TECHNICAL FIELD

The present disclosure relates to a system and method of software delivery in a cloud service broker (CSB) platform, and specifically, for a system and method for Of Digital Product Onboarding And Distribution Using The Cloud Service Brokerage Infrastructure.

BACKGROUND

When a reseller begins selling cloud services where the service owner is an external independent software vendor (ISV), resellers may have to run a cloud service broker (CSB) platform to facilitate selling the cloud services. The CSB would be configured to provide a unique user interface (UI) that integrated offers from different ISVs, an operating system for performing different control actions on the services (provisioning, deleting, changing etc.), a billing system for performing calculations of consumption/licensing fees, and generating invoices for their sub-resellers and customers. CSB platform may also be integrated with a plurality of different service vendors (e.g. Microsoft®, Dropbox®, Kaspersky Lab®) interfaces or special connectors.

In some cases, resellers may already offer other services unrelated to cloud services. By way of an example, a reseller in the hardware distribution business may have already implanted a solution for billing their sub-resellers and customers, they have tuned working CRM and many other custom system or IT business systems from any popular vendors of such systems (Oracle, QuickBooks, SalesForce, SAP etc.). As a result, launching a new platform with built-in IT solutions that enable selling products (it may be cloud services but also anything that is being handled by ISV) become too costly and ineffective.

On the other hand, service vendors may also suffer from complicated integration processes with the CSB platform. The complications may cause changes of application programming interfaces (APIs), require developing new APIs, adjusting billing rules, and the like. As a result, integration costs may exceed the revenue of selling through the Platform channel for many periods and even make the process of integration impossible if the vendor already has contracts with other similar CSB platforms.

Therefore, there is a need for a new and improved system and method of digital product onboarding and distribution using the cloud service brokerage infrastructure, and specifically, integration with vendor's systems and with the third-party it business systems used by a reseller, whereby a vendor can integrate with one CSB system, and display new service offerings on such vendor's e-commerce and IT business systems.

SUMMARY

In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, there is shown a schematic drawing of a system for digital product onboarding and distribution using the cloud service brokerage infrastructure. The system includes and ISV device, an ordering system, a vendor portal computing device, a marketplace computing device, and third-party computing device.

In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, a developer (for an ISV that wants to integrate its service with the CSB platform) may use a vendor UI portal in the vendor portal computing device. In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, the developer of the ISV may use the vendor portal computing device to fill in the general attributes of a product for sale, where such attributes may include, for example, product name, logo, product ID that will be further used in API calls, name of the account that owns this product from the ISV side, product fulfillment mode that define whether how provisioning/change/deletion will happen, short product overview for CSBs and the detailed overview of the product for CSBs.

In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, the vendor portal computing device and the product catalog are configured to generate the product model for a particular product. In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, the product definition may operate by way of API calls.

In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, there is shown a standard fulfillment API workflow. In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, API calls are relative to requests for a purchase order; and the purchase order is relative to a single asset with multiple product items from the ISV. In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, the system is configured to allow an asset defined as a recurring or one-time service or a product and a workflow of requesting these assets. In at least one embodiment of the present disclosure, all such requests get into a queue and then are processed either by an operator using the fulfillment UI or automatically via the integration through the fulfillment API.

