Seller Insights

Marketplace on Modern
Business Requirements Document

September 2018

Microsoft Confidential
 Seller Insights BRD
Marketplace on Modern

Contents
Marketplace on Modern .......................................................................................................................... 1
Azure Marketplace Background ........................................................................................................... 4
Seller Insights Background ................................................................................................................... 4
Modernization of Commerce ............................................................................................................... 4
Partner Impact ........................................................................................................................................ 4
Orders ................................................................................................................................................. 4
Customer............................................................................................................................................. 4
Minimum Viable Product ......................................................................................................................... 5
Parity ................................................................................................................................................... 5
Improvements ..................................................................................................................................... 5
Removal .............................................................................................................................................. 5
Opportunistic Improvements ................................................................................................................... 5
Conventions ............................................................................................................................................ 5
Requirements .......................................................................................................................................... 6
Summary Tab ...................................................................................................................................... 6
Normalized Usage Trend .................................................................................................................. 7
Active Orders Trend ......................................................................................................................... 7
Monthly Usage at a Glance .............................................................................................................. 7
Monthly Orders at a Glance ............................................................................................................. 8
Trending Usage ................................................................................................................................ 8
Trending Orders ............................................................................................................................... 8
Payout Trend ................................................................................................................................... 9
Payout Tab .......................................................................................................................................... 9
Overview ......................................................................................................................................... 9
Payout History ............................................................................................................................... 10
Trending Revenue .......................................................................................................................... 10
Revenue at a Glance ...................................................................................................................... 11
Orders & usage Tab ........................................................................................................................... 11
Normalized Usage by Offer (top 10 offers) ..................................................................................... 12
Normalized Usage by Market (top 10 markets) .............................................................................. 12
Normalized Usage by Azure License type ....................................................................................... 13
Customer Tenure ........................................................................................................................... 13

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Detailed Normalized Usage Data .................................................................................................... 14

Customer Tab .................................................................................................................................... 14
Customers Detailed Data ............................................................................................................... 14
Downloads Tab .................................................................................................................................. 15
Download Requests (Last 30 days) ................................................................................................. 15
Work Item Breakdown and Acceptance Criteria ................................................................................. 16

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Azure Marketplace Background

Microsoft partners with several third-party companies through the Azure Marketplace. There are two
different business models in place. One model is the “reseller” model where the third-party products
are billed as first-party offerings by Microsoft. In this case, each partner has a custom agreement
defining reporting requirements and payment terms. Microsoft bills for these products directly and
provides a royalty payment to the partner. The other model is the “agency” model where third-party
products are offered to customers and Microsoft bills and collects the payments from the customers on
behalf of the third party.

Seller Insights Background

Microsoft launched the Seller Insights portal to provide information for partners participating in the
Azure Marketplace. This was originally a stand-alone portal. Based on a desire to rationalize the
number of different portals partners needed to use, it was merged into the Cloud Partner Portal (CPP).
Today, the Insights are separated into a few different primary areas (Summary, Payout, Orders & Usage,
Customer, and Downloads). Additional beta or preview sections and a Microsoft internal section exist,
but they are not globally available to partners currently.

Modernization of Commerce
As Microsoft approaches the goal of a “Universal Store”, the underlying systems, infrastructure, and
data models change. The target date for supporting the Azure Marketplace with the Modern Commerce
APIs (MCAPI) begins on January 15th, 2019. Customers and partners should not be negatively impacted
because of these changes. The successful transition will enable new business models for Microsoft and
partners.

Partner Impact
Orders
One of the most obvious changes to the reporting on Seller Insights is the removal of an Order ID
associated with products that are billed based on usage. In the current (Legacy) system, this is the Azure
Data Mart (ADM) Order ID. The concept of an order for a usage-based product has caused substantial
confusion for partners. At the smallest grain of reporting (daily usage per subscription by Virtual
Machine (VM) size, and offer), partners are unable to differentiate individual deployment events. It is
also unclear whether the first deployment event constitutes an order, or any deployment event
constitutes an order.

Customer
The other change will be the definition of a customer. A new entity called “Commerce Root” represents
the customer in MCAPI. This new implementation of a customer many have any number of Azure
Subscriptions, or other products and services associated with it. Partners will now be able to see the
products and services purchased by different customers in a much more clearly aggregated manner.
Today, customers are defined as an Azure Subscription which does not clearly associate to a single
customer, and in many cases causes confusion and deflated values being reported.

