“White Label” telecom services are the better option for MSPs

April 1, 2024

At Datagate, we’re constantly talking with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) about their strategies for providing telecommunication solutions to their business clients, including VoIP, UCaaS, mobile solutions and data connectivity solutions.

We see first-hand that MSPs around the world are generally very successful at selling and providing telecom services to their business clients. This is only logical, because they have a closer “trusted advisor” relationship with their business clients in comparison to their larger telco competitors. Furthermore, businesses generally want to minimize complexity – and it’s much easier and less complex to source your IT and telecommunication services from a single source – your MSP.

MSPs with little or no telecom expertise and/or their own telecom infrastructure are best advised to resell the services of a specialist wholesale telecom provider.

There are two fundamental types of wholesale telecom provider models. These are the “Agency” model and the “White Label” model.

Under the Agency model, the MSP refers their clients to the telecom provider and gets paid a commission on whatever services the providers sells and supplies to the MSP’s client. Under the White Label model, the MSP sells the services of the provider to the client under their own name and bills the services on their own invoice, along with any other non-telecom services.

I always recommend the White Label model to MSPs who don’t have the resources and inclination to provide their own telecom services, but are serious about growing and maximizing the value of their businesses. Below are the reasons for my recommendation.

“Sticky” Clients

The more services you provide your clients, the more complicated and difficult it is for them to move their business to another service provider.

Branding Control

    With the White Label model, you have the opportunity to brand the solution as your own. This means you can establish your brand identity in the market, build brand recognition, and foster customer loyalty. Selling as an agent often means promoting someone else’s brand, which may not align with your business goals and does not build your own business value.

    Flexibility and Customization

    White Label solutions typically offer more flexibility and customization options. You can tailor the services to meet the specific needs of your clients, adding value and enhancing the overall customer experience. As an agent, you may have limited control over the services and features offered, which can restrict your ability to meet client demands effectively.

    Higher Margins

    Selling White Label solutions often allows for higher profit margins compared to selling as an agent. Since you have more control over pricing and service delivery, you can set your own margins and maximize profitability. As an agent, you may earn a commission or fee for each sale, but the margins are typically lower compared to reselling White Label solutions.

    Ownership of Customer Relationships

    When you sell White Label solutions, you own the customer relationships. This means you have direct communication with your clients, which can lead to better customer retention and upselling opportunities. As an agent, the provider typically maintains control over customer relationships, which can limit your ability to build long-term partnerships and maximize revenue.

    Scalability and Growth Opportunities

    White Label solutions offer scalability, allowing you to expand your business and reach new markets more easily. You can white-label multiple services under your brand umbrella, offering a comprehensive suite of solutions to your clients. This scalability fosters business growth and diversification opportunities that may not be available when selling as an agent.

    Maximizing your Business Valuation

    Eventually you will want to sell your MSP business and will want to maximize its sale value. Valuations of MSP businesses are often based on a multiple of recurring top-line revenue. The White Label model gives you a much higher top-line revenue result than the commission received from the Agency model.

    At Datagate, we work closely with White Label wholesale telecom providers in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. We are happy to talk with MSPs interested in this subject and make recommendations and introductions where appropriate.

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    MSPs: Don’t leave Voice on the table!

    September 21, 2022

    Earlier this month I was at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect Asia-Pacific conference on the Gold Coast of Australia, along with Liston Pinto and Datagate Telecom Billing – as a booth sponsor of the event. There were 550 MSPs and 30 booth sponsors in attendance, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, and we were pleased to meet up with so many Datagate customers and/or partners from that region.

    The overall mood of the conference was positive and the general message was that this is a good time to be a Managed Service Provider (MSP), given the world-wide shortage of IT professionals, the global security challenges, and the fact that businesses of all sizes everywhere are outsourcing their IT Services and Communications Services to MSPs – which brings me to the subject line of this blog post.

