As of February 1st, 2017 Microsoft made an announcement that all partner managed Azure sales will have to via the CSP program. More details are at http://assets.microsoft.com/en-gb/How-to-buy-Azure-datasheet and https://partner.microsoft.com/en-GB/cloud-solution-provider. 

Enterprise Azure consumption will continue to be guided by Azure EA.

This makes CSP the only option for Service Providers to offer Azure to their customers.

How does a Service Provider make Azure available to your customers? One method would be manually onboard the customers in the Partner center, assign subscriptions, track the usage, calculate the margins that need to be applied for the customers etc. This looks like a set of things a Service Provider could possibly do for one or two customers, but when scale comes into the picture, it is best to automate these activities. Azure does provide APIs that can be used to achieve a good degree of automation, the details are at these links https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/partnercenter/dn974944.aspx, https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/resource-manager-supported-services and https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/billing/billing-usage-rate-card-overview.

If the Service Provider has already deployed a billing system such as WHMCS or Odin, then there is the additional task of connecting the billing system to Azure, and this may involve some more code to be created.

At Nuvepro, we have already written the WHMCS and Odin connectors to Azure, and they leverage the APIs that I have pointed out to earlier in this blog. More details are available at these links https://www.nuvepro.com/WHMCS-CSP and https://www.nuvepro.com/odin-azure-and-office-365

At a high level, with these connectors a Service providers task of reselling Azure and billing the customers for their usage is addressed by our platform. Reach out to us at info@nuvepro.com for a demo and more details.