Westcon-Comstor is bringing cloud and consumption license programs together under its BlueSky platform, enabling resellers to manage both CLP and cloud via the single portal.

Darryl Grauman, Westcon-Comstor APAC vice president of cloud and services, says the distributor is working with vendors and reseller pilot partners on a new addition to the BlueSky business management platform, which will add consumption license programs (CLP) to the mix.

The new offering is currently being piloted in Australia, New Zealand and Asia and is expected to be released by January/February.

“There are many organisations that have CLP, so someone can use a piece of software on premises even, but they pay for it on a consumption basis,” Grauman says.

“It's turning a traditional model into a cloud-like billing method.

Intel Security's MSPP, VMware's VSPP and Microsoft's SPLA programs are all consumption-based licensing.

Grauman says Westcon-Comstor is taking that functionality from a number of its vendors and adding it to the BlueSky business management platform.

“We're going to allow our resellers to manage their end users consumption license program software as well.

“It's not just going to be for cloud and cloud billing, it's also going to be for CLP – all consumption license types of billing, all consumption license programs, contracts, subscription renewals, variable value billing, that kind of thing.

Grauman says Westcon-Comstor is working with vendors to automate their processes so they can be added to the offering.

“There are some vendors that have it, but it's spreadsheet-based, very manual, very human. We're working with them to help them automate those interfaces and bring them in,” he says.

“Think about the power now about around what VMware have done and their announcement last week with AWS,” Grauman says, referring to the announcement that enterprises can take the VMware virtualisation platform with them to Amazon's public cloud via VMware Cloud on AWS.

“Imagine a reseller being able to view all of their end customers and their end consumption and their VMware VSPP consumption and all the costs and the billing and everything related to that from a single portal, and being able to manage every single one of their customers and being able to go into our analytics and optimisation engine and seeing where to place workloads, how they can optimise organisations to get the best bang for their buck, based on what they're spending and how they're spending it.

“Imagine the power of us bringing cloud and CLP together.