CRN Impact Awards: Hosted Network automates service provisioning for MSPs

Sydney’s Hosted Network has earned a finalist spot in the Platform Innovator category of the 2021 CRN Impact Awards for JARVIS, a portal that helps MSPs manage the services lifecycle from end to end.

The Just a Rather Very Intelligent System or JARVIS platform, (named after Iron Man’s AI assistant) was developed with a Vision to simplify the process of managing the ordering, service delivery, support, rebilling, and marketing of cloud and telco services.

Hosted Network began as an MSP in 2003 and, after seeing a gap in the market, transitioned into a wholesale cloud and telco services provider ten years later.

Chief executive Ben Town realised that MSP customers were facing difficulties when it came to tracking and managing subscription cycles, resulting in missed billing, time lost to administration, and dealing with fluctuations in prices from vendors or due to exchange rates.

The JARVIS platform was developed in-house to solve these pain points, automating much of the processes to make it easier for both the company and its MSP partners to gain repeat business.

Aiming for a ‘set it and forget it’ approach, services ordered through Hosted Network can be synced with an MSPs accounting and professional services automation (PSA) systems and link it to the appropriate contracts, allowing them to track the profitability of each customer and ensure nothing is missed.

Hosted Network’s background in managed services and consistent engagement with MSP users has ensured that the development and expansion of the platform has always been informed by the evolving needs of MSPs. To maintain this, feedback mechanisms have been built into the platform for any user to access.

Melbourne MSP Synapse IT managing director Hayden McMaster said that when he made a suggestion for integration with his company’s PSA tool, the Hosted Network team put it into action. He said, “It’s great to have a partner that listens to us and makes things happen.”

Queensland MSP French Technologies director Nikki Stuart said that working with Hosted Network was “smooth sailing”.

“The biggest thing is obviously having a portal that we can work on and do changes straight away. Once it was set up we were able to manage the orders, do the services, support our customers, etc.,” Stuart said. 

“If they find the system goes down, we can jump into the portal and have a quick look to see what the issue was. So it's a lot more troubleshooting that I can obviously do in the office, which then alleviates the technicians. Our customers didn’t have to wait for a long time because we have the portal as our tool in addressing their issues right away.”