Posts Tagged ‘MSPs’

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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!

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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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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!

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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.

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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…

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Cognition360 analytics is boosting visibility and profitability for ConnectWise and Datagate users

May 23, 2020

In this time of Covid-19, more than ever, business leaders need to keep a close watch on what’s happening in their businesses in real time. They need to see trends, issues and opportunities as they occur, so they can swiftly tune their businesses to protect and maximize their bottom line.

Cognition360 Business Analytics platform

This is why I’m so impressed with Cognition360, which a “next generation” analytics solution that uses machine learning and predictive AI. It’s optimized for users of ConnectWise Manage and is now being further optimized for users of Datagate telecom billing.

Cognition360’s president and co-founder is Ken Davis, who has an impressive IT industry track record, having built and exited a large and successful MSP business in New Zealand. Ken understands the MSP business model implicitly, and that expertise, combined with his knowledge of ConnectWise comes through clearly in Cognition360.

Instead of static monthly reports that show where the business has been, Cognition360 drills down into interactive reports using live data to reveal what is happening in the business right now, day by day. Instead of reacting to what happened last month and not understanding why, you can track your KPIs day by day, immediately seeing what changes you need to make. Your reports become a dynamic part of your day by day tuning of your business.

Now with more than 30 million tickets in its database, Cognition360 is the largest repository of industry-wide ConnectWise data in existence. This enables Cognition360 to show MSPs how they are performing compared to current and accurate industry benchmarks, for all their key metrics. Importantly, this gives them the ability to home in on the areas of their business which can be improved.

Of particular interest to Connectwise MSPs who use Datagate for telecom billing, is that Cognition360 will soon have the ability to recognize Datagate telecom invoices and report on these specifically.

I recommend that all MSPs who use ConnectWise Manage, should have a close look at Cognition360.

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The new normal: Now is a good time to review and upgrade your IT & communications systems

March 24, 2020

It is certain that the Covid-19 pandemic is driving immediate and potentially long-term, changes to the way the world does business.

As always, it’s those businesses that adapt and change to the new situation and the new future that will survive and prosper best. This is an ideal climate for small businesses to become large businesses and for large businesses to to potentially fail if they don’t adapt quickly enough.

If you haven’t done it already, now is the time to move off old systems that require on-premise hardware (on premise servers, computers, PABXs etc) and move onto Cloud-based systems, that you can access from anywhere you have Internet access. Remote working is the “new normal”.

Remote working is the “New Normal”

Your phone system should be a “Unified Communications” system that you can access via an app on your smartphone, tablet or laptop computer. That way you can advertise a single phone number that can always reach you, and you are always in touch with your business and your staff.

Standardize on a collaboration platform, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, which will enable you to have meetings with your staff, share documents and communicate more easily. Microsoft Teams can also be connected to a phone system, which is a powerful combination for integrating your outside calls with your internal processes.

Move from desktop Office apps to Office 365 or Google’s “G Suite”. This will ensure you have access to your work platform from a range of devices, instead of just one.

There are plenty of Cloud-based accounting packages to suit your business, including QuickBooks Online, Xero, MYOB, Microsoft Dynamics and others.

Popular Cloud CRM systems include SalesForce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and others.

Now is the time to review your systems and upgrade where needed, to ensure your business can work from anywhere. Contact your Managed Service Provider. This is the new normal.

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Partnerships, Integrations and Game-Changers

January 28, 2020

It’s rare to find a business application these days that can work as an island and doesn’t need to integrate or inter-operate with other business applications. The 2020’s is shaping up to be a decade where we will see the integration of businesses and applications continue to accelerate, to define a new set of winners with a new set of disruptions to the existing ways of doing business.

At Datagate, our focus is on bringing new options and capabilities to our Service-Provider clients as quickly as possible, and we don’t do this all on our own. Bringing in new partners and integrating with their products and services opens up exponential new possibilities for our clients.

The Datagate SaaS product is designed to automate and streamline the billing of usage-base and subscription services. Our vision is to empower our clients in all of the countries we operate, to bring new services and products to market faster and make their own decisions and strategies for what they sell, how their price it and who they sell it to. Speed to market is all-important.

Datagate Integrations

Currently, the biggest area of market disruption for Datagate clients, is the Cloud VoIP revolution. All over the developed world, businesses are looking to their local MSPs (Managed Service Providers) for their voice communications or UCaaS systems. Datagate makes telecom billing, tax and compliance easy and automatic for our MSP clients.

This year Datagate will announce a number of new and exciting partnerships to extend the markets, the capabilities and the scale at which we operate. We will also be announcing new team members throughout the year, starting very soon, to maintain and lift our levels of services as our client-base continues to rapidly grow.

An exciting year decade ahead!

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Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are winning in the new age of business telecom

December 12, 2019

MSPs are the new force in Unified Communications, and they are taking on the business telecom market at an accelerating pace, worldwide.

MSPs are winning an increasing share of the business telecom market
MSPs are winning an increasing share of the business telecom market

Through my business Datagate Innovation, that provides white-label telecom billing solutions, I am witnessing first hand, how MSPs are winning an increasing share of the business telecom market. From what we see at Datagate, this is very much a worldwide trend, and we see it directly in the USA, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

This is happening for the following reasons;

  • Business customers want a closer, more integrated and higher level of service than what the large telecom providers can give. MSPs have a closer relationship and better understanding of their business customers than the largest telecom providers can ever have.
  • Business customers want a single point of responsibility if/when something goes wrong with their mission-critical telecom service. They do not want to have their telecom provider and their MSP arguing about who is at fault and who needs to fix something.
  • Phones and computers have converged. Both are now running on the same networks and the same technologies. Whether MSPs directly sell the phone system or not, they end up supporting it by virtue of supporting its underlying network platform.
  • It’s good business for the MSP. Reselling telecom services is very profitable. It’s contracted and recurring revenue, with all the ingredients for MSPs to add considerable financial value to their businesses.
  • Being the “single point of supply” for all information and data technology solutions, elevates the MSP to a more strategic relationship with the customer and makes the customer “more sticky”.
  • It’s not difficult for MSPs who have no prior telecom experience to enter this space. Through the various white-label wholesale providers and solutions available, they can get as deeply involved in the technology as they want, or leave it to others to provide services for them to resell. The more deeply they get involved, the larger are the recurring margins.

My Datagate colleagues and I estimate that about 20% of MSPs are currently reselling telecom services and the MSP-driven telecom revolution is still in its early stages. The timing is clearly good for the other 80% of MSPs to enter this space!

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