NakiCloud started out life as a regional business-to-business managed service provider, offering IT infrastructure as a service. Director Ryan Eagar says NakiCloud’s business customers gave him the idea for a whole new revenue stream when they kept asking for home ISP services.
“The trickle of requests became a torrent, so we created a new business-to-consumer brand to offer internet services to the residential market,” he says. The new B2C brand – called Speedster – is designed as a national brand that will capture residential internet market share New Zealand-wide. That meant gearing up for large customer numbers and large volumes of invoices.
“Datagate was essential to the launch of the Speedster brand,” Ryan Eagar says.
“Before Datagate we were using a nasty system out of the U.K. We’ve cut our billing time by more than 50% with Datagate. It’s very easy and very logical. It has a nice user interface and we can offer login access to our clients so they can check usage or costs. Datagate has a great team, their tailoring for us has been really good.”
Speedster uses Datagate to measure and bill internet fibre usage by month or by day. The company offers capped and unlimited plans, with capped plans charging per Gig over a certain amount of data. Speedster gives customers courtesy alerts when they are nearing their cap, to avoid unexpected charges. Customers who are often over their cap receive upgrade offers.
“Datagate helps us deliver a responsive service that saves customers money. Without Datagate, we couldn’t do it,” Ryan Eagar says.
“Datagate is a flexible telecom billing platform, that’s its beauty. The development team are really good guys to work with, I really value being able to work with them to customise Datagate the way we want it. That’s been very important for our business. Datagate has core capabilities but the tailoring has made all the difference,” says Ryan Eagar.
Telco services are another new revenue stream for NakiCloud. Datagate measures and bills the phone plan minutes.
“We create any calling plans we like. Our Datagate customer portal and login are nicely branded and look very professional. We offer a landline service and hope to add mobile services by the end of the year,” Ryan Eagar says.
NakiCloud has two other new revenue streams going live in the next quarter: electricity and automated daily offsite backup services.
“For our offsite backup services, we can either bill for the amount of data housed or the amount of traffic travelling. Either option, Datagate will measure and bill it,” Ryan Eagar says.
“For our electricity services we have created a specialist brand to sell into the SME space, called 123-SME. We’re already successfully servicing completely different markets with our two existing brands. Datagate gives us the confidence to create new brands and new service lines to target many different market sectors. It works. It’s accurate. We have big plans for the future with Datagate.”
