Private Offers are now more flexible than ever

Today, we are excited to announce that Private Offers in Google Cloud Marketplace is now generally available. With these new and expanded deal-making capabilities, Google Cloud partners can help our shared customers buy the way they want. All Marketplace partners now have more options to further customize pricing, payment schedules, and terms for privately negotiated Google Cloud Marketplace deals, including:

• Support across product types: SaaS, Virtual Machine and Kubernetes products can now be purchased via Private Offers.
• Expanded subscription and discounting models: New committed use discounts (CUD) and enhanced flat fee and flat fee with usage experiences can better support your business model.
• Flexible payment schedule and contract duration options: Align your Private Offers to how our mutual customers want to buy with pre or post-pay timing options and choice of various contract periods.
• Prepay installments functionality: Allow customers to make multiple prepay payments of equal or increasing amounts over the course of the contract to align with when they want to pay.
• Deal-specific terms: Upload pre-existing or customized license agreements to each offer, enabling customers to leverage deal-specific terms of service and accelerate the purchase process by reducing redlining.
• Private Offer amendment and extension:  Support for renewals, expanding existing deals, updating customer plans, and launching new product features.

Offering these capabilities is an important step forward in helping our partners grow their business on Google Cloud. As Kathy Barboza, NetApp’s Worldwide Head of Google Cloud Sales Specialist says, Private Offers open new and expanded opportunities, helping us better serve our customers together: “NetApp and Google Cloud have partnered to meet our customers’ unique needs through Private Offers on Google Marketplace and are collaborating to establish long term relationships, growth, and revenue. The partnership provides our joint customers with the ability to anticipate budgets along with the flexibility to address their business-critical requirements as they navigate digital transformation.”

And these new capabilities are on top of the existing customer benefits that accelerate deals transacted  through Google Cloud Marketplace:

• Buyers can leverage their existing agreement with Google Cloud for Marketplace purchases, simplifying procurement for quicker deployment and time to value.
• Customers can decrement their committed spend through Marketplace transactions, which maximizes their cost savings and helps them spend smartly across first and third-party solutions.
• All Marketplace purchases show up on one bill from Google, allowing customers to easily analyze and manage spend.

Check out the Marketplace Partner Fundamentals within Partner Advantage for more on the benefits of Google Cloud Marketplace for your business and customers.

This is a major step forward in helping customers solve business challenges more quickly and driving additional growth for our partner ecosystem. Google Cloud Marketplace was already the fastest way to show up to Google Cloud customers in-product worldwide. Now transacting and growing large, customized enterprise deals is easier and more flexible than ever.

Simple Private Offer configuration

Ready to grow your business on Google Cloud with Private Offers? Let’s walk through the guided creation flow.

As a prerequisite, you’ll need to publish a transactable listing on Google Cloud Marketplace.

Once your product is published, customers can request a negotiated deal by reaching out to you directly within Marketplace, through their Google seller, or via an existing engagement. While confirming  pricing, terms, and payment schedules with the customer offline, you can start creating a new Private Offer in Google Cloud Marketplace > Producer Portal and selecting the relevant transactable SaaS, VM, or Kubernetes product and plan that will support one of three subscription models per deal:

For SaaS, VM and Kubernetes products with Usage Only pricing models, you can provide your customer with a committed use discount (CUD) subscription. The customer commits to spending a certain amount to use the product and receives a discount based on this commitment. They can apply this commitment flexibly towards different resources of the product.

For SaaS products specifically, there are two additional subscription models available:

1. Flat fee: your customer pays a set subscription fee for a specified quantity of software features.
2. Flat fee with usage:  your customer pays a fee to use the software, including access to features in specific quantities. Customers pay an additional fee for resource usage incurred beyond what’s included in the flat fee.

After selecting the product and plan, you’ll enter the recipient details for the customer or the Google Cloud reseller if this offer is being resold. Enter the recipient’s Billing Account ID—which they can learn more about identifying here. A Private Offer will apply to all projects assigned to their billing account. You’ll then provide a sales contact at your organization that the customer can reach out to if they have any questions on this Private Offer.

You can also add notes that your organization will see in the Private Offer dashboard. We’ve seen partners use this for order numbers, procurement IDs, or other CRM IDs to track deals within tools they use internally.

Next, you’ll select a payment schedule and the discounted pricing that you’re providing the customer. A postpay schedule will bill the customer monthly, while a prepay schedule—which many larger organizations prefer to help manage cloud spend—allows you to configure an installment schedule. Each installment can be up to a year in length, and each must be equal or greater in value than the previous one. You’ll also indicate a contract duration and offer an acceptance deadline that can be up to 3 months from the creation date. For postpay schedules, you can also select whether the customer can automatically renew this order at the end of the contract duration.

Now, select the software license terms you want the customer to agree to for your solution. You can use Google’s standard end-user license agreement (EULA), or you can upload and name a custom deal-specific one. We see most Private Offers using the standard EULA, but you may want to provide custom terms in certain scenarios. For instance, reusing previously agreed-to terms with an existing customer could skip redundant legal reviews, saving you and your customer time.

Now you’re ready to review the details for accuracy and preview the customer view of the deal. When everything looks great, generate a link to the Private Offer that you can send for your customer to review and accept.

By the way, don’t worry about future-proofing your offer now. We’ve built in plenty of flexibility to support growth in customer usage and renewals. Partners will also be able to amend existing offers as your customers’ needs grow, including:

• Modifying installment contracts to upsell and upgrade
• Adding future installments and edit unpaid installments
• Extending contract durations
• Offering new features that are launched on existing plans

Once configured, review it for accuracy and click Generate URL to send it to the customer or reseller.

Learn more about how to leverage this new feature set in the Private Offer documentation.

We’re excited to offer these new Private Offer features that provide you and our mutual customers with greater deal-making flexibility than ever in Google Cloud Marketplace. Stay tuned as we continue to invest in our partner ecosystem to unlock further opportunities that accelerate our customers’ digital transformation. See you in the cloud.