Most of the big names in HPBX built their own: ShoreTel, RC, Fuze, Digium, Fonality - built their own 8x8 built there are; hold about 90 patents; and is one of the most successful HPBX company at $230M in annual rev. Vonage - has 2 home brew + BSFT (over 600K seats on VB) Dialpad - Freeswitch Nextiva, DSCI, Momentum, XO, VZ and 400 more are on BSFT 15 Million lines on BSFT - more than 3x the next vendor for UC (Cisco) Downside to that is that the patent trolls win, time and again. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-03/sprint-wins-139-8-million... https://www.law360.com/articles/885168/sprint-owes-153m-over-sms-patent-comc... Combined Level3, VZ, Sprint, AT&T have over 500 VoIP patents. That will bite you eventually. I see patent trolls regularly attacking clients. BTW..... It isn't the technology. It is knowing who to target with what bundle and what message - and then getting out there to sell it. There are plenty of open source VoIP companies who have failed miserably. Quite a few on Meta and BSFT. Much of it has to do with product/market fit; marketing and sales. Those last 2 - marketing and sales - are like kryptonite to most folks who go open source. Why? They get stuck on the tech. It's all about features and custom and blinking lights. That doesn't appeal to a buyer. Open source has its own challenges: patents and skill set. You have to have full stack devs and engineers to run your own platform. One CEO who switched from a commercial to home brew spent all of his licensing dollars on a team of devs and engineers to keep the cluster running. Regards, Peter Radizeski RAD-INFO, Inc. On 3/16/2017 8:48 AM, Fred Posner wrote:
Another +1 here for open source.
I came to the open source side after working with Broadsoft and Acme Packet... finding out that not only could we reduce unnecessary costs with an open source model, we could also improve the customer experience.
Projects such as Asterisk, Kamailio, and FreeSWITCH are mature, tested, and trusted by large institutions, carriers, governments, and more.
If you don't want to build your own, there's great products out there building on top of open source, such as:
CSRP http://www.csrpswitch.com/ high-performance SIP "Class 4" call routing platform for VoIP service providers of all kinds
Kazoo/2600Hz http://www.2600hz.com/
and... of course... you can always build your own (or hire a consultant to help you).
--fred http://palner.com
On 3/15/17 10:51 PM, Alex Balashov wrote:
Since we work predominantly with service providers that take open-source approaches, we would be remiss not to plug that as an approach here. It's taken by a significant percentage of the industry.
No, open source is definitely not free. But to those accustomed to a Broadsoft-type experience, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about it that stem from a lack of familiarity with how to approach the open product ecosystem. There's a perception that it's "highly technical" or, "Okay, I got FreeSWITCH to compile. Now what?"
In reality, there are _lots_ of "packaged" answers to this problem, if you're just willing to look. If you don't want to build anything yourself, there are many good commercial systems built on top of an open-source technology stack. They cost some money, but nothing on the order of the big brands, and are competitive and growing in the larger operator and enterprise markets. Example:
https://integrics.com/enswitch/
It's built on top of Asterisk, Kamailio and MySQL, but very turn-key.
If you have the engineering core competency to build something yourself, the ROI is excellent. Yes, there's a cost and a GTM lag, but once you sink the cost, nobody's going to hit you up for $MEGABUCKS for another 100 seat licences ever again. And again, it doesn't mean you have to write a million LOC multitenant software product yourself.
There are lots of people on this list who provide hosted PBX with Asterisk or FreeSWITCH and have not had to do this. There are many approaches; you can certainly roll a home-spun multi-tenant platform if you really want to, but you can also sell individual instances of ready-to-go PBX distributions to customers inside a virtualised or containerised environment. In the latter, the port density / unit economics relative to hardware are excellent. You can put 100+ such PBXs on a single commodity box. Automating deployment with all the tooling out there these days isn't that hard. A lot of the tools already exist in FOSS land, if you just look around. And you can use feature-rich (and easy white-labelled) PBX distributions such as FreePBX or FusionPBX out of the box. Just Google around.
The companies who have put a little bit of work into this have definitely forked out some CAPEX (mainly engineering time or consultants), but their ongoing OPEX commitments are comically low, and accordingly, their gross margins and cash flow are that much the better for it. What's more, the sunk cost tends to be largely fixed, so your ROI gets better and better with subscriber growth.
It's not for everyone. Some organisations are sales-heavy cultures best suited to selling cookie-cutter products and don't want to do anything nerdy, or can't. But there are lots of people on this list making excellent money with open source, and I count some of them among our customer base (though we are not in the C5/hosted PBX platform business).
-- Alex
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