    Notwithstanding the positive headline messages of the conference, there was also an undercurrent of concern among many of the MSP attendees regarding one of Australia’s major telco’s who has started pro-actively marketing their MSP IT Support Services to their business customers by leveraging their existing voice relationships. In effect, the telco is doing in reverse, what so many MSPs have been doing so successfully for years – extending their existing MSP relationship as an IT Provider, into also becoming the voice provider. Now it’s the voice provider extending into IT!

    Don’t leave voice on the table!

    Increasingly, businesses are choosing to buy their voice solutions and services from their MSP. MSPs who don’t provide voice services to their customers are at risk of losing those customers to another MSP or telco who does offer the full MSP service including voice.

    I came away from the conference with the words of the Australian MSPs etched into my mind “Don’t leave voice on the table!“. It’s risky to not sell voice (UCaaS VoIP etc) and yet today it’s so easy (unlike it was in the past).

    Other reasons to not leave voice on the table are:

    • Voice services provide a stable source of recurring revenue (every business requires a phone system)
    • The extra top-line recurring revenue of voice services, increases the valuation of your MSP business.
    • By providing a business with IT and Voice services, the customer is more reliant on the MSP and therefore less likely to switch to another provider (ie the relationship is more “sticky”).
    • Providing the whole suite of MSP services (including voice) lets you “own” the customer relationship.
    • Selling voice is easy to business customers where you’re already providing IT services.

    If you are an MSP interested in selling voice services, please contact my team at Datagate Telecom Billing info@datagate-i.com where we will gladly make introductions to white-label wholesale telecom partners in your region. In the United States, this includes partners that specialize in telecom tax and compliance.

    Posted in Datagate, MSPs, TELCO, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
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    Conferences are back!

    November 10, 2021

    Last week I attended the Channel Partners conference in Las Vegas with Datagate‘s North American sales & marketing team. In almost two years, this was the first time I’d flown in an airplane, been outside British Columbia, been in person to a business event, and the first time I had the chance to catch up with so many industry friends, partners, clients and contacts.

    I must admit that leading up to the event, I was somewhat nervous about the more-complicated processes involved in getting the Canadian members of our team in and out of the United States, and the question of how many people would turn up to the event – would it be successful? Other concerns included, what would we do if one or more of our team tested positive at one of the Covid-19 tests? As it turned, my concerns were unfounded and everything went smoothly.

    The flight into the United States required us to take a rapid antigen Covid-19 test within three days of departure, and provide proof of vaccination status upon arrival at Vancouver airport. The flight back to Canada required the same via the ArriveCan app, except that the Covid-19 test needed to be of the more expensive PCR variety. No quarantine or isolation was required for any part of the journey, thankfully.

    The Channel Partners conference was very successful, and they had a record number of attendees (I believe it was over 6,200 people). People there were generally in high spirits. Glad to be out at an in-person conference again and glad to be catching up with their friends and business contacts. Surely a good sign that life is getting back to some kind of normal.

    For Datagate the conference was valuable on a number of fronts. We connected with a large number of new sales opportunities, met with clients, partners and prospects, and furthermore we had the opportunity to get our North American sales & marketing team together in person for the very first time. Our team was also able to meet with Datagate board member Eric Hernaez, who was also at the conference.

    We announced Datagate’s sponsorship of Train our Troops who do great work for military veterans, helping them with training and certifications for their civilian business careers. It was great to meet the guys from Train Our Troops, and “Juan Rico” their friendly explosives detection canine.

    This week Datagate team members are back at two more in-person conferences, which are the Compliance Solutions conference in San Diego, and the Connectwise IT Nation Connect conference in Orlando.

    In 2022, we’ll start off the year exhibiting at the ITEXPO conference in Fort Lauderdale FL February (8-11) and then the SkySwitch Vectors conference in Orlando FL in March (27-30). Following that, we will be back at other MSP/telecom events including Channel Partners, DattoCon, Canadian Channel Partners and more.

    If you’re attending any of these events, please come and say hello to the Datagate team!

