Enterprise Marketplace is a self-service marketplace of cloud services where your customers can browse, search, order, and fulfill cloud service orders.
Introduction to Enterprise Marketplace
Enterprise Marketplace is powered by a comprehensive Information Technology as a Service (ITaaS) catalog, spanning public and private clouds, traditional IT providers and managed services.
The heart of Enterprise Marketplace is Catalog page. The Catalog page lists a series of service bundles that your users can provision, termed catalogs. These catalogs can be sourced from public cloud providers or any private cloud provider that you have access to.
In addition to direct requests for approval, catalog requests can be added to Shopping Carts that can be used to store requests which can then be submitted. In addition, if your users would like to get a price estimate before submitting a request, they can create a Quote for the service offering with their specifications. These quotes can subsequently be submitted as catalog requests.
After the catalog requests have been submitted, they must be approved. This approval process can be automated, manual, or a combination of both. After they are approved, the services in the catalog are provisioned, at which point they are called stacks. You can track these stacks on the Ordered Services page.
You can set up these catalogs to include fields that your users must fill in to provision these services. These fields can, for example, include the region that they work in, the team that they work for, how much storage they are requesting, and any other information that you need. You can design your catalogs on the Provider Management page.
What functionalities are available to you depends on the role that you have been assigned in Enterprise Marketplace. For more information about roles and the privileges that are assigned to them, see Roles in Enterprise Marketplace.
Some key core capabilities of Enterprise Marketplace are:
- View order details on the Ordered Services page
- Visualize the status and progress of approvals on the Ordered Services page
- Create technical and financial approval policies on the Approval Policies page
- View detailed inventory lists of ordered services on the Ordered Services page
- Perform Day 2 actions on the Ordered Services page
- Generate quotations for services to compare the pricing on the Quote Details page
- Apply filters and searching for services on the Catalog page
- Use pre-built modules for cloud providers on the Catalog Management page
- Configure and provision resources across public cloud, private cloud and on-prem environments on the Catalog Management page
- Define policies to enforce budgets and auto-approve or deny orders on the Policy Admin page
- Create chains of service offerings that are all provisioned together on the Service Chaining page
Enterprise Marketplace roles
What a specific user can do in Enterprise Marketplace depends on the role that that user is assigned. The Operator role controls access to the system using roles, teams, and contexts. For example, if a certain set of users is not allowed to provision a certain type of service, you can set rules so that group never sees that service offering. To restrict the service offerings options, configure the servers to appear as the only options for an specific region.
The following roles currently exist in the system. For more information, see Roles in Enterprise Marketplace.
- Viewer: Allows visibility to all aspects of Enterprise Marketplace for any Access Group that the user belongs to.
- Service Designer: Creates catalogs for Enterprise Marketplace.
- Catalog Administrator: Manages the providers and catalogs on the Catalog page.
- Buyer: Allows the user to select and request catalogs using the Catalog page.
- Approver: Evaluates and authorizes the service offering request. An approver can accept or deny an order based on three expertise grounds: financial, legal, and technical.
- Operator: Manages services for an Access Group.
- Order Administrator: A system-wide role that monitors all orders in the system. Because this is a system-wide role, it is not associated with any specific business entities.
- Order Integrator: A system-wide role that can make service order instance names more consistent. Because this is a system-wide role, it is not associated with any specific business entities.
- Policy Admin: Manages the policies that determine how service offering requests are approved.
Enterprise Marketplace widgets
Users can have a compressed summary of the activities executed in Enterprise Marketplace by reviewing the widgets available on the landing page.
- Order status: This widget displays the quantity of orders submitted and approved for the last 30 days. Additionally, it provides the number of submitted orders that have been denied, failed, and completed.
- Pending Approval: This widget displays all orders that are currently pending approval, and allows the user to click through to the approval page for those orders.
Enterprise Marketplace functions
The following sections provide detailed information about performing the functions of Enterprise Marketplace:
- Service ordering: Order catalogs from the Catalog page.