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Minimum Viable Product

Parity
The goal in the Scandium (Sc) semester (July 1st, 2018 – December 31st, 2018) is parity for partners using
Seller Insights. The primary tenet is to uphold the critical dictum lifted from the Hippocratic Oath; “first,
do no harm.” Substantial risk already exists in the migration of the business systems and the data
lineage changes associated with modernizing the Azure Marketplace. The initial state of Seller Insights
upon the migration from legacy to MCAPI is that of parity. No perceptible changes with the UX other
than the customer improvement and the order id removal should be implemented.

Improvements
The customer tab is currently rendering information based on an Azure Subscription. The current data
set should be preserved, however it will be renamed to “Azure Subscriptions”. The addition of a new
data set representing the customer will be added as well as the corresponding relationship between
Azure Subscriptions.

Another improvement planned to coincide with the modernization is decoupling the requirement for an
Azure Subscription to be created for customers purchasing Software as a Service (SaaS) offers through
the Azure Marketplace. This will be the first time an order will not be associated with a subscription. To
provide traceability between customers and payout information, many of the User Interface (UI)
elements will need to be updated.

Removal
The Order ID will be removed from usage reporting. This will be removed both from the table in the UI
as well as the downloads (both .xlsx and .csv) from the Usage & orders tab. Any time something is
removed from Seller Insights, partner notification is required 90 days in advance. In addition to an e-
mail campaign with this notification, a banner notification will be presented to partners using Seller
Insights.

Opportunistic Improvements
Several other improvements may be implemented but are not required as a part of the transition to
MCAPI. These improvements will be designated as Priority 1 (P1) scenarios. Examples include extending
the number of months reported on using charts and graphs, providing a consolidated download on the
summary tab, and other UX improvements.

Conventions
The term tab will refer to the top-level Seller Insights navigation mechanism.

The term pane will refer to the UI widgets bounded by a border on a tab.

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The positions of the panes on the tabs dynamically adjust for narrow screens (like phones). The relative
positions mentioned are based on a wide screen (laptop) view of the page. None of the order of the UI
widgets will be changed for the scope of this document.

Requirements
Summary Tab
The summary tab presents an overview for the partner based on their offer type. The Insights are
intended to show critical information
at a glance.

The top left pane renders the

“Normalized Usage Trend” for
publishers with usage-based offers
or “Active Orders Trend” for
publishers without any usage-based
offers. Note, publishers with both
types of products and services will
only be shown the “Normalized
Usage Trend”.

The top right pane renders “Monthly

Usage at a Glance” for publishers
with usage-based offers or “Monthly Orders at a Glance” for publishers without any usage-based offers.

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Note, publishers with both types of products and services will only be shown the “Monthly Usage at a
Glance”.

The bottom left pane renders “Trending Usage” for publishers with usage-based offers or “Trending
Orders” for publishers without any usage-based offers. Note, publishers with both types of products and
services will only be shown the “Trending Usage”.

The bottom right pane renders “Payout Trend” for all publishers. Commented [AG1]: Might be worth showing a
screenshot of the proposed locations mentioned in text
Normalized Usage Trend here. I see a grainy screenshot listed with a portion of the
The vertical axis is “Normalized Usage Hours” (hours of charts cut off.

usage per virtual core), and the horizontal axis is the
month and year for the three month time period filtered in
the “Marketplace Summary” pane between the start date
and end date. The chart is a stacked bar by “Active Orders
Usage” and “New Orders Usage”.
Commented [DN2R1]: None of the positions of items will
be changing on the Summary tab. I’ll see if there is a better
way to capture a “long” screenshot showing the full page
when a user has to scroll.
Commented [DN3R1]:

Changes
Orders no longer apply to usage. The chart will be stacked
based on “Existing Customer Usage” and “New Customer
Usage”. New customers are customers with the first
instance of an offer purchased from the publisher during the calendar month depicted (this could either
be a usage-based or non-usage-based offer).

Active Orders Trend

The vertical axis is “No. of Orders”, and the horizontal axis
is the month and year for the three-month time period
filtered in the “Marketplace Summary” pane between the
start date and end date. The chart is a stacked bar by
“Active Orders” and “New Orders”.

Changes
The vertical axis will be renamed to “Number of Orders”.
The chart will be stacked by “Existing Customer’ Orders”
and “New Customer Orders”.

Monthly Usage at a Glance

This information is presented in tree map form. The information can be sliced either by Channel
(Enterprise, Enterprise through Reseller, Pay as You Go, Cloud Solution Provider) or by Offer (Partner
offer a.k.a. SKU). The usage is displayed in “Hrs” short for “Hours” but is actually “Normalized Usage
Hours”.