    Posted in Billing, Communication, conferences, Datagate, MSPs, TELCO | Leave a Comment »
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    Learning from our international telecom MSPs and partners

    April 29, 2021

    One of the things I enjoy most about Datagate Telecom Billing, is that we are an international business, with an international team and international partners, serving an international group of MSP clients. With an ecosystem like we have at Datagate, we’ve learned, and continue to learn so much about how the MSP Telecom business operates around the world.

    The MSP industry itself is strong on networking, learning and sharing experiences & knowhow. This is evident in the online forum Reddit and in the great selection of well-attended MSP industry conferences, such as IT Nation, DattoCon, ConnectIT, Channel Partners, ITExpo, Canadian Channel Partners and the list goes on.

    At Datagate, we’ve established a series of monthly webinars called “Talking VoIP with Datagate” where we talk with selected partners and clients about their experiences, offerings and business in general. This month we’re talking with Allegiant Technology about telecom offerings to the MSP community, and next month we’ll be talking with Eric Hernaez, the founder and former president of SkySwitch, who recently joined Datagate’s board of directors and is now the CEO of a new technology business called RabbitRun.

    Our observations – what is common to all and specific to some MSP geographies

    Here is some of what Datagate has observed about the MSP Telecom industry in the countries we operate in, which are the USA, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

    1. Worldwide, the demand for MSP services appears to be at an all-time high. Most MSPs serve businesses, and the Covid-19 pandemic has increased business reliance on IT and communication systems. The main challenge for most MSPs appears to be keeping up with demand.
    2. More and more businesses are preferring to buy their telecom systems and services from their IT provider. Increasingly, IT and telecommunications are becoming one and the same.
    3. In the United States, telecom tax and regulatory compliance is a big topic and major concern for MSPs who sell telecom services. This is why Datagate has invested so heavily in this area, supporting the best telecom tax engines and partnering with the best telecom tax & compliance service providers. Tax and regulatory compliance is not a major concern for MSPs outside of the United States, however.
    4. MSPs who provide IT and Telecom services commonly use a PSA (Professional Service Automation) system, such as ConnectWise Manage, Datto AutoTask, Kaseya BMS and others. They typically want to process and be able to see both their IT and their telecom business in the same PSA environment. This is actually why Datagate is so successful, because our strategy is to enable telecom billing for these PSA’s.
    5. Inside the United States, the most popular accounting system for MSPs is QuickBooks by a big margin. In second place would be Xero.
    6. Outside the United States (particularly Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand), MSPs more commonly use Xero for their accounting system, by a big margin.
    7. Globally, most MSPs resell UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) or VoIP telecom services provided by a wholesale provider. Wholesale providers can either be “White Label” (where MSPs sell the service to their customers on their own invoice and take responsibility for the tax and regulatory compliance), or have an Agency or Referral model (where the MSP effectively outsources the billing, tax and compliance to the provider). Examples of White Label wholesale providers are SkySwitch (US & Canada), OITVoIP (US), Gamma (UK), Access4 (AU) and Spark Wholesale (NZ). Examples of Agency wholesale providers are Allegiant Technology (US), MedTel Communications (US) and WaveFly (US).
    8. Microsoft Teams is a very strong driver of business for MSPs and the ability of Teams to act as a softphone for making telephone calls through a Cloud PBX is the most popular product offering around for MSPs around the world. The interesting thing about Teams is that it further unifies the worlds of IT and communications – so much so that we’ve added the ability to bill Teams calling to the Datagate telecom billing engine. Microsoft Teams is introducing a lot of MSPs to the world of telecom. TeamMate Technology in the US are doing great things enabling telecom providers to support Teams, as are TeleSmart (NZ & AU) with their Teams calling offer to MSPs. Teams calling is now a “must have” and most of Datagate’s telecom partners are offering this.

    It’s a great time to be part of the MSP world, and we look forward to continuing our learning process, especially through Datagate’s “Talking VoIP with Datagate” monthly webinar series. I hope you’ll join us.

