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Getting set up to sell software

Getting set up to sell software

Welcome to IBM Cloud®! To start onboarding your software to our cloud platform, first complete a few tasks: provide your company and product details, create a test environment, and set up access for your team to help with the onboarding process.

Watch and learn

Onboarding software to IBM Cloud involves four major steps: registering in Partner Center, customizing your product details for the IBM Cloud catalog, testing and validating your product, and, finally, publishing your product. Check out the following video for a walk-through of the complete process.

Video transcript

By onboarding and selling your product on IBM Cloud, you can grow your business and expand your reach to clients globally, by leveraging IBM's trusted relationships with fortune 500 enterprises. You can accelerate your time to market and gain a competitive edge, all while taking advantage of flexible, secure options across open source and compute technologies.

Onboarding your product involves four major steps - registering in Partner Center, customizing your product details, testing and validating your product, and, finally, publishing your product. In this demo, we’ll focus on using a Terraform template as the delivery method.

Get started by heading to Partner Center in the IBM Cloud console - your one-stop shop for onboarding your product. [Click My products on the Partner Center home page to open the Getting started dashboard]

First, register your product by providing the name of your company and then creating your test environment. This test environment will house your product during the onboarding process. [In the Create your test environment section, click Create]

Next, if you want team members to help with the onboarding process, get them set up with access to your account. [In the Assign access section, click Assign to assign access. Then, click Let's go.]

Confirm your legal agreement with IBM. You can instantly accept the IBM Digital Provider Agreement, or you can upload your own custom agreement, which will need to be reviewed and approved by IBM. [Click Provide details then click Standard and confirm that you've read and agree to the IBM Digital Provider Agreement.]

After confirming your agreement, click Create, and add the name of your product. [Click My products > Create]

Now you’re ready to customize your product for the catalog. The information that you provide on the Product details tab is displayed in two places: your catalog tile and your detailed product page. For your catalog entry, provide a link to your company or product logo and a description of your product. To help users find your software in the catalog, select the category that best fits your product. [Click Product details. Then, click Add logo to add a link to your logo. Then, click Summarize what the product is and its value to enter a description of your product. Then, click Select category and select Developer tools.]

Next, select the third-party provider type. You can also enter keywords to help users find your product in the catalog. For your product page, provide a list of features that users can quickly scan to get an overview of what it’s all about. [Click Add a list of product features.]

Then, provide a detailed description that explains its value in more detail. [Click Enter text that explains the product's value and benefits to users.]

Provide links to high-quality images or videos, and, finally, provide a link to your official documentation. [Click Add media to add images or videos. Click Add your documentation URL to add a link to your official documentation. ]

Next, define your pricing model. Currently, you can select a free plan or a bring your own license plan. Note that a bring your own license, or BYOL plan requires a URL to the license. [Click Pricing and select the Free pricing model.]

Head over to the Support tab and define your support experience. First, provide details that explain how users can get self-help, open support cases, and engage directly in real time with your support team. [Click Support. Then, click Provide URL to add your support site URL. Click Describe process for responding to support issues to describe the support process. Then, click Provide the countries in which support is available to add support locations.]

Next, explain how IBM Cloud Support leaders can contact your support team leaders. [Click Describe process for IBM Cloud response to support issues and provide a description of the support process. Click Provide support contact information to share the support contacts with IBM.]

From the Software tab, import a version of your product to the test environment that you created when you registered your product. [Click Software. Then, click Import a version.]

Choose your delivery method and select your source repository type – either public or private – and provide the URL to it. Then, enter the version of your product. After importing your product, you're ready to configure it by adding any required deployment values. [Click Step 2 - Configure the deployment details to add deployment values.]

Add links to the license agreements that your users are required to accept when they install your product. [Click Add license agreements.]

Now, you’re ready to validate that your product can be successfully installed on the deployment target. [Click Validate product. Click Next > Next > Validate to validate your product.]

Head back to Partner Center and check your progress in the Onboarding checklist. [Once validation is complete, click Go to Partner Center.]

At this point, you’ve completed all the required tasks and you’re ready to submit your product for publishing approval. [Click Request approval.]

Submitting your request automatically notifies our onboarding team that you’re ready to publish your product to the catalog. We’ll review the details that you provided and either approve your product for publishing, or request some updates. You'll get an email with details about any changes that you might need to make.

After your product is approved, you're ready to return to Partner Center and publish it. Your software is now live and available to users in the IBM Cloud catalog. [Click Publish. Click View in IBM Cloud catalog and search for the name of the product to open it.]

Before you begin

  • Verify that you're using a Pay-As-You-Go or Subscription account. To check which type of account you're using, go to Manage > Account > Account settings in the IBM Cloud console.

    It's recommended that you use an account that was created with a functional ID to ensure your continued access to the products that are onboarded in the account.

  • Verify that you're assigned the administrator role on all account management services and all IAM-enabled services. See Assigning access to account management services and Managing access to resources.

  • Review the list of supported software:

    • Helm charts on Kubernetes and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud clusters

    • Terraform templates

    • OVA images deployed on VMware Solutions Dedicated - vCenter Server

    • Virtual server images with Terraform deployed on VPC infrastructure

    • Custom virtual server images deployed on VPC infrastructure

      Onboarding Virtual Server Images for VPC with IBM Z® deployment support is available in private catalogs. The onboarding experience for IBM Z-supported Virtual Server Images is the same as how you onboard other Virtual Server Images in your private catalog.

    • Operators with a TGZ file from GitHub or GitLab repositories

    • Operator bundles from Red Hat OpenShift registries

Provide your company name

  1. In the IBM Cloud console, click the Navigation Menu icon Navigation Menu icon > Partner Center > Overview > Get started.

  2. Enter the name of your company as you want it to be displayed in the IBM Cloud catalog.

    The company name doesn't need to be finalized. You can update it later from the My company page in Partner Center if necessary.

Create a test environment

You, or a member of your team, uses the test environment to onboard your product, and validate that it's ready to be published in the IBM Cloud catalog. Your test environment includes a private catalog in which you import your product from an external repository.

  1. Click Create in the Create your test environment section on the Get started page.
  2. Enter the name of your private catalog, and click Create. The private catalog and its contents are visible only to the users you choose.

Set up team access

If you want to enlist team members to help with the onboarding process, you need to assign them specific levels of IBM Cloud Identity and Access Management (IAM) access. To streamline the process, you can organize your team members into a single entity by adding them to an access group.

  1. Click Assign in the Assign access section on the Get started page.

  2. Enter the name of the access group, and click Create. Members of this group are assigned the following roles by default:

    • Administrator on the catalog management service
    • Editor on the Partner Center - Sell service
    • Editor on the user management service
    • Editor on the IAM access groups service
    • Viewer on all account management services

    For more information about the actions associated with each role, see Actions and roles for account management services.

  3. Click Let's go.

Invite team members to your account

After you create your access group, you can add team members to the group by inviting them to your account.

  1. Go to Partner Center > My team.
  2. Click Invite users.
  3. Enter the email address of the user that you want to invite.
  4. Click the checkbox if the user that you invite is a technical team member who will be doing technical tasks.
  5. Click Invite.

Next steps

Now that you completed the getting started tasks, you're ready to continue with the onboarding process.

To get an overview of all the tasks involved in the process, see Checklist for selling software on IBM Cloud.