- Shopping carts: Create a cart and add services to that cart. You can empty the cart, delete the cart, transfer the cart ownership to another user, and export the bill of materials.
- Quotes for catalogs: Generate a quote, and later add services, delete quote items, duplicate quotes, and create an order from a quote.
- Order history monitoring and management: View a complete history and the current status of your orders.
- Approval process: Review, and approve or deny an order.
- Consumption Dashboard: Assign the budget viewer role and manage and export active service offering instances.
- Provider management: Maintain the catalogs that your users can use to provision cloud services.
- Service Chaining: Bundle catalogs together so your users can order multiple services at once.
- Bill of Materials: Review recurring charges, estimated usage charges, and one time charges in the BOM.
- Pricing in Enterprise Marketplace: Apply prices including discounts and up-charges to the catalogs as well as create, view, update, and delete the pricing rules for the organization. Pricing is useful to create budgets that can be used in policies.
- Introduction to policies in Enterprise Marketplace: Control access to start and stop, taint and un-taint, and edit the policy. You can also automate order approval and denial. You can specify the teams and operations groups that can have access to the operations. Policies can draw on budgets that are created using pricing.
Enterprise Marketplace integrations
Enterprise Marketplace integrates with all major public, private, ITSM, orchestration, network, and utility providers. Catalog Admins can integrate with ServiceNow for workflow approvals and CMBD updates. Additionally, they can access a complete governance suite with personalization policies, provisioning policies, approval policies and budgetary control. The following lists show the current capabilities.
These are not definitive because Kyndryl is adding new integrations on a continuing basis.
- Public cloud providers: Services from public cloud providers are available as out-of-the-box service offerings in the Catalog as well as being able to be added on a custom basis:
- Infrastructure as code: Integration with the following infrastructure as code technologies is supported:
- AWS CloudFormation
- Azure Resource Manager
- Google Deployment Manager
- Alibaba Resource Orchestration Services
- CloudPak: Integrates with other tools like CloudPak. You are able to use prebuilt modules from CloudPak.
- SaaS marketplaces: It supports Red Hat Marketplace as a service (SaaS) marketplace. For more information, see Red Hat Marketplace integration.
- Deployment technologies: Allows a full integration with providers supporting all DevOps, CI/CD, and pipeline technologies, allowing Enterprise Marketplace to provision the infrastructure and deploy any associated applications and post op configurations on it. This integration completely automates the process of getting the stack up and running without any need for time consuming and error prone manual interventions. Enterprise Marketplace communicates with any DevOps tool through GitHub. Any other tool such as Jenkins, AgroCD, Tekton, and Ansible that support GitOps and GitHub webhooks can be integrated as well.
- Pricing: Provides deep insights into how much you will be spending on your IT infrastructure so you can plan your budgets properly. You can compare prices across multiple offerings, including dynamic pricing, allowing you to easily discover which is the best financial choice for your organization. Additionally, Enterprise Marketplace includes the ability to estimate pricing based on dynamic factors such as consumption and utilization rates, which no other cloud management platform provides.
- Service offering workflow: Ability to customize the service request process from the UI. Initially, you can establish the parameters and set up a form that can be filled out to initiate the request. During this process, your client can compare prices between multiple catalogs. The catalog request goes through a fully automated and customizable financial and technical approval process. Finally, upon approval, the requested services are deployed using GitHub automatically.
- Out of the box services: Enterprise Marketplace comes with some out of the box (OOTB) services that are intended for demo purposes only. This demo content includes compute, storage, and database services for three providers: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure.These OOTB services are not intended for production use.
- GitHub: Enterprise Marketplace can integrate with GitHub so that you can manage Enterprise Marketplace from GitHub and import templates from a GitHub repository. For more information, see Introduction to GitOps.
For the latest lists and supported integrations, see Introduction to provider management.
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