    Posted in Billing, Cloud, Communication, Datagate, MSPs, New Zealand IT Industry, SaaS, TELCO | Leave a Comment »
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    New Webinar Series: “Talking VoIP with Datagate”

    January 25, 2021

    One of the great things about the telecom – MSP industry is that there is no shortage of interesting topics within it to learn about and apply to your business to make it more successful. These include technical, product, business and regulatory subjects (yes, regulatory subjects can be interesting too).

    This year Datagate has decided to run a series of webinars called “Talking VoIP with Datagate” where we delve into what we believe are the most interesting subjects to us and our MSP community. In effect, it’s a learning exercise that we want to share with anyone who wants to join us and we will be talking with some of the most interesting and qualified people in the industry on the topics we cover.

    At the time of writing, we are still compiling our list of topics and guests for the year, but our first topic will be “Using Microsoft Teams as a softphone” and we’ll be talking with Micah Singer of TeamMate Technology. TeamMate develops the software that connects Microsoft Teams to phone systems and so Micah is on the cutting edge of what can be done with Teams and telecom.

    Other topics that we’re considering for the series include “Building a successful telecom business”, “Telecom tax and compliance in the United States”, “Digital marketing for MSPs”, “Data analytics for MSPs”, “Adding value with professional voices” and others. We’re open to suggestions for further topics that would be interesting to our MSP community.

    I hope you’ll join us in this series. It should be fun, interesting and educational.

    Posted in Billing, Datagate, MSPs, Networking, New Zealand IT Industry, TELCO | Leave a Comment »
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    2020 – a year like no other at Datagate

    December 17, 2020

    At the start of this year, we thought 2020 was going to be “special” because it marked the start of an exciting new decade for Datagate. While that might still be the case, that particular aspect of 2020 was about to be overshadowed by what unfolded in the coming months with the global Covid-19 pandemic.

    2020- A year like no other

    For Datagate, being an international business, a major impact of Covid-19 for us was finding that we were restricted from travelling, both locally and internationally, and we were forced to do 100% of our meetings and interactions on-line. All our staff suddenly had to work from home, and we soon found that working from home was actually more productive and efficient than working from a city office. We’ve now decided to stay with the work-from-home model, as it works better for our staff and our business.

    The whirlwind that was 2020

    Despite all the Covid-19 carnage and disruption around the world, and being forced to work from home and not travel, the Datagate team, along with our partners and clients, managed to achieve a lot.

    In January we formalized our new and very successful distribution partnership with SkySwitch – a leading US white-label wholesale VoIP, UCaaS provider for MSPs, who are based in Florida.

    In February, prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, we attended what was to be our last in-person conference for a while, the ITExpo in Fort Lauderdale FL, where we met with a number of our partners and clients.

    In March the Covid-19 outbreak took hold, and our plans for travelling and industry conferences came to an abrupt halt. At the same time we could see that our MSP clients were becoming even more busy than usual. The world had changed and the demand for VoIP and UCaaS solutions from businesses everywhere was skyrocketing, to enable staff to work from home. Fortunately for us, being a Cloud-based business, we could keep up with this higher level of demand under our new working-from-home configuration.

    Our MSP-Telecom industry conferences started announcing that for health & safety reasons, they were “going virtual”, so that meant we became booth-sponsors of Canadian Channel Partners 2020- virtual, Cloud Connections Summit, Channel Partners 2020 Virtual, and ConnectWise‘s IT Nation Connect 2020. We found that virtual conferences were a great option when there are no in-person conferences, but they really are not as good as the real thing for the purpose of connecting with people. We certainly missed all the great MSP & Telecom conferences that we normally attend, and look forward to when they restart.

    In addition to SkySwitch, we also signed Datagate distribution deals with OITVoIP of Miami, Florida and Access4 of Australia, so we now have three strong white-label VoIP -UCaaS providers selling Datagate telecom billing solutions to their MSP resellers.

