CloudBlue Connect (hereafter Connect) is the world’s most powerful ecosystem management distribution as a service (DaaS) platform with the support for both recurring (subscriptions) and one-time (physical & licensing) products. Connect provides a highly customizable service to arrange various integrated business flows, including contract management, product information flow, ordering and fulfillment, subscription management, and resource usage reporting.
Connect supports the following key Supply Chain flows:
Contract (Agreement) Flow: Business process that enables Distributors to bring new Vendors and Resellers into the system and manage business relationship with them at scale.
Product (Information) Flow: Business operation that requires Vendors to onboard products and list them to the Marketplaces.
Order (Fulfillment, Purchasing) Flow: Business operation that allows Distributors or Resellers to submit requests to Vendors; thus, partners can handle various operations in the product life cycle, like purchase, change, cancellation and other types of business scenarios.
Usage (Consumption, Metering) Flow: Business process that requires Vendors to submit structured product consumption reports that support pay-as-you-go model.
Connect supports different types of products. This includes:
One time: Physical goods, software licenses, etc.
Recurring: Subscriptions, services, etc.
Pay-as-you-go: Telecommunication metering, infrastructure-as-a–service consumption, utilities, etc.
Furthermore, Connect can be quickly integrated with various business processes and systems. Vendors, Resellers and Distributors can use any of the following integration methods:
Manual: Integration scenarios utilizing native capabilities of Connect Portals.
Extensions: Prebuilt software packages that integrate Connect with other systems.
SDK and Tools: Native bindings of REST API to various programming environments.
REST API: Set of functions to access features and data of Connect modules.
Scenarios
Connect is a platform that enables efficient business interactions between multiple Vendors, Distributors and Resellers in a many-to-many environment.
Connect can also implement the following high-level interactions cases:
Direct 1:1distribution of products from one Vendor to one Distributor.
Direct 1:many distribution with one Vendor and multiple Distributors.
Direct many:1 distribution with multiple Vendors and one Distributor.
Syndication 1:1 (resale) with one Distributor and one Reseller.
Syndication 1:many (resale) with one Distributor and multiple Resellers.
Such interactions can be summarized with the following diagram:
Please refer to the various articles and sub-articles of the Community Page to learn more about different scenarios and features of the CloudBlue Connect platform.
Where to go next?
In case you want to learn more about CloudBlue Connect Platform, it is recommended to access the Getting Started article first. You can also use left menu navigation to get to the particular topic directly or use search to find specific topics.
