17 INTRODUCING technologyreseller.co.uk TR: Can we expect anything new from CloudOlive in the second half of 2024? MG: There’s tons on the roadmap but what I’m most excited about is a brand new tool called NCEasy! This gives one-screen visibility into all Microsoft NCE renewals, licence change windows, unassigned licences, actively assigned users… it’s gonna be so good! TR: What type of support can you provide customers? MG: With strategic locations in Australia and Europe, we offer round the clock support and training. Our onboarding process ensures your PSA is standardised for easy maintence. We’ve successfully onboarded numerous MSPs needing a way to standardise everything after multiple acquisitions (AirIT, Xerox UK, Centaris) or just PSA ‘out of wackness’ after longtime use. Co-founder Adam Ross and I both came from Autotask and can provide best-practice recommendations for simplicity and scalability. TR: What currently is having the greatest impact on your business? MG: Listening to the MSP market to find out where there are gaps and challenges with ever-evolving vendor tools, because it inspires us to build the next thing. Our biggest driver is to have CloudOlive solving problems. It’s in our best interest to be receptive and agile when it comes to product improvement suggestions so that we keep solving challenges for our 130+ customers. TR: Where do you see the next big opportunity for MSPs/resellers? MG: Service delivery has been the industry focus for 10+ years and now, thanks to innovation in billing tools, admin and finance teams will be getting well looked after in the next decade. That’s where maximum margin and scale will come from moving forward. TR: What lessons should we learn from outages caused by Crowdstrike’s faulty software update? MG: We need to be realistic and accept these things WILL happen. But acceptance doesn’t mean being passive. It should drive us regularly to review Plan Bs and ensure they best mitigate risks. The U.S. Marine Corps has a saying, Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Everyone needs to protect themselves with a Plan B, because it’s not a matter of if, but when. Technology Reseller (TR): Why should resellers partner with CloudOlive? Megan Gower (MG): The way vendors invoice MSPs is vastly different to how MSPs resell those same services. If you rely on a human to manually check bills, or even vendor integrations into PSAs, there are always gaps and errors. We’ve built CloudOlive to automatically detect errors and give your finance team the most granular control over variances each month so that you never delay invoices, misbill clients or leak revenue again. TR: What are some of the products, tools and services you offer MSPs? MG: A powerful tool to reconcile vendor charges against client fees, with BI dashboards for granular insights into profit margins, contract existence and cost optimisation. Plus, customisable alerts for anomalies in billing or usage patterns so that MSPs can quickly address issues. We also flag when vendor integrations into the PSA function incorrectly. If everyone seriously validated the integrity of their vendor integrations instead of blindly trusting them, I wonder how their profit margins for the year would change? TR: What are your business highlights of the year so far? MG: In Q2 we launched CloudOlive Groupings to ensure unit counts for multiple services match every month (ie. RMM, AV, BU), reconciling Managed Service packages or tiers beautifully. We are the only ones who are solving this, so it’s been pretty awesome. TR: What should resellers be looking to capitalise on? MG: Internal reflection. People like to chase the newest, shiniest thing, but internal insights have monetary value – seeing what tools and services customers may be missing, finishing the set-up of your PSA to enhance business operations, auditing where PSA services forgot to be added to a contract, licences decommissioned in the portals etc.. Megan Gower, Account Executive in charge of partners + new biz sales in North America & EMEA, introduces CloudOlive, an online platform where MSPs can centrally manage and automatically reconcile all Cloud & SaaS vendor invoices against client billings. Any vendor invoice can be ingested into CloudOlive and immediately compared against client contracts Introducing…CloudOlive TR: What’s the best bit of business advice you’ve ever been given? MG: When the going gets tough, the tough get going. TR: Have you ever had any embarrassing moments at work? MG: Just Youtube ‘A day in the life Autotask’. Every now and then my old colleagues will jokingly send me this video as a reminder of the cringe. I hate being on camera and die a little inside knowing 500+ people have seen this. TR: What is your favourite quote and why? MG: ‘The glass is ALWAYS half full, never half empty.’ There’s always going to be someone in this world who’s lucky enough to have been given more, and at any moment you could swap places with them. We could all benefit from having more gratitude for what we have, instead of focusing on what we don’t have. TR: What’s on your playlist at the moment? MG: I recently discovered Depeche Mode on a trip to Estonia. My husband probably enjoys the break from 24/7 Taylor Swift. TR: What’s the most used app on your phone and why? MG: My camera. I love capturing life, plus my dog is a model. TR: How do you like to spend your spare time? MG: Travelling to anywhere cold where I can avoid the sun. Long walks with our dog. Spontaneously agreeing to marathons with zero training. Concerts. Love a good red wine and Netflix. Megan Gower
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