Changes
The usage should be displayed by “Normalized Usage Hours” rather than “Hrs”.

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Monthly Orders at a Glance

This information is presented in tree map form. The information can be sliced either by Channel
(Enterprise, Enterprise through Reseller, Pay as You Go, Cloud Solution Provider) or by Offer (Partner
offer a.k.a. SKU). The orders are displayed as “Orders”.

Changes
None

Trending Usage

Trending usage is broken down by top five markets, top five performing offers, and top five customers.
All three dimensions are ranked by Normalized Usage in hours. The markets are broken down by
country. The top five customers are Azure subscriptions, and the information includes both the
customer company name and the customer name from the subscription.

Changes
The top five customers will be presented at the grain of a customer rather than an Azure Subscription.

Trending Orders

Trending orders are broken down by top five markets, top five performing offers, and top five
customers. All three dimensions are ranked by order count. The markets are broken down by country.
The top five customers are Azure subscriptions, and the information includes both the customer
company name and the customer name from the subscription.

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Changes
The top five customers will be presented at the grain of a customer rather than an Azure Subscription.

Payout Trend
The vertical axis is “Paid out amount” (publisher currency),
and the horizontal axis is the month and year for the three
month time period filtered in the “Marketplace Summary”
pane between the start date and end date. The Upcoming
Payout amount is also rendered in the top right corner of
the pane.

Changes
None

Payout Tab
The payout tab provides an overview
for the partner including the total
payout received, upcoming payout, and
billing in progress. Additional panes can
be filtered by a date range to show the
payout history, trending revenue, and
revenue at a glance.

Overview
The payout overview provides the
ability to download the payout report
(.xlsx or .csv). The total payout received
by the partner (program inception to
present) is presented in the payout currency. The upcoming payout for the next period (once it has
been calculated) is presented in the payout currency. Billing in progress is also presented (this is
intended to represent any charges to customers that has not been collected but is still confusing to
publishers who are looking for a revenue forecast).

Changes
The billing in progress amount should only reflect any amount that is likely due to the partner in future
payments. It should not include amounts that have been paid in advance to a publisher, or amounts
related to internal use.

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Payout History

The payout history pane displays a bar chart with the paid amount as the vertical axis and the month
(including year) for the horizontal axis. Commented [AG4]: A future improvement could be to
have commentary related to each payout. For example, a
Changes drop is payout could show a comment box with a reason
None why it’s lower. Example being a reduction in purchases or
usage in specific region, ect…
Trending Revenue Commented [DN5R4]: That’s a great idea! I haven’t
formalized much of the concept around what I think of in
terms of “true” insights. I would like to have some ML and
potentially AI in place to show a partner what the system
thinks is the cause for a sudden increase or decline, as well
as a path to show the other charts/data that were used to
drive such a suggestion.

Trending revenue is broken down by top five markets, top five performing offers, and top five
customers. All three dimensions are ranked by payout amount (in the partners payout currency). The
markets are broken down by country. The top five performing offers are based on the partner’s SKUs.
The top five customers are Azure subscriptions, and the information includes both the customer
company name from the subscription.

Changes
The top five customers will be presented at the grain of a customer rather than an Azure Subscription.

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Revenue at a Glance

This information is presented in pie chart form. The information can be sliced either by Channel
(Enterprise, Enterprise through Reseller, Pay as You Go, Cloud Solution Provider) or by Offer Type (Single
VM, Solution Template, etc.). The orders are displayed as “Orders”.

Changes
None

Orders & usage Tab

The orders and usage tab displays
usage for usage-based offers and
orders for non-usage-based offers.
If the partner does not have usage-
based offers, they will not be able to
select usage. The reports can be
filtered by Azure License Type,
Marketplace License Type, a date
range, Market, Offer Type, a trial
indicator, Usage Type (Normalized
Usage, or Raw Usage), an Azure
Subscription GUID, the customer
first name, the customer last name,
and the customer company.

The usage report pane displays normalized usage by offer (top 10 offers), normalized usage by market
(top 10 markets), normalized usage by Azure license type (Enterprise, Enterprise through Reseller, Pay
as You Go, Cloud Solution Provider), Customer Tenure (Existing Customer, New Customer). Commented [AG6]: Do we provide definitions of
normalized usage, orders, ect… anywhere in CPP? If not,
that could help the user better understand the charts,
graphs, and data available.
Commented [DN7R6]: We do have all the definitions in
the help files on CPP. We’ve also got a copy on
docs.microsoft.com which is the new platform. I’m
expecting some rationalization of terms and column
renames as we get closer to the modern timeframe.

