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
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