Solutions
Microsoft Apps Cloud: Service Provider Business Models
Offering Microsoft enterprise applications in private and hybrid clouds is an emerging market for cloud providers. Explore the business models you can offer using technology provided by Hosting Controller.
An Emerging Market for Private and Hybrid Clouds
Microsoft Enterprise Applications suite includes Exchange, Active Directory, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Teams, Hyper-V, RDS, VDI, and Office applications. Offering these applications in the public cloud is mostly dominated by Microsoft 365, but offering these Microsoft enterprise applications in private and hybrid clouds is an emerging market for other cloud providers. An estimated 85% of medium to large organizations worldwide are using Exchange for messaging or Active Directory for identity data.
Business Models
Four Ways to Offer Microsoft Apps as a Service
Hosted Private Cloud
The Cloud-Provider offers an instance of Hosting Controller Control Panel hosted on its infrastructure for every customer who wants a managed private cloud environment. The provider supplies Windows VMs that customers use to run Hosting Controller and other Microsoft applications, optionally with readymade VM images.
On-Premises Private Cloud
The Cloud-Provider only offers licenses for Hosting Controller software. The customer deploys Hosting Controller on-premises and uses it to manage Microsoft applications also deployed on-premises. The provider's infrastructure is not used directly.
Hosted Exchange Public Cloud
The Cloud-Provider deploys Hosting Controller in a multi-tenant configuration where one instance of a Microsoft application is shared among multiple tenants. The provider makes user-based subscriptions and takes an SPLA license from Microsoft for the hosted applications.
Hosted Exchange Multi-Cloud
The Cloud-Provider makes per-user subscriptions for Microsoft applications hosted on its cloud, with some applications offloaded towards Microsoft 365. The provider takes an SPLA license for the apps it hosts and CSP licensing from Microsoft 365 for the offloaded ones.
How IT Works
Order, Deploy, and Manage
Sample Offering
Customers start by ordering the required mix of virtual machines based on their target deployment topology. An order consists of at least one Windows machine running Hosting Controller itself and one or more machines for other Microsoft applications like MS Exchange, Active Directory, and SharePoint. Customers get root level access to Hosting Controller, from where they login, onboard all the required applications, and start managing them with automation provided by Hosting Controller.
Licensing and SLA
For licensing, the Cloud-Provider includes the license price of Windows servers, while customers bring their own licenses (BYOL) for the rest of the applications and are responsible for Microsoft licensing compliance. For the SLA, the Cloud-Provider is responsible for infrastructure, i.e. compute, storage, networking, backups, and restore, while the customer is responsible for the operations of the software applications.