Accelerate with confidence

We support G-Cloud and Cloud Compute 2.

G-Cloud 13 provides a direct award route, while Cloud Compute 2 assumes a mini-compete process. Purchasing through either of these frameworks has no impact on ongoing delivery of our service or its scope.

No, there is no impact.

We operate resale under the AWS End Customer Account Model specifically to avoid any such impact. Under this model we become your point of contact and reference for invoicing and payment of AWS services used. Your processes for accessing the techical AWS services you need remain unchanged.

Yes access is provided. There is no impact to its terms and no additional cost of accessing it through us.

To access the OGVA2 discount you will need to make certain annual AWS spend commitments. Marketplace spend will contribute to reaching these commitments but will not receive any discount. 

Yes. AWS Marketplace is included. 

Under G-Cloud 13, we can facilitate purchasing through the AWS Marketplace under separate Lot 2 call-off contracts. Such Marketplace purchases continue to count against any OGVA or EDP spend commitments. 

Under Cloud Compute 2, there is no requirement for separate call-off contracts, but we can apply the costs against separate Purchase Orders if that is better aligned to your procurement processes.

We can help negotiate discounts on AWS Marketplace services through “private pricing offers”. The discount will depend upon the supplier, the quantity and the term length.

We can operate separate Purchase Orders, one for software purchased through AWS Marketplace, and another for cloud services. 

Yes, we can provide guidance on the use and setup of the AWS Private Marketplace to provide these governance controls. 

This enables you to stop unauthorized users from making any purchases, limit views of the Marketplace to read-only,  limit which products they can see and enable only a subset of users to make purchases. This Private Marketplace would be administered by a small number of people in your team. One option would be to only add products into your Private Marketplace after you’ve completed your internal assessment and approval procurement processes (including a Lot 2 call off contract via G-Cloud if necessary) before making it available to those with permission to purchase.

This would be enforced through AWS SCP & IAM permissions configured within your AWS Accounts. Although we will support you in the initial definition of your approach. you would maintain control of implementation and ongoing management. This is part of our least privilege approach to security to avoid us needing access to your AWS accounts.

Rather than charge a specific fee for our Accelerate service, we make our money from:

• Solution Provider Program resale discounts from AWS
These rebates are applied to any reseller and are paid for by AWS, from a budget reserved exclusively for partners, not you. 
• Additional Savings Plans & Reserved Instances savings
To provide you the discounts, simplicity and ease of management of the Perfect Savings Plan, or our more flexible 3-36 month term tailored Commitments we will make a variety of commitments, when relevant, to AWS in the background. This enables us to take advantage of additional discounts for longer terms or being more specific in the resources we’re committing to. This carries the risk that there will not be usage to match the commitments we’ve made or that we have not made the optimal level of commitments with AWS to provide your Perfect Savings Plan discount. This is entirely at our risk. Our team, technology and management strategies help us mitigate this risk.

The impact this has for you is:

• The resale rebates paid by AWS will show up in AWS cost and usage reporting tools. If you have an OGVA spend commitment, the reseller rebate is bundled into the OGVA discount but it still remains paid by AWS and does not impact the rates you actually pay. This is standard AWS practice and remains the same when buying through any reseller.
• Any spend visibility tools based on the AWS cost and usage figures will reflect all the commitments we’ve actually made to AWS. As such they do not accurately reflect the benefits (or reduced lock-in risk) of the commitments you actually own, the Perfect Savings Plan or any of the flexible 3-36 month tailored term Commitments we provide. We calculate these for you and display the results in our Portal, your invoices and backing sheets for transparency.

Our service is secure and non-intrusive. We require no access to the data within your accounts.

Registration of your Cloud Provider Accounts with us is in accordance with the terms, conditions and provisions given by AWS to any reseller. We use an AWS best practice RBAC, IAM and SCP approach to grant access on a non-intrusive, least-privilege basis.

As your reseller we will have access to cost and usage metadata about your accounts. We use this to provide our recommendations, apply discounts and produce your insights and usage dashboard for reporting.

