Cloud hosting provider Hostway Services, Inc. today announced Cloud Connex, a hosted cloud reseller/partner platform that enables VARs, marketing agencies, system integrators and managed service providers to sell private-labeled cloud services with no internal infrastructure or development costs. The platform features a brandable storefront template and customer portal for easy end user onboarding and self-serve provisioning, integrated billing and payment processing, and full control over customer pricing as well as the customer relationship –features unavailable from providers like Rackspace, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Resellers can use Cloud Connex to drive recurring revenues by marketing a web-based corporate email & collaboration solution based upon Open Xchange and public-cloud IaaS services. Domain name registration from Hostway and hosted Microsoft Exchange will also soon be available. Hostway has provided these services to hundreds of thousands of customers for years, allowing partners to take advantage of its infrastructure and experience.
VARs can deliver applications in Hostway’s public cloud with their own branding and optionally bundle them with email and/or DNR services. Marketing agencies can quickly spin campaigns up and down paying only for what they use and billing the customer for all services on one invoice. System integrators can package Hostway’s services with their own to increase customer wallet share. Managed service providers can utilize Hostway’s cloud to deliver their services without building their own cloud infrastructure and manage all cloud environments from a single console.
Cloud Connex resellers also reap the benefits of:
- Completely automated cloud services management, including provisioning and billing.
- Fully customizable retail pricing, allowing resellers to define their own rates without being tied to the cloud service provider’s pricing.
- Integrated billing that automatically imports wholesale usage-based pricing that is rated using the reseller’s retail pricing and also combines multiple Hostway or Hostway/reseller services, eliminating the need to manually create customer invoices from one or more supplier invoices.
- Centralized administration of all customer accounts through a reseller control panel.
- A tiered 5-20% discount structure that rewards partners with larger discounts and payouts as aggregated monthly recurring revenue (MRR) increases.
“For resellers, the cloud opportunity has been largely nullified to date by the inability to layer private-labeled cloud on top of their own services without building expensive infrastructure. Cloud Connex provides that infrastructure along with customizable branding, pricing, bundling and billing that make the entire cloud offering appear to be the reseller’s own,”said Todd Benjamin, Hostway Vice President of Hosted Services. “This is a cloud game changer for the reseller community.”
Cloud Connex billing and administration functions are provided by Parallels Automation software for delivering and managing cloud services, which has been integrated with Hostway’s services for turnkey use. Hostway hosts the Parallels software on the resellers’ behalf, eliminating in-house deployment and associated costs.