Is COVID-19 the official cause of death to legacy PBXs? 4

[phoneguy610]

Hey all,

been some time and hope you are staying healthy, prosperous, and safe.

With everything going on in the world we recently had an internal meeting here and wanted to hear from the community. With nearly the entire world working from home, is the legacy PBX officially dead in favor of cloud solutions?

What are your thoughts?



viirtue.com | White Label UCaaS and Quoting for Service Providers | 12+ Year Telco Veteran

 

[random192]

Cost and control is what will keep on-prem PBX around for the foreseeable future. Anyone supporting more then 50 to 100 users is often gonna do cost assessments and and realize on-prem is cheaper. Also most hosted solutions don't give access to command line that makes administrating and trouble shooting larger systems much more efficient.

 

[phoneguy610]

@belevedere - and what premise system is not antiquated after 5 years? With hosted new updates come out you get them free instantly. With premise you either have to purchase new hardware or pay for licensing upgrades. 6 one way, half dozen the other. Not just pbx having hardware onsite in a server room is antiquated any way you look at it. Email servers, sans, even firewalls are being virtualized. And agreed with kwing, almost all hosted platforms can do SLA, static call park appearances and more. + when you get into the new stuff like ms teams, who cares about extensions when you can just point and click to call john smith instead of searching for his extension number.

@lopath - seems like they found the wrong vendor. Most ive heard of including ours are password protected. Standard audio conference bridges are a bit antiquated IMO, but our web meetings tool has multiple forms of protection from pin to invite only.

What we are seeing is smb go pure hosted, and enterprise space is eyeing teams




viirtue.com | White Label UCaaS and Quoting for Service Providers | 12+ Year Telco Veteran

 

[phoneguy610]

and @belvedere our partners install the algo 8301 for paging and it works perfectly.

viirtue.com | White Label UCaaS and Quoting for Service Providers | 12+ Year Telco Veteran

 

[random192]

@phoneguy610 "What premise system is not antiquated after 5 years?" Virtually any PBX based on Asterisk has free upgrades for life. Even the majority of companys that white label FreePBX based solutions no longer charge for upgrades. That kind of stuff is dying out with proprietary vendors. Biggest enemy of long-term PBX's is fan failure now that storage is going all high reliability solid state.

 

[phoneguy610]

I mean youre comparing something free and opensource to the major players. All ill say on that front is "you get what you pay for"

viirtue.com | White Label UCaaS and Quoting for Service Providers | 12+ Year Telco Veteran

 

[random192]

You could say that 10 and 15 years ago but today Asterisk and FreePBX are mature, full featured, professional, and very well supported platforms. Asterisk is the backend for 9 out of 10 call centers and the majority of cloud hosted PBX providers are all Asterisk based as well. Traditionally proprietary solutions like Avaya are just riding brand recognition at this point but as time goes on that will only diminish more. Cloud hosted solutions will surely continue to be a major player for the foreseeable future for the under 50 user market. However, unless something changes hosted solutions will struggle to compete in cost when you have companies like Grandstream pumping out 100 user 50 concurrent call PBX for under $300 with no cost per extension or feature that have all the bells and whistles including built in FXO ports, and can work with under $60 phones and accept 3rd party devices no problem.

 

[lopes1211]

Actually, free upgrades are included with maintenance agreements with all of the major equipment vendors. As said before....it really depends on size.

A few years ago while still working with a vendor, we sold hosted and premise based. We did many ROI evaluations and found 150 users to be the crossover point. At about 19 months, premise based was cheaper and made more sense for 150+ users. For customers less than 150 users, pay as you go hosted was cost effective for a much longer period of time and had other advantages for start-ups and incubators mainly not needing a large cap-ex. When customers were in the 1000 user range, premise based break-even ROI was closer to 12 months.

Again with some ambiguity if "traditional" and "premise based" are being used interchangeably here, I can't think of a premise based system not supporting VOIP for 10+ years now for remote users so I don't see how Covid-19 impacts that. It's almost like asking if car leases are going to be the death of car ownership/purchases. Doubtful....just always have been 2 different solutions to the same problem. Which solution is best will vary from person to person and company to company.

-CL

 

[stuckbutton]

Well, we just shut our CS1K option 11 down in January 2020. She got to be shut down gracefully before this whole mess happened.

We have seen about 80 percent of our workforce start working remotely (about 2000 users) since our company went in to a "reduced operations" state. While I have deployed a number of Avaya soft client solutions for employees, we had to add an additional PRI to handle the increase of external incoming calls (i.e., people calling in to Skype/Teams meetings from a cell/landline). We live/work in a pretty remote setting in Central Canada so I don't see our traditional on site PBX going anywhere any time soon.

Telephone Analyst
CS1K/Avaya Aura

 

[phoneguy610]

random192 - they are mature, but no where near featureset as the real players in the class 4/5 softswitch space i.e. broadsoft, netsapiens, meta, etc..


Majority of cloud PBX providers today run the 3 mentioned above, with broadsoft still the leader by far.

lopes1211 - there are different strokes for different folks! Sip trunks to a converged platform is absolutely still a decent idea depending on the use case. Many of our partners sell hosted similar to the pbx model of low cost per seat and charge for the concurrent calls. So it scales better that way. Of course if youre looking at a platform that is $40/user that wont scale effectively, but most cloud providers who work in the enterprise space price it to be competitive that way. But for sure, sip trunks to a converged platform has cost benefits. And as you said updates are included with a maintenance agreement...mainteneance agreement is free with most cloud providers. But i digress. Theres value on both angles, just depends what the customer is looking for of course!

jmarkmoss - have you looked at deploying teams internally? If that makes up the majority of calling


viirtue.com | White Label UCaaS and Quoting for Service Providers | 12+ Year Telco Veteran

 

[stuckbutton]

phoneguy610 - yes, we are looking to deploy Teams sooner than later. We had some discovery sessions last year w/ Microsoft re: integrating Skype for Business with our Avaya Aura environment.. needless to say we didn't get too far and MS was less than helpful. Their final recommendation was to install an SBC and migrate to Teams. We'll see where we end up. I just started deploying One-X for our IT support desk as we use H.323 stations on CM, and it has been working great. Avaya had told me they no longer support One-X, but sounds like a lot of people are still using it!

Telephone Analyst
CS1K/Avaya Aura

 

[omonat]

I guess should be something like

Peer detail
username= <account>
type=peer
secret= <pin>
progressinband=never
port=5060
nat=auto
insecure=very
ignoresdpversion=yes
host=ippbx.net2phone.com
dtmfmode=rfc2833
context=from-trunk
canreinvite=no
allow=g729&g711&g723

user detail
username=<account>
user=<>
type=user
port=5060
context=from-pstn
canreinvite=no
allow=g729&g711&g723
Register string
acctin@ippbx.net2phone.com/siptrunking

Also see

https://irp-cdn.multiscreensite.com...lines-for-SIP-Installations v3.2 Dec 2019.pdf

Wanet Telecoms Limited