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The bottom pane displays the top 1000 rows (paginated) for usage at a daily grain. The full data set is
available for download (.xlsx or .csv).

Normalized Usage by Offer (top 10 offers)

Normalized usage by offer (top 10) is displayed as a stacked bar chart with Usage (Hours) on the vertical
axis and month on the horizontal axis. All remaining offers are aggregated into “Other Offer Titles”.

Changes
None

Normalized Usage by Market (top 10 markets)

Normalized usage by market (top 10) is displayed as a stacked bar chart with Usage (Hours) on the
vertical axis and month on the horizontal axis. All remaining markets are aggregated into “Other
Markets”

Changes
None

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Normalized Usage by Azure License type

Normalized usage by Azure License type is displayed as a stacked bar chart with usage (Hours) on the
vertical axis and month on the horizontal axis. The stacked slices are “Existing Customer” and “New
Customer”, but they both relate to an Azure subscription.

Changes
The Azure Subscription needs to be replaced by the new definition of a customer.

Customer Tenure

Customer tenure is displayed as a stacked bar chart with usage (Hours) on the vertical axis and month
on the horizontal axis.

Changes
The vertical axis needs to have a label.

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Detailed Normalized Usage Data

The detailed normalized usage data (top 1000) shows the top 1000 rows of usage at a daily grain by
subscription. The publisher is also able to download the full data set (.xlsx or .csv).

Changes
The “Order ID” column will be
removed. Commented [AG8]: Will you notify partners via CPP
banners about removing this data point? I could foresee an
Customer Tab increase in support tickets if we don’t do a good job
notifying the partners of the change.
The customer tab enables the
partner to filter the view of Azure Commented [DN9R8]: Yes, we will use a banner on the
site at 90, 60, and 30 days. We may do a few more as we
Subscriptions (defined as
get closer to the launch date. There is also an e-mail
customers) by Azure communication being drafted today 9/24
license type, marketplace license
type, Azure subscription GUID,
Customer first name, customer last
name, customer company name
or market in the top pane.

The bottom pane shows the top 1000 customers (paginated).

Customers Detailed Data

The customers detailed data shows the top 1000 rows of subscriptions that have an offer from the
partner. The partner is also able to download the full data set (.xlsx or .csv).

Changes
The modern commerce root object will be used to define a customer. The existing data set that is
labelled as customer will be renamed to Azure Subscription.

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Downloads Tab
The downloads tab is necessary when the size of
a data download exceeds a certain limit. This
ensure the partner has a good experience with
the website. An asynchronous process is kicked
off to generate the report and make it available
for download. The partner will receive a dialog
notifying them that this is happening, and they
will receive an e-mail with the deep link directly
to the downloads tab where they can acquire the file.

Download Requests (Last 30 days)

Any downloads requested by an individual are made available and retained for a 30-day period.

Changes
None

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Work Item Breakdown and Acceptance Criteria

Work items for the engineering team are maintained in Azure DevOps. The Product Backlog Item (PBI) is
the smallest unit of business value that can be delivered in terms of working code. PBIs are grouped
under Feature work items, and those in turn roll up to an Epic. Additional work items are likely to be
present in the product backlog, but the ones listed below are specific to the BRD as the Minimum Viable
Product (MVP) to deliver a smooth transition for publishers as we enable the Azure Marketplace on the
Modern Commerce Platform.

I. Marketplace on Modern [Epic]

a. Marketplace on Modern Summary Tab (Insights) [Feature]
i. Normalized Usage Trend [PBI]
ii. Active Orders Trend [PBI]
iii. Monthly Usage at a Glance [PBI]
iv. Monthly Orders at a Glance [PBI]
v. Trending Usage [PBI]
vi. Trending Orders [PBI]
vii. Payout Trend [PBI]
b. Marketplace on Modern Payout Tab (Insights) [Feature]
i. Overview [PBI]
ii. Payout History [PBI]
iii. Trending Revenue [PBI]
iv. Revenue at a Glance [PBI]
c. Marketplace on Modern Orders & Usage Tab (Insights) [Feature]
i. Normalized Usage by Offer (top 10 offers) [PBI]
ii. Normalized Usage ty Market (top 10 markets) [PBI]
iii. Normalized Usage by Azure License type [PBI]
iv. Customer Tenure [PBI]
v. Detailed Normalized Usage Data [PBI]
d. Marketplace on Modern Customer Tab (Insights) [Feature]
i. Customers Detailed Data [PBI]
e. Marketplace on Modern Downloads Tab (Insights) [Feature]
i. Download Requests (Last 30 Days) [PBI]

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