Traditionally, the procurement of support and service licenses by Managed Service Providers (MSPs) has been a labor-intensive process that becomes more cumbersome as the number of customers and IT assets under management increases. In addition, the necessity to track and manage a large number of contracts with multiple expiration and renewal dates exacerbates the complexity of the situation.
Furthermore, while most MSPs offer their customers a monthly billing cycle, they are often required to make a large upfront investment in support and subscription services supplied by their upstream vendors as, typically, those vendors sell the licenses for these services in one-year increments. The inability to reassign that investment to other services quickly and easily in case end customers stop servicing their monthly bill further aggravates the situation.
In order to address the above issues and to achieve consistently high profitability, MSPs need a powerful tool that reduces their cash flow burdens, increases their flexibility, accelerates new client acquisition and maximizes their service delivery options.
The solution—SonicWALL FlexSpend.
SonicWALL® FlexSpend is a powerful, partner-enabling tool that dramatically improves the flexibility and liquidity of partners’ investment in SonicWALL services, while lowering their capital and operating expenses. FlexSpend is the industry’s first and only licensing program that makes monthly service billing easy, flexible and cash-flow friendly for MSPs.
Benefits.
FlexSpend enables the alignment of monthly service revenues with license expenditures, thus improving cash flow. In addition, FlexSpend reduces sunk cost and service procurement time, provides rapid cost insight and adds significant flexibility to the management of services.
Minimize cash flow fluctuations.
With FlexSpend, rather than having to invest in a full year of services, partners have the option to limit their cash outlays for services into shorter time increments, for as few as 30 days. Service duration can now be set in terms of days rather than years, or to end on a specific date. Hence, partners can better align outgoing cash flow for SonicWALL support contracts and subscription services with incoming cash flow from clients.
With FlexSpend’s ultra-flexible service management, services are not limited to pre-defined, fixed-unit increments (e.g., 25 or 50 client licenses, or 50 or 100 gigabytes). Therefore, in addition to providing the ability to customize service duration, FlexSpend also empowers partners with the ability to customize or change on the fly the number of clients or gigabytes on applicable services. For example, to implement a unique quarterly CDP offsite storage contract, FlexSpend could allow a partner to quickly deploy a 90-day service for exactly 45 gigabytes of offsite storage, yet have the option to change the service’s number of gigabytes at anytime.
Drastically reduce time spent on service procurement.
FlexSpend cuts procurement down to one step. As long as SonicWALL FlexSpend Credits are available in a partner’s account, the partner can enable multiple services instantly on multiple units at once, all without having to purchase and activate a large number of individual service SKUs.
Similar to the different denominations of cash currencies, a manageable number of available FlexSpend Credits are available for purchase from distribution to replenish a partner’s FlexSpend Credit account.
Reduce sunk cost.
FlexSpend allows SonicWALL Partners to significantly reduce the potential loss of service value allocated upfront by letting them recover any amount of unused FlexSpend Credits beyond the first 30 days of service for any given product. With FlexSpend, partners can now instantly transfer previously allocated, yet-unused FlexSpend Credits in the following ways:
- Transfer FlexSpend Credits back into the available pool of non-allocated FlexSpend Credits.
- Transfer FlexSpend Credits to a similar service on another unit.
- Transfer FlexSpend Credits to another service type on the same or a different unit.
With the flexible recovery and instant re-deployment of FlexSpend Credits as SonicWALL services, FlexSpend allows partners to significantly reduce the inherent sunk cost that is traditionally present across a large installed base of customers.
Gain rapid insight on service costs.
Utilizing a single, centralized reporting tool, partners gain better insight into their wholesale, recurring service costs and are able to build and intelligently price retail managed service offerings. These reporting capabilities also allow partners to easily understand both past and future service consumption for a more convenient billing of services and revenue forecasting.
Reduce renewal contract overhead.
FlexSpend allows partners to quickly pinpoint the presence of a large number of disparate service expiration dates. Its innate capability to potentially designate a single expiration date for any number of services renders the use of separate co-termination functionality unnecessary, reducing the large management overhead of numerous renewal contracts.