Read data about your payer account:
List accounts and their tags, describe cost and usage report definitions and read the S3 bucket that holds those reports.

Validate data with Cost Explorer:
Used to verify our optimization actions have been correctly applied by AWS, view usage, billing and savings plan information.

Commitment-holding account access control:
We buy, change and sell reserved instance and savings plan commitments in dedicated holding accounts. We have admin access to these accounts.

Reserved Instance Marketplace
We grant our commitment holding accounts the ability to sell unused Reserved Instance commitments when required on the AWS Reserved Instance Marketplace.

Any reserved instances or savings plans we purchase to access discounts are registered to “Commitment Holding Accounts” used exclusively by us. We may ask your team to create some AWS accounts, under our payer account that will always remain owned by you. We may also create additional accounts that will always be owned by us. For your convenience and transparency, as our customer, your Portal homepage summarizes the commitments in holding accounts you own.

We operate under the standard AWS End Customer Account Model for its authorized resale partners. AWS designed this specifically to make it easy for their customers to transfer the financial payment obligations detailed in the AWS End Customer Agreement to a third party. 

The result is that:

• AWS will invoice us, and we will invoice you
• All other terms, conditions and technical use of cloud remains the same
• You maintain your relationship with your AWS Account Manager
• You remain eligible for all the same credits, benefits and initiatives AWS would provide you if buying direct from them.

Our “Cloud Purchase Agreement” replaces the financial obligations described in your AWS End Customer Agreement. It includes matching billing & payment provision, equivalent suspension & termination rights, terms required by AWS for any reseller to pass on to its customers and a security statement regarding our access requirements.

Accelerate is provided via our Cloud Purchase Agreement on a 36 month initial term. It is available under UK or US law. 
Under this agreement we take sole charge of the buying and selling of Reserved Instance and Savings Plan commitments into dedicated commitment  holding AWS accounts.

We:

• provide billing and payment provisions that match or enhance AWS terms
• offer equitable foreign exchange provision for currency flexibility
• have equivalent suspension and termination rights to those of AWS
• incorporate terms required by AWS for any reseller to pass on to its customers
• include a security statement on access required to deliver our services
• may withdraw Accelerate if there is a material change to AWS’ product(s) that means our commitment strategy cannot be supported

You:

• remain under your existing AWS Customer Agreement terms and conditions (or equivalent)
• must meet the Accelerate Service Plan Qualification Criteria in our Service Description. This description is incorporated into your contract and covers service delivery, deliverables, roles and responsibilities
• share financial information for the purpose of credit checking if requested

AWS requires its resellers to own the account that manages payments to AWS. We follow AWS’ standard process to enable this. You maintain ownership of the individual accounts under the payer account.

We will guide you through the two part AWS Consent to Assignment process alongside your AWS Account Manager. The process will take 2-3 weeks to complete with less than one hour of your time required to confirm you understand, agree to and support the process. This same process would be used if offboarding. 

The first part will complete the AWS legal transition of your account. The second part is the operational changes for root account ownership, tax and invoicing setup.

You will be free to independently create new AWS usage accounts as and when required in the future. This process does not affect your current technical setup or ability to manage services configured at the organization level (e.g. Control Tower and Landing Zone).

Strategic Blue invoices will be issued between the 4th and 7th of the month to cover the AWS usage in the previous month. 
This invoice will reflect all discounts and credits you have received.

Payment is on 30 day terms with a 1% late fee.

When you first onboard, provided onboarding completes before the 25th of the following month you will receive two invoices:

• one will come from AWS or your previous reseller to cover the period before completing the account setup process
• the second will come from us to cover your usage for the period after account setup

No, you do not lose any technical ability or access.

The only change to access is made to ensure clear ownership of RI and SP management through Service Control Policies (SCPs) that ensure you cannot:

• Purchase Reserved Instances or create Savings Plans as we manage this for you
• Access the billing console as we manage it for you
• We restrict use of Cost Explorer as it will not reflect the flexible commitments we have enabled for you
• Display details on accounts in our AWS organization or leave it accidentally. This protects your account information and delivery of our service.