SkySwitch Wrapped 2019 – A Year in Review

December 19, 2019
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2019 was a huge year for SkySwitch — not only for our team but for our entire reseller community and the ever-expanding partner ecosystem. Without you, our favorite moments of the year wouldn’t have been possible. So, let’s ring in 2020 together by taking a moment to celebrate the best of 2019. (Because if 2019 was good, 2020 is only going to get better from here.)

We Launched New Technologies & Integrations to Support You

2019 was a busy year for SkySwitch’s technology team. For starters, we launched two integrations to help support our reseller community. The first one, debuted in April, was our Business SMS with Rocket.Chat that helps make real-time team collaboration easier. 

As a white label, channel-only platform, creating tools that make branding easier for our resellers is always top of mind. So in March, we made it easier for resellers to pre-qualify client sites before installation with our release of the NPAT, a white label Network Performance & Assesment Tool. With just a few simple clicks in your Dashmanger, this tool can be completely customized with your own branding.  

Another area where we improved branding functionality can be found within the SkySwitch Dashmanager. With new UI configurations and functionalities rolled out this month, now SkySwitch resellers can easily control the look and feel of their own consumer-facing portals. Before this self-service functionality, portal branding was behind-the-scenes and created for resellers by the SkySwitch support team. Now, resellers have greater control over how they decide to present their portal to their customers. This new set of branding features also allows resellers the ability to better manage their brand images and templates, such as welcome emails, and the automation of each file’s purpose. 

One more major feature we’ve rolled out this year is a robust set of HIPAA reporting capabilities directly within the SkySwitch Dashmanager. Released in December, HIPAA reporting with detailed records of call logs, voicemail listens and virtual fax views are all easily accessible. In addition to reporting, resellers can easily manage HIPAA compliant features for customers who need to adhere to those stricter regulatory guidelines.

We Met Up at 4 Industry Trade Shows

In February, Eric Hernaez, Founder and President of SkySwitch, spoke in the panel discussion DIY: Building a Next-Gen Carrier at IT Expo in Ft.Lauderdale, FL to help keep the channel updated on what’s new in telecom. 

Later, in March, we took a trip over to the west coast where SkySwitch exhibited at Channel Partners in Las Vegas. 

We have thoroughly enjoyed these face-to-face interactions — both new and old. This means you can expect to see us traveling around and attending many more shows next year. If you’re interested in meeting with us face-to-face at upcoming roadshows, conferences and events, make sure to subscribe below to our newsletter to stay up-to-date.

We Connected With the ConnectWise Community

SkySwith hit the road again in June and traveled to Orlando, FL to exhibit at ConnectWise’s IT Nation Explore. Attendees at Explore experienced hands-on product training, innovation sneak peeks, breakout sessions and more — which made it the perfect platform to rollout our ConnectWise Manage integration, certified by ConnectWise’s Invent program. This was our first big splash into the ConnectWise community, and the SkySwitch momentum around ConnectWise just kept rolling from here.

In July, we attended ConnectWise’s quarterly Invent event in Tampa, FL to learn more about what we can be doing to improve our integration for ConnectWise users. Through the valuable feedback from ConnectWise Account Managers, who interact with ConnectWise users on a daily basis, we were able to make integration improvements that directly benefit those many MSPs who rely daily on ConnectWise.

All of this research and relationship-building was preparation for sponsoring ConnectWise’s largest event of the year: IT Nation Connect at the end of October. This is where SkySwitch truly linked arms with the ConnectWise community and showcased how easy and profitable it is for MSPs to resell telecom with SkySwitch. We also introduced our special SIP trunking offer for 3CX resellers.

Growth Machine: SkySwitch Community, The Club 1,000 and an Expanded Executive Team

We’re happy to say that this year,  160 new resellers have joined the SkySwitch community so far — and already 30 resellers have reached the ranks of Club 1,000, a VIP SkySwitch reseller group, that recognizes the hard work, performance and success of the top resellers who have reached 1,000 customer seats or more.

It’s not just our Reseller Network that has seen growth. SkySwitch as an organization has been expanding too. This year we added 27 new employees to the SkySwitch family and have brought in two new additions to the executive team: Harlan Hamlin, VP of Business Development, and Andy Abramson, Chief Marketing Officer.

And We Can’t Forget About the Event of the Year: Vectors 2019

Vectors was undoubtedly one of the largest highlights of the year. Every year, since 2016, we’ve brought the SkySwitch community together at our user-group conference to empower resellers with the knowledge, best practices and valuable business connections needed to succeed in the UCaaS space. But don’t just take our word for it, look at some of the media coverage that seemed to never stop, running a full twelve days after Vectors had concluded:

Since our inaugural event in 2016, we’ve gone from a small group of SkySwitch resellers gathering together to now over 300 in attendance. A bigger audience means bigger expectations, and our team worked hard to step up to the plate with 3 industry-expert keynote speakers, more educational sessions than ever before, and a rocking annual dinner party with Grammy nominee, Julian Marley, who performed a private concert for SkySwitch resellers at the Hard Rock Live on Universal Studios’ CityWalk.

We Moved On Up: New Tampa Headquarters

SkySwitch also outgrew our original Tampa HQ. So we went out and found a new corporate headquarters in the Westshore area of Tampa. With the rapid expansion of service offerings and of our growing team, this new space, fully-equipped with real-time collaboration technologies, was a necessary move to continue sustaining this growth. 

We’ve been on a lot of exciting adventures with you this past year, and we truly owe it all to each and every one of you in the reseller community. Thank you.

Get ready for new and exciting things to come in 2020: more events and trade shows, more webinars ⁠— more of just about everything.

Happy Holidays. Happy New Year. Happy Next Year, from….

Your SkySwitch Team

Posted in SkySwitch Blog