    During the year we also formed a number of new integrated-product partnerships – all of whom we consider important to our MSP customer base. These include Avalara and their AvaTax for Communications tax engine, ConnectBooster and their popular payment automation solution, the quoting solution Quoter, payment solutions IPPay, Stripe and Authorize.net and MSP analytics solution, Cognition360.

    We produced and participated in MSP-focused webinars with AdavantageIVR (professional voices for phone systems) and Cognition360 (advanced analytics for ConnectWise and Datagate), as well as with ConnectBooster, SkySwitch, OITVoIP and Avalara.

    Geographically, we expanded our footprint in 2020 to include Sydney, Australia and London, UK. These added to our existing locations of Jacksonville Florida, Vancouver Canada and Auckland, New Zealand. We’ve also added five new staff to our North American customer services team, to increase capacity to serve our MSP clients.

    Further to all the above, we did a lot of great work in collaboration with our established industry partners (in no particular order): ConnectWise, Microsoft, CCH SureTax, Compliance Solutions, GSA/CLA, RTC, Xero, QuickBooks and others,

    It’s been quite a year!

    Happy New Year! Roll on 2021!

    Posted in Billing, Cloud, Communication, Datagate, MSPs, SaaS, TELCO | Leave a Comment »
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    Datagate featuring at IT Nation Connect 2020 – Virtual

    November 2, 2020

    Next week (November 10th, 11th & 12th) Datagate will be a gold-level booth sponsor for the fourth time in a row at the ConnectWise IT Nation Connect conference, which is traditionally held in Orlando, Florida each year.

    This year, due to Coronavirus-related health & safely concerns, the event will be “virtual” for the first time, instead of in-person. This presents a great opportunity for MSPs around the world to “attend”, what I believe to be the greatest industry event for MSPs, without the expense and time commitment that is normally required.

    Datagate wins “Best Newcomer” award at IT Nation 2017 in Orlando, Florida

    Datagate’s first appearance at IT Nation was in November 2017, which marked the first time that we connected face to face with American MSPs and started to understand their requirements for a telecom-billing solution that would integrate deeply with ConnectWise Manage and handle the inclusion of numerous telecom taxes at the federal, state, county and city level.

    We also won the “Best Newcomer” award from ConnectWise and along with that, received a lot of publicity within the ConnectWise MSP world.

    We came away from IT Nation 2017 with over a hundred sales leads for MSPs wanting a solution like Datagate, that would save them days of work each month, share its data with ConnectWise Manage and make the complicated task of telecom billing very easy and quick.

    This started the ball rolling for Datagate with ConnectWise, and since then we’ve grown to serving over 150 MSP clients using Datagate for telecom billing with ConnectWise Manage. We’ve sponsored each IT Nation Connect event since then, and this year we’re doing the same – except for the first time, it will be a virtual event.

    Anyone wanting to virtually attend IT Nation Connect 2020 can register here.

    I hope to see you there.

    Posted in Billing, Communication, Datagate, MSPs, New Zealand IT Industry, TELCO | Leave a Comment »
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    MSPs see strong revenue growth in business VoIP despite Covid-19

    September 28, 2020

    Computers and phones have converged, so the providers of IT services, known as “Managed Service Providers” or MSPs, are now selling VoIP phone systems as a natural and profitable extension of the managed services they provide to their business clients.

    From the strong revenue growth we at Datagate see through these MSPs, even during a global pandemic, it is clear that businesses around the world like to buy their telecom and IT services from the same source – their MSP. This is hardly surprising, given that the network technology is common to both, and nothing can be more frustrating to a business customer than having multiple technology providers pointing to each other when something goes wrong.

    After some recent conversations with Ken Davis, the president of ConnectWise BI & Analytics provider Cognition360, I was inspired to look more deeply into the numbers to draw insights into what is happening to the MSPs using Datagate for telecom billing, especially during this complex time of the Covid-19 pandemic. Cognition360 now has the capability of providing analytics specific to Datagate telecom billing within a ConnectWise Manage database – which I am very excited about.

