What service or soft-switch do use externally to provide to your customer, and why? What do you like and dislike about the platform. Personally, I have used both Broadsoft and NetSapines platforms both through wholesalers. On Broadsoft, I like the feature set and stability of the platform, but I dislike the user interfaces and complexity of setting up simple things like an auto attendant. I also dislike the cost of the platform as simple features like auto attendants incur an additional cost, and many other platforms and competitors these day offer unlimited auto attendants for example. On Netsapines, I like the UI as a basic user can configure most items without ever having to call us, but I dislike the stability of the platform. Might just be the reseller we are using, but they have had over 10 outages now in a couple of month time-frame, and have blamed it on a Netsapins bug. Some of the backend databases for Netsapiens are also not what I consider professional.
What sort of database backends do you seem unprofessional? On March 15, 2017 9:52:39 PM EDT, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote:
What service or soft-switch do use externally to provide to your customer, and why? What do you like and dislike about the platform.
Personally, I have used both Broadsoft and NetSapines platforms both through wholesalers.
On Broadsoft, I like the feature set and stability of the platform, but I dislike the user interfaces and complexity of setting up simple things like an auto attendant. I also dislike the cost of the platform as simple features like auto attendants incur an additional cost, and many other platforms and competitors these day offer unlimited auto attendants for example.
On Netsapines, I like the UI as a basic user can configure most items without ever having to call us, but I dislike the stability of the platform. Might just be the reseller we are using, but they have had over 10 outages now in a couple of month time-frame, and have blamed it on a Netsapins bug. Some of the backend databases for Netsapiens are also not what I consider professional.
-- Alex -- Principal, Evariste Systems LLC (www.evaristesys.com) Sent from my Google Nexus.
I've been working with 2 different NetSapiens deployments over the past 6 years. I probably haven't experienced 10 outages in total over those 6 years. At least not 10 that I can attribute to NetSapiens bugs. Now I haven't been going through wholesalers. I agree with you on Broadsoft. We have a Broadsoft deployment through a wholesaler. Cost is a real issue, although the feature set is nice. On Mar 15, 2017 7:56 PM, "Colton Conor" <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote: What service or soft-switch do use externally to provide to your customer, and why? What do you like and dislike about the platform. Personally, I have used both Broadsoft and NetSapines platforms both through wholesalers. On Broadsoft, I like the feature set and stability of the platform, but I dislike the user interfaces and complexity of setting up simple things like an auto attendant. I also dislike the cost of the platform as simple features like auto attendants incur an additional cost, and many other platforms and competitors these day offer unlimited auto attendants for example. On Netsapines, I like the UI as a basic user can configure most items without ever having to call us, but I dislike the stability of the platform. Might just be the reseller we are using, but they have had over 10 outages now in a couple of month time-frame, and have blamed it on a Netsapins bug. Some of the backend databases for Netsapiens are also not what I consider professional. _______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
Mauricio, We are about ready to deploy Netsapiens. Any other feedback good or bad about them? Good to know you're seeing good stability on your own hardware. I would agree the wholesaler is probably having their own issues not related to Netsapiens software. On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 9:30 PM, Mauricio Lizano <mauricio.lizano at gmail.com> wrote:
I've been working with 2 different NetSapiens deployments over the past 6 years. I probably haven't experienced 10 outages in total over those 6 years. At least not 10 that I can attribute to NetSapiens bugs. Now I haven't been going through wholesalers.
I agree with you on Broadsoft. We have a Broadsoft deployment through a wholesaler. Cost is a real issue, although the feature set is nice.
On Mar 15, 2017 7:56 PM, "Colton Conor" <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote:
What service or soft-switch do use externally to provide to your customer, and why? What do you like and dislike about the platform.
Personally, I have used both Broadsoft and NetSapines platforms both through wholesalers.
On Broadsoft, I like the feature set and stability of the platform, but I dislike the user interfaces and complexity of setting up simple things like an auto attendant. I also dislike the cost of the platform as simple features like auto attendants incur an additional cost, and many other platforms and competitors these day offer unlimited auto attendants for example.
On Netsapines, I like the UI as a basic user can configure most items without ever having to call us, but I dislike the stability of the platform. Might just be the reseller we are using, but they have had over 10 outages now in a couple of month time-frame, and have blamed it on a Netsapins bug. Some of the backend databases for Netsapiens are also not what I consider professional.
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-- Darin Steffl Minnesota WiFi www.mnwifi.com 507-634-WiFi <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi> Like us on Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/minnesotawifi>
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 -- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/
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
+1 for 2600hz / Kazoo. Vinix (disclosure, my company) is a proven and now profitable model using this platform. www.vinixglobal.com. Good luck! Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:52 AM, Fred Posner <fred at palner.com> 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
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
Mark/Fred, With 2600hz / Kazoo, are you paying them to install, maintain, and update their platform, or did you download and install it on your own? I talked to 2600hz's long ago about their hosted product, and at the time it just was not mature enough. Not to mention they basically wanted something like $5 per seat, and support on-top of that which was equivalent to the price I was paying for broadsoft seats on a monthly basis. No they didn't charge extra for group features like auto attedants and hunt groups like broadsoft does, but still I considered their product high priced for the limited functionality it had. On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 8:02 AM, Mark Diaz <mdiaz at vinixglobal.com> wrote:
+1 for 2600hz / Kazoo. Vinix (disclosure, my company) is a proven and now profitable model using this platform. www.vinixglobal.com. Good luck!
