An integral part of helping MSP’s profit from communications services is providing them with easy and convenient access to information of many types. Typically, this is done through a portal of some kind. Wholesale communications is a niche business model for which very few ‘off the shelf’ solutions exist, and so the options available are limited to two basic choices: 1. Cobble together a set of separate tools and platforms to try and create a seamless experience for partners. or 2. Design and develop a fully customised portal that provides partners with a truly seamless experience. Obviously the second option is the more challenging and costly, but it’s also the only realistic choice for a company that wants to empower MSP’s to be more efficient and profitable. In this article we explore the journey that Activa Communications has embarked on to build and deliver a market-leading portal to empower our partners to become more efficient and profitable, and to better support their customers.
Efficiently managing projects, orders, customers and services
MSPs are profitable when they are efficient, and have good processes and systems in place, but even the most efficient MSP will struggle when trying to coordinate customers, services, projects and orders across a number of wholesale communications providers. Managing billing, placing orders in different supplier portals, and consolidating order information between projects – all of these tasks take valuable time. We know this because we have experience running a successful MSP, and so we know that the value of partnerships comes from the total cost of transactions, not just the price shown on the invoice. In the design of our Partner Portal we have incorporated four key features that help MSP’s to be efficient and profitable, as listed below:
- Customers – view and manage customers and their site locations and contacts.
- Services – view and manage services and arrange changes and cancellations.
- Projects – create and manage projects, as groupings of orders.
- Orders – view and manage orders (note that our provisioning team will keep you informed of orders as they progress).
By providing these core features we empower MSP’s to reduce their operating costs and maximise efficiency and profitability. We know of no other comparable portal that provides these functions, specifically tailored to the needs to MSPs.
Placing orders for any service using a simple, consistent and efficient process
Ordering services is a necessary task that all MSPs that provide communications services must tackle, but many MSPs haven’t considered the time costs involved with managing orders across multiple suppliers. Consider just some of the things that need to be managed:
- Staff need to be trained in multiple different portals and processes.
- Notifications and updates are providing through multiple different channels.
- Multiple sets of invoices and billing feeds need to be managed.
The costs involved can be significant and are often overlooked. In previous businesses we have witnessed first-hand how costly and inefficient these arrangements can be.
Our Partner Portal provides partners with a simple, easy to use ordering process that is consistent across all of our products and services. It does not matter if you are ordering a SIP trunk, a Xelion UC system, a basic NBN service, a 10Gbit fibre service, or a hosted fax account – every order follows the same procedure and uses the same common set of records including customers, contacts, sites and projects.
Using our Partner portal, MSP’s can train staff in one straightforward ordering process, receive updates about all orders of all types through one channel, manage a single set of customer records, and simplify their accounts with one invoice or billing feed, all of which can maximise the efficiency and profitability of their operations.
Manage SentryNet and protect customers from emerging threats
Cybersecurity is at the core of every MSPs value proposition to their customers, and every MSP is seeking to deliver better security outcomes to customers without complicating their ‘stack’ or adding unnecessary costs. SentryNet empowers MSPs to deliver transparent security to their customers as a seamless feature of their Internet connectivity, without requiring any software or equipment to deployed to customer sites or devices. MSPs can enhance the security of their customer’s connections by leveraging the AI-based threat and content filtering engine of SentryNet, which adds over 150,000 new malicious hosts to its databases every day. Our Partner Portal provides MSPs with full control of their SentryNet policies and services, allowing them to tailor the service to suit specific customer requirements, but also to leverage the unique design of SentryNet to increase efficiency by centrally managing settings that may apply to many or even all of their customers in one step.
SentryNet is a comprehensive platform with a wide range of features and settings that can’t all be discussed in this article (you can learn more about SentryNet HERE) but consider the example of when an emerging threat is detected and an MSP needs to act quickly to prevent their customers from being exposed. In the worst-case scenario, the MSP has no centralised management or orchestration platform, and needs to connect to each customer directly to apply filtering of one form or another manually, requiring a great deal of technician time and of course delay. Hopefully, there is some system in place to allow the MSP to automate the deployment of an update or change of configuration to prevent customers from being exposed to the threat, but this may involve one or more platforms, delays and significant technician time to complete. With SentryNet deployed, MSP’s can leverage the ‘allow’ and ‘deny’ lists of the platform to prevent all of their customers from being exposed to threats in one simple step. Lists can be included in policies and updated dynamically, so by maintaining a centralised list of malicious hosts the MSP wants customers to be protected from the emerging threat can be mitigated in one step, taking just a few seconds to apply. The same functionality allows for less urgent but equally valuable things to be done, such as ensuring that phishing simulation systems are always accessible to customers regardless of the filtering policies that may be in place.
By including SentryNet administration features in our Partner Portal we help MSPs to enhance their cybersecurity offerings and be more efficient and profitable at the same time.
A future development roadmap driven by partner feedback and requests
Creating a custom designed software platform such as our Partner Portal requires a great deal of focus and effort, and at Activa Communications we have compressed the timeframe for development of our portal significant and delivered a great deal of functionality in a very short period. However, we haven’t even slowed down since the portal was launched in June 2024 and have delivered a stream of new features and functionality with two more key improvements in the final stages of development, for release in coming weeks. The first key feature ready for imminent release is Unified Service Qualification, which allows partners to see the availability of all our connectivity services across all of our carriers at a specific site address. We also display all of the details of the site including technical information that determines the qualification result. Partners can also access the history of past qualification of any site and can be sent a record of the qualification result by email. 
The second key feature is providing partners with access to technical information about connectivity services, including live performance monitoring and, where available, live NBN technical information. Partners can view the uptime and response time of connectivity services over different periods of time, and where relevant they can see the full technical details provided by NBN, including information such as detected wiring faults, stability profiles, and service dropouts.
With a long list of further improvements in the pipeline, driven by feedback from our MSP partners, we plan to keep delivering new features and functions and improving our Partner Portal to help MSPs become more efficient and profitable when delivering communications services to their customers. Activa Communications is built around serving the needs of MSPs in Australia and New Zealand and helping them to be more efficient and profitable when delivering communications services to their customers. Our internal culture is very focussed on leveraging automation to be efficient in all of our operations, and our Partner Portal is an expression of that culture. The journey Activa Communications has embarked on in developing a custom designed Partner Portal has presented significant challenges, but we are delighted with the progress we have made and the substantial functionality we have delivered. We look forward to onboarding more partners to use our Partner Portal and incorporating more of the valuable feedback, suggestions and features requests from MSP partners to help guide the improvement of the portal in the years to come.