A helicopter view of the path ahead for our customers and partners.
A pioneer in the VoIP industry – 3CX has helped build SIP interoperability, provided freedom of choice of phones and providers, and helped phone vendors and SIP trunk providers make their platforms more secure and reliable to the benefit of the whole VoIP industry. Hundreds of thousands of IT admins and partners worldwide have been trained by 3CX in the use of VoIP and SIP. And even with these successes – there’s still plenty more to achieve. Read on to learn more about what’s ahead in our strategy outline for 2025 and most importantly your role in it.
Focus on Medium & Large Installs
At 3CX, our core strength lies in medium and large-scale installations, catering specifically to companies with 25 to 1000+ users. Our platform was designed with these enterprises in mind, offering an enterprise-grade PBX and a robust mid-range Contact Center solution. Our hallmark has always been the simplicity of deployment and management. However, the ease with which 3CX can be set up and operated also led to its adoption by smaller partners who found a niche with smaller businesses. The fact is our architecture is inherently optimized for larger organizations. As easy as 3CX is – running a dedicated, self hosted or on premise installation still requires IT skills, the kind that most smaller companies do not have in-house. For this reason, our focus remains on medium and large installs.
Empowering IT Admins to Self Host and Manage
3CX was founded with a clear vision: to demystify the telecoms black box and empower IT administrators to self manage telecoms for their company. We actively encourage companies with competent IT teams to self administer – be it as 3CX hosted or self hosted in the cloud on AWS, Azure or Google Cloud. The ability for a company to control their communications is a key unique selling point of 3CX.
New V20 Architecture Ready for 3+ Years
With V20 we re-architected our product to be ready for the future and prepared for the security challenges ahead – architectural changes that will stand administrators and partners in good stead when facing the constantly evolving security landscape. Though we acknowledge that V20 was a major change up from V18. The good news is we don’t envisage large changes for the coming 3 years at least – probably a lot more. The architecture of our platform is now ready to be extended upon with enterprise, contact centre and AI features without major deployment or management changes. In this market it’s difficult to look beyond 3 years but we’re confident the road ahead will be smooth.
New Features Around AI, Management, Reporting
Having future proofed our architecture, we will now turn our attention to developing features around AI, Management, Contact Center, Reporting, Integration and APIs. During 2025 we expect to deliver smaller incremental updates focused on the following:
- Delivering enterprise quality reporting
- Advanced Post Call Analytics using AI
- Contact Center features
- Further management and administration improvements
- New security and hacking detection features
- Live chat to AI integration to deliver ready answers
- In Call AI integration to suggest better answers for agents
- Extending and improving documentation of our APIs
- Providing more out of the box call scripts and training
Changes to 4SC Sales – A Look Ahead
It has become increasingly difficult to manage the sheer volume of small partners and their small customers as well as focus on larger installs. We don’t want to overcharge for solutions that customers don’t need but at the same time we can’t sustain the subsidy of small partners and customers as we have been doing until now.
Some critical decisions have to be made. We have to transition and want to help you manage this smoothly. This will let us focus our marketing, development and support resources on midsize & larger installs and on customers who require advanced telephony solutions. Looking ahead, we have a number of changes lined up:
- We are increasing the license prices of 4SC PRO and ENT licenses as of today 4th February 2025. They remain competitive, but are no longer subsidized. Full details can be found on the 3CX website.
- Hosting a 4SC costs 3CX exactly the same as an 8SC license so the cost has been increased accordingly. Looking ahead, expect memory requirements of a dedicated instance to go from 2GB to 4GB so its possible hosting cost will increase further over time.
- 4SC licenses will no longer be listed on our website and only available via partners. Support for 4SC licenses is limited to level 1 and 2 only.
- Effects partners only:
- Bronze partners make up the bulk of 4SC license sales. Consequently support for bronze partners will no longer be free.
4 SC license sales do not count towards partner status. - Setting a margin maximum as with hosting on 4SC licenses will be considered going forward.
- Bronze partners make up the bulk of 4SC license sales. Consequently support for bronze partners will no longer be free.
- Legacy FREE 4SC dedicated editions on V20 will continue to work until the end of 2025 for up to 4 sim calls. After that they will be renewed for 2026, but limited to 2 sim calls. By then if your customers require more than 2 sim calls they must upgrade to a commercial key.
- Free edition users still on V18 will have to upgrade to V20 by 31st March 2025 to continue the use of their current 2SC license.
Emails will follow this week to Partners and Customers recapping the changes outlined.
Multi-Tenant for Small Customers
Partners that want to retain their smaller customers (<10 users and modest telephony requirements) more cost effectively can transition them to a multi-tenant instance.
It’s important to note we’re not pushing our multi-tenant edition to partners. Ultimately, we want our partners to focus on larger customers, rather than smaller ones – whether they’re on multi-tenant or not. In this context, we’ve made our multi-tenant edition available with the sole purpose of assisting partners to help existing smaller customers more cost effectively.
The multi-tenant instance certainly has some limitations and customers with advanced telephony requirements will still require a dedicated 3CX install.
Win-Win – Our Commitment to the Channel
We have been a channel friendly company since our founding. We will continue to remain so. Partners are key – most customers need help to deploy and configure 3CX correctly, as well as advice on how to maximize the benefits of 3CX through integration and leveraging of advanced telephony features.
We are very proud of the investments we have made in our channel over the past 20 years (!) – with free support, online and offline training being given to 10,000+ partners each year. Over the years, we’ve forwarded tens of thousands of customers and hundreds of millions of dollars in business to partners and providers, helping both your business and ours to flourish.
It’s our belief that Partners continue to choose us for a range of reasons – some of which we’ve recapped below and all of which are being retained as we move forward:
- The most competitive margins in the industry
- Lowest cost support options in the industry
- Freedom of choice
- No lock down to a particular VoIP provider
- No enforcement of a particular phone brand
- Self hosting in the cloud or on premise is permitted
- Free online training
- An active forum with community and 3CX involvement
- Partners bill customers directly – we do not turn partners into commission agents!
- Partner programs starting at just $1000 end user value per year. The lowest in the industry
- THE most competitive pricing for an enterprise telephony product
This strategy will ensure 3CX remains the best choice for enterprise telephony for many more years to come. We thank our 350,000+ customers and 10,000+ partners for your support and trust!
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