How are you staying relevant and selling hosted VoIP /w FusionPBX?

[Kenny Riley]

Here's a question you don't see here often -- how are you guys actually remaining competitive and getting new business? The VoIP market has evolved and I've seen prices averaging out to around $20/month per user and pretty much every major player has the capability for built in SMS, video conferencing, mobile app, etc.

I've thought about going to a low $5/month per extension rate and $20-$25 per concurrent call to stay competitive pricing wise but have found that this pricing model confuses some people. And while possible and I have done this, it's not intuitive in the slightest to limit concurrent calls on a domain basis, so this doesn't scale well from an administration standpoint.

While I love FusionPBX to death, have been an avid user for over 3 years, am currently a purple member, and have supported the project for a long time.. the GUI looks outdated compared to more commercialized solutions and is not intuitive in the slightest to a non-technical end user to the point that our customers have to rely on our helpdesk to perform virtually all maintenance and call routing changes on their system. I've worked with Mark to get the Messages app working for SMS but that leaves alot to be desired as well. I know I've posted on this before, but GS Wave is incredibly unreliable and has lost me at least 5 customers this year alone -- this is one area I will say 3CX excels: the web interface is pretty and intuitive, 3CX app works flawlessly -- all of the time, and the web client portal is a very nice end user portal for instant messaging, voicemails, call history, conferencing, etc. However, 3CX lacks SMS as of this posting, but your carrier can make up for this..

This is not a bash or a flame, but just me projecting my thoughts and positioning on these items. For very basic needs customers, I put them on our FusionPBX platform because of the multi-tenant capability. For any customers that need anything more than basic needs such as a call center, reporting, collaboration, mobility, etc.. I usually have to turn to 3CX.

About 4-5 years ago, I was pulling in new VoIP business left and right -- today I still am but it has slowed down and I am seeing alot more customer turnover due to the limitations I've mentioned above in conjunction with the VoIP market starting to become over saturated. My main source of new VoIP business is our Managed IT Services customers as just another service we can offer them and provide them a central point of contact for both IT services and telecom services, however, as much as I hate to admit this.. I have found myself deploying 3CX more and more lately due to the pain points that I've listed above.

What is everyone's opinion on this? Are you still pulling in good business? What are your strategies for doing so to set you apart from everyone else out there, especially the main players (Ring Central, Nextiva, Vonage, Ooma, etc.)

 

[bryanredeagle]

I can't say anything on the business side. I've just started my own business (phone focused) a couple months ago and I'm still working my way up.

Though I agree entirely with your statement on the UI. It needs a rewrite, but, based on the source, that would take a significant rewrite to make happen. They do PHP the old school way rather than the more recently common methods (MVC/Front Controller type stuff). Each page you load mixes in the logic and template in one file. It takes a while to get through. Hell, it's taking me a while to figure out all the boilerplate stuff I need to add a custom app. And not anything complicated either.

For the softphones, GS Wave worked great for me at first, but more recently I've been having issues with it. Zoiper has been working so far, but I've been looking into Acrobits's softphones. Apparently it does a great job of connection hand offs when you move from cell to wifi. Plus, they have a white-label/reseller version.

 

[markjcrane]

There are lots of choices for soft phones many of them also support video. Grandstream Wave is convenient and useful for testing maybe not a perfect replacement for a desk phone. A dedicated hardware based phone is hard to compete with since it is dedicated to the task. However soft phones can definitely be useful and convenient. Here is a list of a few soft phones if you use a search engine you can find a lot more.

https://www.counterpath.com/all-products
https://www.microsip.org
https://www.zoiper.com
https://www.cloudsoftphone.com
https://www.acrobits.net/
https://www.ekiga.org
https://jitsi.org
https://www.linphone.org
http://icanblink.com
https://www.yealink.com/products_list_11.html

SMS we recognize this is an important feature and will be making big improvements to SMS support soon.

Development style as mentioned old school non MVC. FusionPBX code is actually pretty simple to follow easier than most MVC. We have made progress this week that will be committed in a few days that is progress towards implementing the MVC design pattern. Not having this completed already has annoyed some developers and has reduced some of the people willing to contributors code to the project. Regardless of this we do have an increasing amount of contributors and pull requests. We do recognize benefits of the MVC design pattern and have started implemented it. It will take some time but we expect it to be completed or have significant progress by the end of this year. If you look at the master branch you will see we are using a template engine for views for the browser install. The browser install is used the most for recovering the password.

FusionPBX project has been running on very little resources for years and has survived primarily because of FusionPBX training classes an because of hard work and enormous amount of persistence. As time progressed demand grew beyond resources and it became absolutely necessary to change things for the FusionPBX project to be sustainable. This was critical to make the resources grow with the demand. Demands for security, support, customer needs, code improvements and many more. To meet these demands the FusionPBX Membership was started. This new sustainability model is making a difference.

For those that are not currently members please consider becoming a member. This will help us reach a positive feedback loop where the resources helps us to help you.

 

[Adrian Fretwell]

This is a very interesting discussion, I would like to see more input on this topic, especially from any UK operations.

My thanks to Mark for a very informative update.

It has taken a while for me to respond to this thread because I wanted to get some input from our Marketing Director.

We get a significant proportion of revenue from being a SIP trunk provider using OpenSIPS; hosted/cloud PBX is growing, but we find it can be a hard sell in the UK.

We offer SIP trunks at £5 each (which includes 999 emergency services) - for this you get two concurrent calls. Extra channels are between £2 and £4 each depending on the requirement. There is a single one-off charge of £1 for each additional number. All numbers are fully portable.

