The Promise of Cloud Provisioning

Cloud provisioning offers an inbox facility where the requests for approval can be examined. This inbox acts as a worklist where multiple administrators can divide the work.

In cloud provisioning, a tenant can subscribe to an application by selecting it in a catalog of applications provided by a (sales) channel. All applications are managed by the service provider (the PaaS provider) and can be offered via different sales channels, where they can be procured, subscribed to and consumed by the tenants.

Channel catalogs do not contain the applications because an application can belong to multiple channels. They refer to the application definition that the PaaS administrator owns. The channel catalog provides information on the application capabilities, cost and subscription conditions. Applications can be owned by the ISVs or developers can also create new applications in their tenant and publish them to their own catalog .

Metering services. The metering service provides usage tracking of applications and services. Information on the usage of applications can be used by PaaS and SaaS providers for billing. It provides information to the ISV on how its application is being used and tells the tenant how many of its employees are using a specific application or service. The metering service doesn't instrument the applications to extract usage information. It's up to the ISV to implement the actual measuring of the usage and calling the metering API to register the usage.

The unit in which usage is expressed in the metering service is called "transaction." A transaction consists of an identifier of the application; the (application-specific) transaction type; the user and the organization; the context in which the application is used; a time stamp; and a usage quantity. Applications can define multiple transaction types to differentiate between different events that need to be measured. For example, an online shopping application can differentiate between viewing and sale/purchase of products.

With all the usage information available in the metering service, it's possible for an administrator to create different types of reports and views based on their role. Access to all information is role-based. It is possible to summarize per year, month, week or day and sort per type, channel, organization, application or a combination. The transaction totals have to be actualized via a manual action that'll start processing the transactions that still need to be included into the totals.

The main functions of the metering service are:

1. Log transactions by applications and services;

2. Process the transactions into totals per channel, organization and application by the metering calculation;

3. View transactions and totals;

4. Export totals in comma separated value (CSV) format;

5. Archive transactions.

The transactions or the totals can be exported in a CSV format. This allows easy integration with metering service for processing or analyzing of application usage. After exporting, the files can be downloaded and used, for instance, with a spreadsheet.

Transactions that are no longer needed can be archived using standard database tools. Archives can also be restored to the transaction tables.

The Promise of Cloud Provisioning

Cloud provisioning helps service providers cut operation costs by providing a workflow-enabled provisioning framework that facilitates end-to-end process integration and self-service to offer a new product, value-added service or application to the market. This creates the option for operators to act only on exceptions and thus lower the costs to operate a cloud.

OpenText Cordys Cloud Provisioning

OpenText Cordys Cloud Provisioning complements the business operations platform with automated provisioning and metering of applications for the cloud.

In principle, Cloud Provisioning can be characterized by the four capabilities it brings to the OpenText Cordys platform:

• Provisioning services take care of the delivery of services to customers.
• Informational services provide multiple views on the allocated resources and processes per tenant, per channel and overall.
• Business services provide commercial value to the SaaS and PaaS providers by adding SaaS-oriented business functions such as catalog, sales channels, application and application specifications.
• Metering services provide insight on the usage of applications.