    To date, Datagate has signed up over 150 MSPs who use our SaaS billing solution to bill VoIP services, spread throughout the United States, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand (with most in the United States).

    In calculating the following numbers, we looked at the period from August 2019 to August 2020 and we only included MSPs that had been with us longer than the measured 12 month period. Six of the twelve months in this period included international Covid-19 restrictions which only appears to have had a somewhat negative effect on New Zealand and Australian telecom revenue.

    The international average revenue growth rate for MSPs billing telecom services through Datagate over this period was 33%. In the Australia-New Zealand region the average growth was down to an average 25%, while in the United States, the average was a whopping 77%.

    Obviously, achieving a high percentage revenue growth gets harder, the larger a business is, and is was notable that our larger MSPs were still achieving impressive growth rates, with large dollar value increases.

    Internationally, Covid-19 seems to have made our MSPs busier, helping their business customers reconfigure for staff working from home, and implementing “Unified Communications” VoIP systems.

    My conclusion from looking at these high-level numbers, is that selling VoIP and Unified Communications, is a solid high-growth opportunity for MSPs which seems to be mostly resilient to the Covid-19 lockdowns.

    Posted in Billing, Cloud, Datagate, MSPs, New Zealand IT Industry, SaaS, TELCO | 1 Comment »
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    Virtual events for MSPs in 2020

    August 28, 2020

    Covid-19 has eliminated in-person conferences for the foreseeable future, and this has forced the conference industry to “go virtual”. In addition to virtual-conferences, we’re also seeing an increased quantity of webinars and podcasts.

    Whilst there are obvious advantages to the in-person events, there can also be a different set of advantages to the virtual events, if they are done thoughtfully and well.

    Virtual-events are a relatively new phenomenon, so the industry is still early in its learning curve. I’m noticing that as time goes on, the conferences are getting more successful. It’s as if there is a collective learning process happening within the industry.

    Last month, my company Datagate (telecom billing for MSPs) was a sponsor/exhibitor at OITVoIP‘s Cloud Connections Summit 2020 (#CCS2020)

    What impressed me about #CCS2020 was the impressive line-up of very interesting and relevant speakers, over and above the sponsors, including myself, who also got to present. My team and I attended many of the presentations because they had such good material.

    OITVoIP’s President, Ray Orsini did a great job as host, and Sean Lardo (OITVoIP’s VP of Channel Development) was also great as co-host and counterfoil to Ray, with constant amusing banter between the two of them.

    Ray Orsini, Presdent OITVoIP

    It was noticeable that the audience tended to move around together to attend whatever was the current presentation, rather than wander around the virtual conference center on their own, visiting booths etc. I think Ray picked up on this early on, and ensured that the group not only attended the presentations, but also visited the sponsor booths. This was done, for example, by organizing and announcing a demonstration at the Datagate booth at a preset time, that was complementary to the event’s main schedule. It worked well.

    As an attendee of the virtual conference, it played out much like a big television show, where you had the ability to self navigate through the virtual conference center, between or during presentations. I could see it was important that they had gaps in the schedule, similar to ad breaks in a television show, so that attendees have the ability to do what they need to do from time to time throughout the day (after all, they are all really sitting at a computer screen at home, so plenty of potential distractions).

    At the end of the conference, Datagate came away with a list of contacts who expressed interest in our telecom billing solution and a good level of promotion and exposure to our target market – MSPs who sell VoIP. Maybe not the same level of personal interaction we would have had at an in-person conference, but still a good level of promotion, considering we didn’t have to fly across the country to get there!

    Another virtual event that worked well for Datagate in early July, was a webinar we held in partnership with ConnectBooster (the automated payment collection portal). Datagate and ConnectBooster are complementary products, both aimed at MSPs, so holding a joint event meant that we both benefited from each other’s community. We had around 80 attendees, which resulted in some good sales activity afterwards.

    Ryan Goodman
    President ConnectBooster

    The webinar featured presentations from Datagate and ConnectBooster, including ConectBooster’s president Ryan Goodman and me.

