Comms Vision is always a good indicator of where the channel’s collective head is at. This year, the conversations felt more grounded than ever – less about abstract future trends and more about the operational reality MSPs and ISPs are wrestling with day to day.
Across the panels, roundtables and all the in-between conversations, three themes kept surfacing.
1. Automation isn’t a project anymore – it’s becoming a survival tactic.
Margins are tightening. Expectations are rising. And the “we’ll fix it manually for now” approach has finally hit its limit. Providers are looking hard at anything that slows onboarding, creates rework or delays revenue.
Automation has shifted from efficiency play to operational resilience. It’s how organisations are trying to buy back time, headroom and profitability.
2. Portals are proving to be the industry’s biggest handbrake.
The portal problem came up in almost every conversation. Not because portals are bad technology – but because they sit outside the workflows MSPs rely on. Each one forces a context switch. Each one breaks the automation chain.
You can’t automate end-to-end if critical steps live behind someone else’s UI. Until the industry moves towards cleaner, standardised integration, we’re asking service providers to automate around gaps of our own making.
3. Billing still feels like the quiet crisis in many providers’ operations.
For all the progress the channel has made in unifying tools and platforms, billing is still too fragmented and too dependent on manual intervention. Telco and connectivity data arrives late, inconsistently, or in formats most PSAs were never designed to handle.
The result? Delayed bills. Write-offs. Support noise. And an enormous amount of internal effort just to get invoices out the door.
Billing shouldn’t be the thing holding businesses back – yet for many, it still is.
A clearer sense of what people need – and what they expect from us
Beyond the formal agenda, it was the candid conversations that stuck. When you actually sit and listen, you hear where people really are – not where the industry narrative says they should be.
A few things came through clearly:
- A lot of providers are looking again at their operational setup – billing included. Not tentatively, but with a real sense of “we can’t keep doing it this way.” There’s growing appetite for tools that reduce effort, improve accuracy and make month-end less painful.
- In some conversations, people recognised what SI is doing – Elevate IQ came up naturally, and there was genuine interest in the Fibre Café model too. A good sign that awareness is building.
- In others, we weren’t in the conversation yet – which made the face time at Comms Vision even more valuable. Getting in the room gave us a chance to hear the challenges first-hand and explain where our platforms fit.
- And across the board, providers want software that integrates cleanly and removes more of the manual work created by inconsistent data across multiple suppliers and systems. That came through again and again.
None of this sits outside those themes – it all feeds into the same overall picture. It gives us a clearer picture of what people need, where we can support better, and where we need to keep listening.
Where Strategic Imperatives fits into the picture
What struck us most is how closely these themes align with what our customers bring to us week after week.
- Fibre Café helps service providers escape the portal maze: one connection into a growing ecosystem, instead of building and maintaining multiple one-to-one integrations.
- Elevate IQ tackles the billing challenges PSAs aren’t designed to solve, giving teams clarity, accuracy and a billing process that doesn’t break every month.
We didn’t build these platforms because they were trendy or because they’d look good on a slide. We built them because the industry needed a practical way to move faster, operate cleaner and scale without drowning in complexity.
Comms Vision simply confirmed that these needs aren’t theoretical – they’re immediate.
If you’re navigating any of these challenges and want to explore them further, we’re always up for a conversation.