This is a time of great opportunity and also great risk of disruption, for businesses working in the fields of IT services, Telephony and Electricity. Each of these three industries on their own are under increasing margin-pressure, because each industry can be seen to lack a great deal of differentiation. All can now be classified as on-line infrastructure services. Phones are computers, computers can be phones – all require a network and electricity to operate. Increasingly, all must work together to provide a working platform for the common customer.
The needs of the market, the customers, will ultimately drive the outcome of who wins and who loses. The market favours those who are efficient, those that have the best understanding of the customer’s needs, those who adapt, those who offer the best service, those who are easiest and least costly to deal with.
Increasingly we are seeing the rise of businesses who offer combined IT and telephony services. These are now intertwined services, where phones and computers share the same networks, Internet connections and infrastructure, They are now very much one and the same. The technology of both has converged. Furthermore, the sales process and the customer relationship are now the same. It no longer makes sense for the customer to source telephony and IT from different suppliers.
Now add the supply of electricity to the mix of IT and Telephony. It’s a logical addition – another on-line service. It can leverage the same sales process and the same customer relationship as IT and Telephony. Companies that provide all three of these services to their customers, can offer a better, more complete offering, while at the same time getting maximum return on their sales and on-going relationship effort.
This convergence of on-line services, is the reason why I’m so convinced that my new company Datagate is on the right path. Datagate is a white-label, Cloud-based billing engine and customer service portal for companies that sell services including Telephony, Electricity, Hosting, IT services and other utility services. Datagate produces a single unified bill for the end customer that includes all subscribed services and lets them review and analyse their bills and consumption of services in their own private on-line portal.
Datagate is rapidly building a base of on-line service re-sellers, covering IT, Telephony, Electricity and other services, enabling these businesses to pick and choose the services they want to sell and allow them to create their own bundles and pricing plans.
Convergence is a great creator of business opportunities …and also a great disruptor.
Mark Loveys 
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