Mark Loveys

I get asked why I stood down from my role as CEO of Enprise Group and diverted my focus and investment to Datagate, which at the time, was the newest and smallest of Enprise’s businesses.

I did this because I recognised the very strong demand for Datagate by companies that sell IT, Telco and/or Utility services, driven by five big changes that are happening right now in the marketplace, as listed below;

1. The rapid rise of Cloud computing is leading IT Companies of all sizes to shift their business models towards selling services (instead of selling hardware). Subscription service revenue instead of product sales revenue. For IT Companies, this has progressed through selling data circuits, Internet connects and on to SIP / VOIP Telephony. Datagate makes this type of subscription billing easy.
2. Computers and Phones have become one and the same. Businesses of all sizes are deciding that one supplier is preferable to provide their IT and Telecommunications services, because the technologies have merged. A relationship with fewer service suppliers is easier and less expensive to manage, whereas having more suppliers is more complex and costly to manage. Datagate enables resellers to aggregate multiple service types such as Telco and IT services in their billing and portal services.
3. Power companies are starting to sell broadband successfully. At the reseller level, we are starting to see an emerging pattern of convergence between electricity and telephony (at least at the broadband level at this stage). Telephony & IT resellers are interested in selling electricity to their customer bases – essentially it’s just another on-line service to add to data services. Electricity companies are interested in selling broadband and other Telco products. Datagate provides billing and portal services that can combine different services types, such as Telco and electricity.
4. Billing of telephony and electricity is complex. A product like Datagate is needed to make this billing easy. Furthermore, it’s even more complex when you try to mix different service types. Standard accounting and billing systems cannot handle this complexity efficiently. A specialised product, such as Datagate is required.
5. Further to billing, customers’ service expectations are increasing. They expect immediate on-line access to their bills and reports analysing their consumption of services. The large established electricity and telco vendors all offer on-line analytical portals and so have already set the market expectation. Resellers of these services therefore need to offer similar on-line portals. This requirement becomes more complex when the reseller is selling a combination of services, such as electricity and telephony. Datagate is built to handle this requirement.

Datagate exists to help IT, Telco & Utility resellers capitalize on the opportunities that these changes in the market are driving.

We are experiencing fast uptake of Datagate by resellers in the New Zealand market and we plan to take Datagate to overseas markets, where the same market changes are happening, in the very near future!