Automating Billing & Operations

To reduce costs and improve customer response times, cloud services providers will automate repetitive tasks such as service provisioning and billing. Automating your billing system provides a single online portal for your customers to purchase services, view invoices, and manage their account. In addition, it allows you to quickly add new offerings, such as software-as-a-service (SaaS), to further increase your revenue stream.

Hosting customers should be able to log in to a web-based control panel, add services and resources, and check out with multiple payment methods for real-time provisioning — all without contacting a customer support team. This self-service mechanism helps to streamline business operations and automates all aspects of service delivery for cloud services providers, ISPs, and telcos.

In addition to streamlined operations, benefits of billing automation include:

• A boost in new customer registrations
• Lower cost of customer acquisition
• Quicker response to market changes
• The ability to mine data on existing customers for marketing new services and upsell opportunities
• White label services for resellers, VARs and SIs, enabling your resellers to offer services under their brand, hiding you as the provider
• Easily deployed payment modules for your resellers

Build vs. Buy

A key question for cloud services providers looking to automate their billing and operation systems is whether to build in-house or work with a partner such as Parallels to purchase and install a finely-tuned, widely-accepted automation system. Ask yourself, do you want to use valuable company resources on building commodity, back-end billing and automation systems, or focus on revenue-generating activities and service differentiation?

As leaders in automation and virtualization, Parallels offers two products to help you automate your billing and operation systems: Parallels Plesk Billing and Parallels Automation.

Parallels Plesk Billing is an easy and complete way to automate basic ordering and billing processes. It is especially useful when integrated with the Parallels Plesk Panel suite of products and is well suited for single-server solutions. Parallels Automation offers a more flexible, scalable approach to billing automation and is useful for automating the deployment of a wide portfolio of services such as Microsoft Hosted Exchange, Sharepoint, Dynamic CRM, software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtual private servers, and dedicated and share hosting.

A Parallels account represent can help you choose the right billing automation system for your business.