With the continuing squeeze on call revenue we are finding that, although our customer base is growing, turnover remains about the same.

We offer hosted (Fusion) at £5 per user and they get the SIP trunks thrown in for free.

I am told we do lose a significant number of potential customers to 3CX, some of which are not even prepared to discuss the alternatives to 3CX. I have not looked at 3CX, believing it to be closed source.

Many of our customers are not interested in the way Fusion looks, they just want phones on the desk and do not want a GUI/portal. Our Technical Support Manager says that he doesn't think Fusion looks outdated, but some new customers ported from other hosted systems have made comments. He says if you are new to hosted and have not seen anyone else's dashboard, Fusion looks great.

We have a demo kit that we take to potential customers and often leave it on site for them to play with for a couple of days. One of the potential problem areas with the demo environment is that it is missing features like the Call Center Wallboard.

Many customers that we move to Fusion from traditional PBX systems often want a small desktop application that docks to the side of the screen like the Mitel Connect application (https://www.mitel.com/en-gb/downloads/mitel-connect-applications). These apps have busy lamps, a quick access to their contacts and CDRs, simple and easy addition of a contact from CDR etc., and also click dial and SMS. We had to bridge this gap by writing our own application in C++ using Qt. This is an app that we would happily share with the community, but it requires a simple Fusion API to access the contacts and CDR data and the Fusion API is Closed Source and not available to everyone.

As a business, we try to set ourselves apart from others by being flexible and being able to offer bespoke solutions and, whilst we do not like to alter, for example, the Fusion source code because it makes upgrades difficult, the fact that Fusion is Open Source does allow us to do this where required, and this will often make the difference between winning a customer and losing them.

My gut feeling is that Fusion is a good product and therefore will be a success for a long time to come, and the membership support model is working well. I do, however, believe that membership should be about help and support and not about access to Closed Source applications. The benefits of an application being Open Source are well documented. Without the application source code being available for scrutiny by all, fewer bugs and security flaws will be identified and fixed.

 

[markjcrane]

The community for the most part helps by reporting bugs. A few security vulnerabilities have come in from the community. Some vulnerabilities were reported by companies or individual whose goal was to build their security reputation, a few have been reported by people that were actually trying to help the project or security in general for benefiting humanity with selfless work. We have learned from those security reports and found additional sources for improving security. The large majority of the vulnerability fixes were done by me or someone I paid. The money to do be able to do this came from the FusionPBX members and before that from those attending the training.

What is needed the most for project sustainability two major things users and money. Each new feature increases the workload and cost for maintenance this is known by developers as code debt. To keep software going it has to be constantly fixed to work with latest operating system and dependencies and constant security effort. It has to be kept up with the times and have the features that people demand. Without that work being done its a matter of time before the software becomes stale and over time irrelevant.

Demand has been higher than resources so I started looking at options of what could be done to bring resources up to par with the needs. Without having to go to an investor which would increase demand for more money. Donations seemed like a very hard approach and one that would constantly be a stress and worry year after year. So instead I looked at another method for project sustainability. I chose a membership model which works very good for places of exercise like yoga, weight lifting, martial arts schools and more. This model was a good choice and has been helping. Although ironically I have had people opposed to it and those opposed to the support membership levels. So I'm not surprised when some people are showing some signs of opposing member features or efforts to undermine them.

Member features are simply benefits given to members that support the project with money. The few member features we currently have made a difference in helping the project have a little more resources. Without these member benefits the project sustainability is more vulnerable and at higher risk of the sustainability model failing. I for one do not want to see the project fall further behind or to fail. So will be continue to improve the open source code we have, the member features we have and will be adding some more. Money is a necessity it will allow us to hire more developers to take on projects that require a lot of time and effort than most people are willing or able to donate. Please choose to support us so that we can return the favor and constantly improve and support your needs. Its a lot funner to work on open source when the community is supportive.

 

[DigitalDaz]

With regards to the MVC discussion, a few of us believe that so much time extra is needed on fusionpbx development because no framework is being used. Probably for the last year now much of the development has been on security like input validation and sql injection. Using a framework this would have been there out of the box or by pulling in a package with composer. When you admit you are low on resources why are you trying to reinvent every wheel when there are nice shiny racing ones there available to you.

 

[bryanredeagle]

Yeah. Using a framework like Laravel or Yii makes security a bunch easier (since other developers are invested in the framework being secure). Both of those frameworks have modularity built in, and they use Composer for package management. You can easily extend Composer to use it as a module management system. Craft CMS, based on Yii, does it using Composer's package types (https://github.com/craftcms/plugin-installer).

 

[markjcrane]

Switching to another framework would take a lot of time, effort and money to rewrite almost the entire code base. This would be a high risk change. As we started doing this customers would suffer because they have needs for SMS and other new features that would be delayed in order to get the move to the new framework completed. I repeat high risk and benefits are not worth the work and the risk. Does using another framework eliminate all security concerns. Answer definitely no... it would reduce some but using the framework will not remove all security concerns. This is especially when interacting with FreeSWITCH there are multiple oppportunities to introduce vulnerabilities.

FusionPBX does have its own framework designed specifically for FusionPBX, multi-tenant, and server clustering. Does this provide some extra work on security yes and we met that need and worked on security and dramatically improved over the past year. Making incremental improvements on the framework allows us time to continue to add features and enhance the interface and improve security. We are not going to change frameworks we will continue to evolve the one we have.

This will allow us to spend more time working on adding features to FusionPBX and staying relevant.