Synthesize makes Gradient MSP a platform player, and is designed to reconcile everything-as-a-service faster and easier, beginning with Gradient’s existing Billing automated billing reconciliation service.

Today, Gradient MSP is announcing Synthesize, a new open vendor integration program and platform built to optimize the MSP business mode, and which the company believes is unique in the IT industry. It makes Gradient MSP a platform player and enables both a frictionless ecosystem, and the reconciling of everything-as-a-service faster and easier, beginning with Gradient’s existing Billing automated billing reconciliation service.

“We have a 250 million TAM industry, where the main subsets are MSPs and vendors, but we think that the channel is worth more than 250 million,” said Dave Goldie, VP of Channel, Gradient MSP. “The industry is worth a billion and everyone should be getting paid what they are worth. We have conversations with MSSPs who devalue themselves by charging less than the value of their services.”

Goldie said that Gradient’s strategic objective is to change that.
“Our greater purpose is to make the world a better place,” he stated. “The first use case was Billable, our automated billing reconciliation service.” It was launched last November.

“By giving MSPs some of their time back on a business operations tool, we also recognized that the majority needed to reconcile billing back to the PSAs, and to automate that, we needed integrations to all the PSA tools,” Goldie said. “Vendors, especially emerging ones, are also coming to us and are integrating with Gradient. They would have to invest in building integrations with the PSAs and maintaining them. Instead they have one integration with Gradient and leverage the deep relationships we have with PSA vendors.”

“What sets us apart from other integration programs is that we are uniting he channel and creating connectors between vendors and accelerators into the market,” said Andrea Ayala, Director of Technology Alliances at Gradient MSP. “This increases the ability of MSPs to make more money, by giving them access to best of breed tools.”

Goldie stressed that Gradient MSP has a unique business and Go-to-Market model.

“We went to the investor market with plans,” he said. “They saw there was an opportunity here, and we announced we closed our Series A funding in November – with zero revenue and plans for zero revenue over the next 12 months. The overall monetization of the platform will come from industry intelligence. It’s not a data play, not selling data. We will eventually have the ability to provide anonymized data to give MSPs the ability to show customers they are being undercharged, as this data-driven discovery will show what an MSP service is worth, so they can charge it appropriately.” These anonymized datasets telling MSPs where they are overcharging or undercharging.

So what’s to stop the customer from going down the street to pay half the price as they were paying before?

“We expect that the competition will also see they have been charging well below the value they provide, so would charge double as well,” Goldie said.
The major PSA vendors are also working on their own open platforms, and ConnectWise formally launched their Asio platform last fall. Gradient MSP sees these as complementary rather than competitive, however.

“ConnectWise wants what’s best for the channel as well, as do the other PSAs,” Goldie said. “They want to give MSPs the vision. Their platforms are also for their Resellers want to do integrations themselves to Gradient.”

“Synthesize is an Open Ecosystem Program that creates partnerships that goes beyond just integrating,” Ayala said. “What sets us apart from other integration programs, is that we are uniting he channel and creating connectors between vendors and accelerators into the market. The integration heading into the Gradient API is also free.”

“With this announcement of Synthesize, which is all about vendor integrations, we will be announcing the early vendors adopters as well,” Goldie stated. He also noted that later this year there will be a monetization of Billable as well.

Initially, that was planned from the start with Billable PRO, which was a $49 per MSP per month upgrade. Things changed, however.

“What it was was an export and drag and drop into Gradient, but we decided we would give more away for free, so we took the CSV value-add and gave it away for free,” Goldie said. “Once there are more integrations for Billable Pro, there will be a paid version, but the integrations will be per MSP per month, not per user . Still, there is monetization and revenue that will happen this year.”

Goldie also gave a shout-out to partners interested in Synthesize.

“Just engage with us,” he said. “Let’s discover if a partnership makes sense, and if so let’s work together to pool our resources.”