Relationships Among Installed Base Items, Installed Products, and Sold Products

[e2787]

Hi Folks:

Would greatly appreciate a few more details on the purpose and relationships between installed base items, sold product, and installed product.  Why, for example do we need installed product?  Could installed base item instead just reference sold product directly?  What is the difference between a sold product and an installed product?

I have read the blog post on installed base from about 2 years ago and the New York documentation.  I am looking for a little more detail.

Many thanks.

[Kavita Waldia]

Hi,

Sold product lets you track products/services that have been sold to a customer. Install Base Item lets you track the deployments/instances for a customer. Installed Products associates a sold product to an install base item to capture which products have been installed on which instances.

Let's consider the product journey from the time it is sold to the time it is deployed for a SaaS product.

1. Customer signs a contract to purchase 'billing service' and 'monitoring service' products, and the contract with the line items goes to the ERP system.
2. At this time we only know what products/services have been sold. They have not yet been deployed/provisioned for the customer. So sold product records would get created for the customer. Agents and customers can already start seeing this information in the workspace/portal
3. Next a prod and dev instance is provisioned for the customer. These are the install base items for the customer
4. Finally the"billing service' and 'monitoring service' applications are installed on dev. After some testing, customer decided to deploy only 'billing service' on production and continue testing 'monitoring service' on dev.

The reason for having these 3 tables with this relationship is to give customer flexibility around what information they track. Some customers may only be tracking install base items but not sold products, while some may have all the entities. This data model lets customers onboard with the data they already have, while moving towards the goal of eventually having the full information.

SOLD PRODUCTS

Billing Service

Monitoring Service

INSTAL BASE ITEM

Boxeo - prod

Boxeo - dev

INSTALLED PRODUCTS
Sold Product	Install Base Item
Billing	Boxeo - prod
Billing	Boxeo - dev
Monitoring	Boxeo - dev

Please let me know if there are more questions.

Regards,

Kavita

[Ehsanul]

Thanks for the excellent explanation.

[Saroj Patel]

So here i have a simple doubt i.e. all install base item and all installed product are asset isn't it.

[vadepunaren]

Hello All,

Does this install base refers the cmdb_ci table?

Thanks,

Narendra