Hero and its sister companies in Australia, New Zealand, US and UK share a common technology framework and offer phone numbers from over 50 countries worldwide. Datagate’s ability to work across Europe, Asia, North America and Australasia is ‘very helpful’, says Ray Jackson, Chief Technology Officer, Hero.
“We see Datagate as a valuable partner that can help us grow our global wholesale business,” he says.
“Partnering with Datagate is very important for us because we require an automated telecom billing solution for the individual tax and legal regimes of our key markets. There is a lot of complexity, especially with taxes, and we rely on Datagate for expertise in those areas,” he says.
Hero sells direct and wholesale services that span telecommunications, data products and services, including Internet (VoIP) phone services, Mobile PBX, Cloud PBX, SIP Trunks, high speed broadband, smartphone applications, custom development and white label services. The wholesale division of the business is showing especially strong growth trends. Hero’s philosophy is to ‘Make life easier for Managed Service Providers at every step’.
“Offering automated white label billing is an important way to make life easier for the wholesale partner channel,” Ray Jackson says.
“It removes entry barriers by stripping out time and cost, making it easy and profitable for our partners to deliver more services.”
“Datagate operates across all of the tax and legal regimes of our key global markets.”
Ray Jackson, Chief Technology Officer, Hero
Managed Service Providers are increasingly a single trusted supplier for everything from telecommunications to data services, networking, hosted software and desktop support. Many of Hero’s channel partners sell a wide variety of products from many different providers. Hero recommends Datagate to any Managed Service Provider that offers a suite of services.
“They need a single billing engine for multiple data feeds. Datagate is the answer – it brings all of the different data feeds together into a single system and manages billing for everything,” Ray Jackson says.
Managed Service Providers can have their growth severely restricted by having to manually download spreadsheets to do their billing, he says.
Datagate’s integrated telecom billing solution pushes data into the MSP’s accounting software and integrates with their banking systems. It manages all of the detail of billing, including downloading Call Data Records and delivering a clear summary to the user.
“There is a lot of complexity in integrating with telecoms carriers – Datagate has taken away that complexity,” says Ray Jackson.
“I wouldn’t recommend any other product but Datagate. The Datagate guys have local knowledge of their markets and they integrate with so many different providers. I don’t know anyone who can do it better.
“Partnerships are a major focus for us and we put huge energy into supporting our reseller channel. We see Datagate as part of that total support package. People need a strong billing solution for all products and that’s what Datagate provides. We’re excited to be working together.
“Datagate is the perfect partner for us because we’re a flexible company that is always innovating and releasing new products and we know Datagate can bill it, whatever it is. We customize cloud-based IT and telephony solutions to suit individual channel partners and Datagate supports the billing of those customized solutions. We also take channel support very seriously and we offer that 24/7, along with dedicated channel management. Again, Datagate is our partner in this because they really do make life simpler for our reseller channel.
“The other reason we like Datagate as a partner is that everyone gets to focus on their core business. I’m not an expert in billing systems and Datagate does not offer any of our services. We can refer customers without ever eating each other’s lunch. Our missions are aligned: together Hero and Datagate take the hard work and uncertainty out of provisioning, scaling up and billing any voice, data, video or cloud service. Datagate offers the best end-to-end automated billing solution for MSPs with complex billing requirements. No one does it better than Datagate.”
