Service providers need to provide their customers with clear, easy to understand pricing. Their customers need to understand exactly what they are paying for and predict their future costs. Services providers also need to increase margins where ever possible and make money. Abiquo helps them do this and service provider have the flexibility to create a pricing structure which suits their customer requirements and maximises their margins.

At the highest level Abiquo supports two pricing models. The first is allocation. Where a customer is allocated, compute, storage and networking resources and is charged based on that allocation. The second is consumption or “pay as you go”. Abiquo is metering a rich set of data, based on the compute, storage and networking resources used by every virtual machine, or every customer every hour. This provides a comprehensive set of data so that customers pay for the resources that they have consumed.

In addition by offering multiple tiers of service it is possible for the service provider to charge for additional value added services, or charge a premium based on compute hardware, hypervisor, storage and so on. This means services can be provided to suit each customers budget.

All of this data is easily exported from the Abiquo platform in CSV or database formats, or through direct integrations with billing technologies such as Zuora, Aria Systems and Ubersmith.