Jamcracker has a long history in enabling multi-tier distribution of hosted/cloud services from Microsoft as well as dozens of other SaaS and Cloud Providers. Since our founding in 1999, Jamcracker has been enabling 2-Tier distribution of Hosted Exchange, SharePoint, Dynamics and other Microsoft Services. The following is a summary of our integration solution with Microsoft's Cloud Service Provider (CSP) program for Office 365.
Microsoft Partnership
Jamcracker has been providing solutions and services that imgallow organizations to sell and distribute Microsoft Online Services since Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) was first launched in 2009, and powered the first Office 365 syndication partner launch in 2011. Jamcracker Cloud Services Brokerage (CSB) partners who syndicate Office 365 can also source hundreds of other pre-integrated cloud services to bundle and distribute from their own private-branded marketplaces for their customers, through their channels, and to their employees. Jamcracker is continuing to invest in the current generation of O365 under the Microsoft CSP Program. In addition to O365, Jamcracker has integrated to Microsoft Azure IaaS and Azure Active Directory (for both enterprise and SMB use-cases).
CSP Integration
The Jamcracker Services Delivery Network (JSDN) Platform incorporates an XML-based provisioning workflow system that allows for defining tasks that can be conditionally executed, with a separate task handler being defined for each type of task. Integration with Office 365 is enabled via the Cloud Service Provider (CSP) interface that provides a set of application program interfaces (APIs) enabling CSP Direct and Indirect partners to offer Office 365 and other CSP-enabled services (e.g. Azure) to their customers. Alternatively, the purchase, provisioning and managed services can be offered by IT providers, e.g. Managed Service Providers or Value-Added Resellers, on behalf of their customers.
The following diagram illustrates the functional data flow for Jamcracker's CSP integration, using Office 365 as an example. Jamcracker's CSP integration works with Microsoft Azure as well.
For CSP services, the provisioning workflow is defined to trigger a sub-workflow within the JSDN enabling asynchronous task execution. Each task in the sub-workflow corresponds to an API call required for provisioning a CSP service. The essential CSP APIs for Office 365 include “CREST” and “GRAPH”, which provide the essential interfaces for automating the provisioning of customer organizations and their associated users.
For Microsoft CSP partners selling Office 365 to enterprise customers, the JSDN integration solution also supports integration with the customer's on-premise Active Directories to enable single-sign-on (SSO) user access to Office 365 and all other cloud services being delivered from the JSDN. This enables enterprise customers to leverage their existing identity and policy management infrastructure to unify cloud services security and compliance controls for their employees.