With the rapid growth of the “as-a-service” business model and the abundance of new services enabled by the Internet and mobile apps, it’s fair to say that there has been a major mindset shift in the monetization of new businesses towards subscription and usage-based billing.
It’s easy to forget that other, more mature businesses categories, such as telecommunications, water, gas, electricity, news media and others, have been using subscription and usage-based billing for decades and have built up a substantial amount of experience, knowledge and I.P. in the subject – not to mention substantial recurring revenue streams!
My business, Datagate Innovation has learnt a lot from the telecommunications industry in particular, where it’s common practice to bill fixed monthly charges for fixed connections, usage charges for calls, texts and data, whilst also offering bundles of usage of various services for a fixed charge. We think this I.P. is invaluable, not only in billing for telecommunications and utility re-sellers, but also for the new and emerging business categories, such as Internet-of-Things, Software-as-a-Service and Artificial Intelligence, among others,
Datagate Innovation’s purpose in life is to help re-sellers maximize and grow their recurring revenue with fixed and usage-based billing, whilst minimize their billing costs through the use of our Cloud-based Datagate rating and billing platform.
The majority of Datagate’s clients are Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who re-sell telecommunications services and IT services to their business customers, but we are starting to get traction in other industry categories, such as electricity and water, who also work on a usage-billing basis.
This month Datagate published a case study for Ranch Hills Water Supply Corporation (RHWSC), who are based in Texas and are using Datagate to bill their water customers on a usage basis. By shifting their billing to Datagate and a usage-basis, they increased revenue by around 26%, while cutting their billing time by around two thirds. Datagate was configured to receive water usage data from RHWC’s Kamstrup Ready Manager system and post the resulting bills to RHWSC’s Xero accounting system, after emailing them directly to the end customers.
The big opportunity we see for all service resellers today is the convergence of different types of usage-based services that can all be sold through a single reseller. We are already seeing our clients combine IT and telephony, as well as telephony and electricity. As long as it’s usage-based and we can get access to the usage data, then Datagate can bill it, on a single invoice.
Mark Loveys 