Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing is an emerging hot business support technology for the future; and as analyst firm Gartner puts it, it is one among the top-10 strategic technologies for the year 2010. Advantages like low-cost business systems, easy installation, low productivity lead-time and quick roll-out of services talk in favor of this futuristic business model. It addresses the evolving needs of communication service providers like on-demand and web-enabled systems that are service-provider oriented, technology solutions to adopt new business models that are economical, and single-point responsibility for supporting business systems and effective risk management. These advantages attract the attention of communication service providers (CSPs) to cloud computing and keep it in their focus, while they think about strategic technology solutions. These high expectations ultimately increase the responsibility of cloud service providers to meet the needs of the CSPs, even to a minute level.
Scalability, flexibility and customization are inevitable features of technology solutions or services nowadays. The scalability to handle CSPs, who have large volumes of customers, differentiates cloud service providers among themselves. Another important differentiator is the capability to handle the sophisticated pricing and billing needs of their customers, the CSPs. Advance capabilities to handle different usage-based variables – such as value, time, volume, promotions, discounts and service level agreements, based on different contract periods and pooled users – must truly make a distinction. In order to address the pricing needs and capabilities like relationship-based pricing, parameterized pricing and advanced pricing models – like flat rates, tiered, bracketed and metered usage rates, rates based on days and peak time -- should be there in the arsenal. Innovative pricing models that help to create attractive packages and bundles, discounts and to bundle partner products are too the need of the hour. Cloud service providers should have the capability for automated billing based on any billing cycle, besides being able to handle payments through different media like manual payments, cards, EFTs and ACH. They should enable features for auditing and tracking the usage even for multi-level accounts for any levels of customers and partners. Multi-language and multi-currency support is also a necessity. Partnerships are becoming highly strategic, and so the capability to get a top-down view of the partner level agreements and revenue sharing attributes to manage revenue settlement and inter transfer pricing makes a huge difference in the market place.
In short, by delivering these top priority capabilities in pricing and billing, cloud service providers can be the real differentiator in the market. Partnering with vendors, who can handle sophisticated pricing and billing functions, could help cloud providers to address the business needs in the market, and to bring out cloud as a prominent business model in the future.