sales Models

Check-List

When designing a sales model remember to collect and analyze the following data:

• Sales Components

• Sales channels - direct and through resellers

• Trials - time-limited or feature-limited (freemium) service

• Service pause and resume - whether a provider can stop a service for a customer and a customer can stop a sub-service

• Integration with other applications (required or optional), for example, DNS, anti-virus, or anti-spam

Typical Sales Models

The sales model for your application can be a combination of:

• Service with fixed price

• Add-on service

• Pay-as-you-go service

Design Process

Look through the list of services you are going to provide and consider the following for each of them:

1. Is it possible to sell the service on an add-on basis?

   • If not, use a fixed price, possibly zero.

   • If yes, consider the following alternatives:

     • Use the add-on sales method, where customers can select the resource limitation.

     • Use the pay-as-you-go method, where resource usage is unlimited and the system will charge customers at the end of each billing period for the actual resource usage.

2. Is it required or possible to assign the service to a service user?

   For example, total resource usage is assigned to the customer as an organization, not a service user.

3. Does the service require a DNS zone or a DNS record assigned to it?

4. If you allow trial subscriptions, will they include this service?

   If yes, what will be the limit on such subscriptions?

5. Will it be possible to pause and resume the service?

6. Is it required or possible to integrate the service with another application?

Write down the results in a table similar to this:

APP SERVICE	Sales method	Assign to users	DNS	Trial	Pause/resume	Other app	Description
VPS Management	Zero price	-	DNS zone	Yes	Yes	-	Main singleton service (subscription service) linked with other services in a subscription
VPS	add-on	Yes	A record	Limited	Yes	- Backup service - Anti-virus - Site-builder	Virtual private server that a customer admin can assign to an end-user. A VPS provides resources limited by an offer linked with it.
Offer	add-on	-	-	-	-	-	A service profile with limits that a VPS based on the offer cannot exceed.
Storage	pay-as-you-go	-	-	Limited	-	-	Total disk space usage in GB.

Decide if cross-selling is mandatory or possible. For example, a mail server needs to bind to one or more domains. In a bound domain, an MX record must refer to this mail server. In another example, a subscriber needs a separate domain to assign A records for each VPS in it. For this reason, your sales model may require cross-selling of service plans from a domain registration sales category.

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