3 Keys to Growing Your Azure or AWS Reseller Profitability

How Azure and AWS Resellers Can Profit with CloudCheckr

As a cloud service provider, you have to make sure that your customers know two crucial things. The first is that once they’re in the cloud, rapid growth is likely. Secondly, you’re able to manage their Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure services for them end-to-end, thanks to CloudCheckr. Additionally, CloudCheckr’s White Labeling capabilities let you substitute your logo and color scheme in the app and reports. (But that can be your little secret!)

In addition to CloudCheckr’s comprehensive cloud management capabilities for security, compliance, and automation, the platform enables you to greatly increase your profitability. CloudCheckr has helped service providers greatly increase their margins compared to what they can capture with native tools alone.

A few key Azure and AWS reseller services CloudCheckr provides are:

1. List Price Translation
2. Bill Re-Rating
3. Service Tiering

This guide will help show you how to increase your Azure or AWS reseller margins, how to leverage CloudCheckr to achieve results, and the immediate impact each can have on your cloud practice.

List Price Translation

An Azure or AWS reseller can purchase instances at a significant discount if they make a commitment to usage. For reasons such as uncertainty over consistent usage, unease with the upfront cost, and/or uncertainty over restrictions like platform or region, customers often ignore the possibilities. This is an opportunity for channel resellers with linked accounts to step in, assume the costs and risks of purchasing Reserved Instances (RI) or Savings Plans, and profit by reselling the capacity. However, to fully capture the margin, the reseller needs to properly recognize whether the customer owns the RI or Savings Plan, recast the cloud vendor’s original bill, and display appropriate pricing to the end customer.

This is where CloudCheckr helps. Rather than manually trying to calculate savings, re-rate the bill, and explain the pricing difference to customers, CloudCheckr administrators leverage the platform to automatically perform all of these functions. CloudCheckr analyzes RI usage and ownership, deallocates discounts, and provides operators with accurate end user billing dashboards that offer real-time updates as the month progresses. CloudCheckr will also perform an automatic opportunity analysis with recommendations for you to increase profit. Resellers that leverage CloudCheckr and RIs can typically double their margin within the first month.

Bill Re-Rating

Resellers are not limited to List Price. A Microsoft or AWS reseller can often craft their own pricing schedules to further incentivize customers and increase margins.

Unfortunately, Azure and AWS resellers sometimes make their pricing changes unintentionally public. Amazon CloudFront, for example, offers users significant discounts if they commit to minimum usage levels. Without CloudCheckr, users who take advantage of these discounts have those discounts displayed to their clients. Resellers are left either forfeiting the entire discount or explaining to customers why there is a discrepancy.

CloudCheckr offers a third way: split the discount with the customer and display only the quoted price. Resellers can thereby encourage greater service usage while still controlling the pricing information displayed to the customer. Similarly, resellers can use CloudCheckr to re-rate and re-price other services and features. All of this is designed to ensure that the reseller is able to maintain pricing confidentiality. It also ensures that the end-user receives consistent pricing.

This is a major profit-building opportunity for Managed Services Providers and Cloud Solution Providers who bundle services for the customers. Microsoft CSPs, for instance, often start out reselling Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) purchased at a discount so they can profit from the difference. As they grow and offer Microsoft Azure cloud services, resellers can continue to reprice services and generate profit from both public cloud and SaaS tools, including Microsoft 365, Teams, Yammer, and more.

CloudCheckr’s Cost Allocator with Expense Assist goes even further. Cloud resellers can split the cost of a shared expense, such as bandwidth, support, or even a third-party tool like a Backup and Restore solution. By establishing a percentage allocation for each client, such charges can be distributed in an equitable manner automatically instead of manually so that the reseller doesn’t have to absorb the cost altogether.

Service Tiering

With service tiering, public clouds can provide progressively greater discounts as customers increase their usage. The net effect is that various services diminish in price as usage increases.

Without CloudCheckr, the diminished charges are displayed on the end-user’s invoice. CloudCheckr, however, will automatically re-price the service as if the account (or account family) is a standalone customer. This enables resellers to charge each customer as if they were using the resource at full price. By doing this, resellers are able to keep the profit associated with the aggregated service usage for themselves.

This revenue capture can be particularly significant when considering the more steeply tiered services such as Support, where the initial charge begins at 10% (for the first $150,000) before tiering down to 3% at higher consumption levels (over $1 million). With multiple small customers, the programmatic adjustment performed by CloudCheckr can add 5% to a reseller’s base margin rate.

CloudCheckr for Azure and AWS Reseller Profitability

Successful cloud resellers build scalable businesses that capture all available margin. CloudCheckr can help you do that with three key capabilities: List Price Translation, Bill Re-Rating, and Service Tiering. CloudCheckr’s cost management tools also include invoicing, budget alerting, and built-in profit analysis.

To learn more, speak to your PDM about how you can create a profitable cloud business using CloudCheckr’s cloud management platform for MSPs, CSPs, and resellers.

Want to see what CloudCheckr can do for your profit margins? Learn how to save 30% or more on your cloud computing bills with a free Cloud Check Up.