What are Best Practices for Partner Trials?

Products

• CloudHealth

Issue/Introduction

Goals

• A uniform trial configuration and process across all partners
• Consistent handling of trials to limit potential for invoice confusion for both CHT partners and Accounts team

Best Practices

• All accounts, no matter which cloud or who 'owns' the account (billing relationship with the cloud provider), should be configured at the partner tenant
• AWS Customers who ‘bring their own’ accounts to a trial should use the 'Full Family' Partner Generated Billing Block (PGB) option
• AWS customers who are part of a partner's consolidated account already, and in trial, should be configured to use PGB to ensure accurate customer level costs
• For Azure Plan customers, the PAYG checkbox and/or billing rules should be set at the time of configuration according to the partner’s pricing model for that particular customer to ensure accurate costs in the customer tenant (Note: Charge PAYG pricing is on by default)
• Partners should inform Channel Account Managers of all trials so the CAM can provide support in closing the deal, and ensuring the account isn’t billed if the trial spans billing periods

 

Expected Outcomes

All customers of partners, regardless of account configuration, will be offered a free trial period of 2 weeks. All exceptions should be discussed with, and approved by, the Channel Account Manager and Director of Channel (if applicable) in writing.

 

 

Trial Configuration Best Practices

Goals

• Streamlined customer on-boarding
• Appropriately set Partner and Customer expectations

 

Best Practices

• Re-configuration, if necessary, will depend on whether ownership of the accounts will change (for example, if the customer will be moving their AWS/Azure accounts from their own PAYG to a reseller)
  • For Azure EA/AWS private pricing customers, a re-configuration is necessary only if the account structure is changing. Changes in ‘ownership’ don’t necessarily matter
    
    
• If an AWS account is moving from PAYG to a Partner Consolidated account:
  • With any AWS bill structure change during the course of the current month, the platform can perform automatic Bill Stitching to combine data costs in AWS accounts from multiple sources
  • If the historical billing bucket is configured at the customer tenant, that will take precedence and the platform will continue reading data from that file even if the account configuration is updated and Partner Generated Billing is enabled
  • At the partner tenant: enable Partner Generated Billing and build out the necessary billing block(s)
  • At the customer tenant: if the customer would like to prioritise historical data over more current data, keep the billing bucket configured as is

 

Tracking Trial Expiration Dates

Partner customer trial expiration dates can be viewed through the User Interface (UI) or via API GET responses:

• UI: Under Partner > Customers > List. Choose 'Edit Columns' to add the 'Is Trial' flag and the Trial Expiration date columns to the customer list
• API: Use the Get Single Customer (https://apidocs.cloudhealthtech.com/#partner_get-single-customer) request to return the trial expiration date for that customer

 

Post-Trial Best Practices

Successful Trials

• No further configuration should be necessary once the accounts have been added in the partner tenant and Partner Generated Billing has been set up
• Partners should notify the CAM of any 'Closed Won' customers
• The Partner is to remove the trial flag on the customer tenant to ensure costs and data continue to be processed, if the customer is 'Managed with Access' they continue to have access to their tenant, and that the customer is included in partner invoicing

Unsuccessful Trials

• The Partner should notify the CAM of any unsuccessful trials in order go over customer feedback, lessons learnt and any actions for future opportunities
• Delete the customer tenant. This is a soft delete and the tenant can be restored within 21 days. After this time the tenant is permanently deleted.
• The Partner removes any customer cloud accounts from the partner tenant to avoid any incurred costs and potential data retention issues