Evaluation Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated using the following criteria:

1. Ability to provide the requested services under the specified contract, and terms.
2. Ease of use and clarity of billing processes.
3. Ease of use and clarity of the onboarding process for end users and University coordinators.
4. Availability of productivity tools.
5. Availability of pre-sales consulting engineers.

General/Company info

• How long has your company worked with Higher Education?  And with Google Cloud Platform?
• Are you currently working with other big universities?  (Note: reflect this in offered References)
• What experience does your company have working with researchers who are utilizing the cloud?
• What states is your company authorized to sell into? If there are territory restrictions – please identify them clearly.
• What experience does your company have with moving production, on-premises workloads to the cloud?
• Describe your company’s order/procurement process and turnaround time.
• How many employees does your organization have that specialize in Google Cloud Services (Big data, GKE, ML)?
• Where is your headquarters? Are your representatives available to come on campus?
• What are your support hours in EST?

Billing/onboarding

• Do you offer Google Cloud Platform under the terms of the Internet2 NET+ GCP Agreement?
• Either from your interface or from management tools, can end-users view details about billing to help end-users understand costs of their activities?
• What is your company’s invoicing process? Are you able to do re-billing (single organization, multiple POs)?
• Does the use of your services as a reseller limit or restrict any native GCP functions? (Ex: Billing, Reporting)
• Is your customer onboarding process geared towards the creation of many GCP Billing IDs, each of which may have a separate PO? 
• Does your company have experience with credits from either federal granting agencies (e.g. National Institutes of Health or National Science Foundation), from cloud vendors, or other sources?  Can credits be combined with standard billing methods (PO, etc.) on existing accounts?
• Do you offer itemized billing per project which is accessible by clients?
  • At what interval is the billing available?
• Are there differences in the detail of billing intervals?

Training/Consultation

• Describe how support for each aspect of the following may be provided:
  • Accounts
  • Billing
  • IAM
  • Cloud infrastructure (Security/Networking) and use of cloud for computing/research.  
• What access to consultation for researchers is available? Are there different tiers of consultation?
• Do you have consulting resources focused on teaching/learning/classroom use of GCP?
• Are additional training classes/credits/opportunities available beyond what GCP/Google is providing?

Features/Functionality/Support

• Do you offer any third-party management or reporting tools for free or discounted price? (Ex: Cloudcheckr, Orbitera)
• How do your support options work for an organization: incident-based, role-based, other? Do you provide support to our central IT or can end-users engage you directly?
• How many contact points do we have for issue resolution?
• Can any of our customers reach out directly for consultation/support, or does a request need to be generated from one of our admins?
• Can we as an organization deploy new projects in an automated fashion? Can our sub-units?

Pricing

Please confirm pricing per the Internet2 NET+ GCP Agreement.