[VoiceOps] What does you use for Hosted PBX and why?

[Mark Diaz]

+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
>> 
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