Catalog

Overview

The Catalog module, as the name implies, allows defining and managing an inventory of products that are available for subsequent business operations. Specifically, the system allows grouping products that can be used for syndication scenarios and for referral programs. A product group can include services of one or multiple vendors, software of a specific category, or represent any other collection of your available products.

The Catalog module is increasingly helpful for organizations that collaborate via the Connect platform. It enables your business partners to learn more about presented products and enroll defined agreement with just a couple of clicks. Therefore, your invited Resellers and Distributors can quickly find all information about your products and easily perform all required operations to provision these products via their own marketplaces.

Catalog Features and Benefits

The Catalog module provides organizations with the functionality to address and successfully overcome product catalog management challenges. The following outlines some of the high-level benefits for your organization and your business partners:

• Discover new revenue and opportunities for your featured products. A well-defined, clear and accurate product catalog for authorized resellers streamlines and boosts up your business operations. Enhance your supply chain and deploy multi-tiered channels by using a single module.
• Catalog greatly improves visibility for your featured products and services. The provided interface enables organizations to easily discover new software or a service and quickly locate required product they want to work with.
• Get flexibility to define your catalog according to your business requirements. Create multi-vendor product groups that will be available for your business partner or showcase products of a single vendor for a certain organization — your catalog can be easily tailored to meet any business needs and to provide a collection of products for specific partners according to your agreement.
• Eliminate barriers of complexity and redundancy with automation. Catalog enables you business partners to automatically enroll and digitally sign a new agreement for a new product without any additional micro-steps or other blockers. Such agreements can also be automatically accepted in case it is required for your business.
• Save time on provisioning new products and managing existing services. All operations to add new products to your catalog, change or update the collection of featured products are just a few clicks away.

Note that the Catalog modules features more advantages that will be described as you dive into the provided functionality, concept, and workflows.

Concept and Workflows

The following diagram introduces and describes the Catalog module concept with Vendor, Distributor and Reseller interconnections on the CloudBlue Connect platform:

Distributors define their program agreements and distribution agreements that serve as templates for corresponding contracts and that are used to collaborate with Vendors on the Connect platform.

Once Vendors define their product on Connect, the system enables such Vendors to submit a listing request. Therefore, this product that can be provisioned via the Distributor’s marketplace and included within the product catalog on Connect. Distributors can also define product groups and sourcing agreements (i.e., syndication or referral agreements) with enlisted products.

Resellers are invited on Connect by signing their service contracts with Distributors. Service contracts are based on their corresponding service agreements that are also created by Distributors. Once Resellers can access the Connect platform, the system provides such Resellers with products in the Catalog module. Thereafter, Resellers can select required products and enroll a sourcing contract. In case the Sourcing Distributor successfully signs the contract, Resellers will be able to provision selected products via their own marketplaces.

The CloudBlue Connect platform also allows Distributors to link multiple product groups to the same service agreement as well as multiple service agreements as schematically illustrated in the following diagram:

Once Vendors submit listing requests with their products, Distributors can create product groups that include products of one or multiple Vendors.

Next, created product groups should be attached to one or multiple service agreements. A service agreement represents a template that can be used to enroll one or several service contracts with Resellers.

In addition, the Connect platform also allows invited business partners to enroll a sourcing (syndication or referral) contract for each product within selected product groups. Syndication and referral contracts are also based on corresponding syndication and referral agreements that are defined by Distributors.

Next Steps

Refer to the following articles to learn how to establish your catalog, create product groups, manage product group visibility and how to use the provided graphical user interface in the Catalog module.