    A video recording of the Datagate-ConnectBooster webinar is available online, here.

    A short while later, Ryan and I recorded a podcast interview that will be released on ConnectBooster’s web site soon.

    Early next month, Datagate will be a sponsor-exhibitor at Channel Partners Virtual 2020. If you’d like to join us, click here for a free or discounted pass.

    With all this activity… I sometimes have to remind myself that, well – it’s all virtual. We haven’t actually gone anywhere to do this…

    Posted in Billing, Cloud, Datagate, MSPs, Networking, SaaS, TELCO | Leave a Comment »
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    20 years on: Exonet – my first major software start-up exit

    July 30, 2020

    In July 2000 I was on top of the world. My co-founders and I had just sold “Exonet”, our New Zealand-based financial software start-up, to an Australian listed company called “Solution6” for AU $30M.

    It was the culmination of a fast and furious two years since we started the business. I was the developer who had the outlandish idea to start writing an accounting system and bring in co-founders Maurice Bryham and David McKee Wright to help build a business around it.

    Exonet was a “new generation” ERP client-server accounting system with a Windows interface, running on an SQL database. It was all new technology back then, when most accounting systems for SME businesses were still running on MS-DOS with proprietary databases.

    Exonet opened offices in New Zealand, Australia and Singapore. Hwa Lian Tan led our business in Singapore and Simon Butler led our Australian business. Simon’s M&A experience was invaluable in our negotiations with Solution6.

    Due to widespread fears about how old accounting software would handle the year 2000 and the market’s desire for the new technology that Exonet was built on, our sales “went ballistic” from the start and exhibited the upward “hockey stick” sales trend that software start-ups still aspire to. This was what attracted Solution6 to acquire us.

    Exonet’s main investor was a VC company called IT Capital. At the time of the exit, I recall they had been with Exonet for about 18 months, had invested NZD $1.5M and effectively owned about a third of the business. A $12.7M return on an 18 month investment of NZD $1.5M – that’s still got to be one of the best investments ever made in the business history of New Zealand!

    Following its acquisition of Exonet, Solution6 merged with another large Australian software business called MYOB (“Mind Your Own Business”) and so the Exonet software was renamed to MYOB-EXO. Today MYOB-EXO is perhaps the most widely used of the mid-market ERP accounting packages in Australia and New Zealand, with many thousands of companies using it.

    Some of the lessons I learnt from the Exonet experience are;

    1. Success comes from a combination of skills, lots of hard work and lots of luck.
    2. Much of the skill required is in recognizing the luck that surrounds you, and knowing what to do with it.
    3. Business success invariably comes from a team of people; specifically, the combined skills, motivation and dedication of those people and the interplay of how they work together.
    4. It’s all about the journey, not the destination.

    After the exit, I worked for the Exonet business within Solution6 for a short while and then decided to take some time out, away from business. It was during that time out I realized that, although I reached the destination of an exit, I still missed the journey of getting there. I missed the energy and engagement of the business world, so I dived back in again and co-founded two new software businesses; Enprise and Datasquirt.

    Much of the skill required is in recognizing the luck that surrounds you, and knowing what to do with it.

    Enprise became of a group of businesses, of which two operated internationally, with a particular emphasis on the United States. One of those was EMS-Cortex, a SaaS software provisioning system that we sold to Citrix in 2011 for US $11M. Also in 2011, we sold ASX-listed Datasquirt to Silicon Valley-based LiveOps for a similar price.

    The international software business experience and contacts I gained through Enprise and EMS Cortex set me up for my current role as CEO of Datagate, where I am now based in Vancouver, Canada. Datagate is a SaaS billing solution for MSPs who sell telecom services, which we sell into the USA, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

    Another thing I’ve learnt over the last twenty years since the Exonet exit; it normally takes much longer than two years to build a good business!

    Posted in Billing, Cortex, Datagate, Datasquirt, Enprise, ERP, MYOB EXO, New Zealand IT Industry, SaaS | Leave a Comment »
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