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 16, 2017, at 8:52 AM, Fred Posner <fred at palner.com> 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
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
Alas, is certainly true that some platforms are more open than others. And there are parts of the industry that have evolved specifically to exploit the willingness of many folk to fork out half a billion dollars to the likes of Broadsoft... -- Alex -- Principal, Evariste Systems LLC (www.evaristesys.com) Sent from my Google Nexus.
On 03/16/2017 09:36 AM, Colton Conor wrote:
Mark/Fred,
With 2600hz / Kazoo, are you paying them to install, maintain, and update their platform, or did you download and install it on your own? I talked to 2600hz's long ago about their hosted product, and at the time it just was not mature enough. Not to mention they basically wanted something like $5 per seat, and support on-top of that which was equivalent to the price I was paying for broadsoft seats on a monthly basis. No they didn't charge extra for group features like auto attedants and hunt groups like broadsoft does, but still I considered their product high priced for the limited functionality it had.
I have used Broadsoft and tried to work that into a hosted model with great disappointment. The problems I had with a Broadsoft/Acme Packet solution in handling 10k users was mind blowing... especially, since I was able to eliminate these problems and see incredible growth when I switched to openSER/Kamailio. We jumped to over 60k users and eliminated (completely) problems with NAT, one way audio, as well as increasing the features we could offer our clients. I think some vendors are starting to aggressively attack open source (Mitel recently did, I responded: http://www.fredposner.com/1935/mitel-thinks-knowledge-is-a-risk/). Some people look at open source as a "cheaper" solution, but that's not the reason I became involved... I needed a better solution, and again, Kamailio solved the problems I had 15 years ago and it continues to be a rock solid performer today. --fred
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
_______________________________________________ VoiceOps mailing list VoiceOps at voiceops.org https://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/voiceops
It's funny, Alex, the way you are so decisive to BSFT. The telco world is built on Lucent for cripes sake. A vendor standard across the fiefdoms of RLECs and ILECs and later CLECs to ensure connection. Part of the problem today is a lack of standards. SIP isn't a standard. PRI is a standard. If all we had was home brew not much would work. You see it in calls between wireless and wireline and VoIP all the time. It is this hobbled together world is why you have so many voice and connection problems. No one is crushing it in HPBX. The penetration is 29%!!! PBX sales only decline about 3% per year. No one wants HPBX or UCaaS. It is a tech solution that has No real problem. The problem isn't the mafia vig you pay to BSFT for licensing. The problem is the pricing pressure across the board. We all take orders for services on price. No one in telecom is selling solutions. They push product. Take orders. BSFT scales. It works. They got stale over there and let Slack and Skype take a lead but the platform is solid. And that is what you want when you have Wall Street climbing all over you for 26% growth Quarter to Quarter. And truthfully many will not hit a scale point where the lack of talent or crappy tech will hurt you. There are over 2000 companies in the US selling Hosted VoIP. No clear winners, but I see a lot of also rans. Regards, Peter @ RAD-INFO On 3/15/2017 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
We use plain Asterisk with 100% self-created code. Why? Flexibility and speed to create things that make our customers stay with us forever. Seriously we have about zero customer attrition, partly because of customer service and partly because we can build anything they need, and it seems like nobody else can. The generic simple stuff that everyone uses is all created as objects (macros and the like) which we can re-use very easily. Customization is hand coded or we just copy a similar customer's files and change them. We're completely in control of our own destiny and results. Someone else said something about having "only 10 outages" with some other product. I can't understand why that's good. Our outages are zero. Asterisk simply doesn't break. It's in a VM that is mobile across our carrier partner's network so we can move services instantly if needed, and they can move our IPs instantly. On Wed, Mar 15, 2017 at 6:52 PM, Colton Conor <colton.conor at gmail.com> wrote:
What service or soft-switch do use externally to provide to your customer, and why? What do you like and dislike about the platform.
Personally, I have used both Broadsoft and NetSapines platforms both through wholesalers.
On Broadsoft, I like the feature set and stability of the platform, but I dislike the user interfaces and complexity of setting up simple things like an auto attendant. I also dislike the cost of the platform as simple features like auto attendants incur an additional cost, and many other platforms and competitors these day offer unlimited auto attendants for example.
On Netsapines, I like the UI as a basic user can configure most items without ever having to call us, but I dislike the stability of the platform. Might just be the reseller we are using, but they have had over 10 outages now in a couple of month time-frame, and have blamed it on a Netsapins bug. Some of the backend databases for Netsapiens are also not what I consider professional.
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On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 11:21:31AM -0700, Carlos Alvarez wrote:
We use plain Asterisk with 100% self-created code. Why? Flexibility and speed to create things that make our customers stay with us forever. Seriously we have about zero customer attrition, partly because of customer service and partly because we can build anything they need, and it seems like nobody else can. ... We're completely in control of our own destiny and results.
That's a very good point. In the oversaturated market conditions of hosted PBX, you really can't afford to sell the same POTS replacement crapola that everyone else is. Delivering true feature differentiation, meeting real-world customer needs and delivering bottom line-relevant functional outcomes is the way to capture value and avoid the race to the bottom. But that requires actually knowing how to do things. That's not the audience the big box brands are designed for. -- Alex -- Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC Tel: +1-706-510-6800 / +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/
participants (8)
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abalashov＠evaristesys.com -
caalvarez＠gmail.com -
colton.conor＠gmail.com -
darin.steffl＠mnwifi.com -
fred＠palner.com -
mauricio.lizano＠gmail.com -
mdiaz＠vinixglobal.com -
peter＠4isps.com