Technology Reseller - v14 2018

01732 759725 COMMUNICATIONS 22 Easy does it available ‘out of the box’ at no extra cost. This, says Clarke, makes it very easy for resellers to produce quotes for customers. “With our licensing model, we don’t charge for features; the customer just buys the appropriate licence and the number of simultaneous calls they need. That’s it. This makes it very easy for resellers to provide a customer with a quote,” he said. In addition to the PBX, softphones and smartphone apps for iOS and Android provide customers with complete mobility. “We’ve got a web client, which lets me enter an internet café, put in a link and access my phone system. Through the presence screen, I have complete visibility of everyone on the PBX, with all functionality replicated on my mobile device. It’s a cliché, but your mobile device lets you take your office anywhere. I can be anywhere in the world, log in with my mobile app, dial a number and it will present with an 0203 number,” explained Clarke. 3CX is also very secure, earning an ‘A+’ rating from SSL Labs, and comes with a raft of security measures built-in, such as the ability to prevent calls to certain countries. “So that partners don’t have to, 3CX provides SSL certificates and a managed FQDN (fully qualified domain name), 3cx.com, which provides a secure method of connecting to web meetings and remote extensions. For example, if I am Paul Clarke Communications, 3CX will supply paulclarkecommunications.3cx.com as my domain name. A partner could use their own FQDN if they wanted, but for simplicity this is something that 3CX provides,” said Clarke. Flexible deployment 3CX is a true multi-platform solution able to be deployed on-site, on Windows or Linux, or in the cloud, either the reseller’s own private cloud or one of 3CX’s supported cloud offerings, including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and OVH. Being open platform, it can work with a huge range of IP phones and SIP trunks, which means there’s no vendor lock-in for resellers. 3CX does have supported kit and VoIP providers, but if a partner’s device of choice is not on the supported list, there is a good chance it will work. Clarke’s advice: “If you want to use a device we don’t support, see if you can get it to do what you want it to do.” That said, he points out that most UK partners use supported devices for added reassurance, especially as 3CX expects partners to provide first-line technical support. “If something goes wrong that you don’t know how to fix and you are using a supported VoIP provider or supported device, 3CX will troubleshoot that problem end-to-end. If you are using an unsupported device, all 3CX can do is prove it isn’t the phone system that’s at fault,” he said. Partner programme 3CX’s ease of use extends to the partner programme, which, as Clarke explains, has been designed to give partners everything they need with no financial outlay up front. “When someone becomes a partner, we give them two ‘not for resale’ license keys, with all the bells and whistles, for them to play with. They can deploy it on Windows, on Linux, in the cloud or on a Software-based IP PBX supplier 3CX is the fastest growing UC vendor in the marketplace and shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, CEO Nick Galea has stated that 3CX will be one of the top five PBXs globally in the next 3 years. In order to achieve this, 3CX is dependent on its growing network of resellers, as, unlike some competitors, it only sells through the channel. It currently has about 2,000 active partners in the UK, of which 45 are Platinum partners. 3CX UK Channel Manager Paul Clarke told Technology Reseller that because 3CX is effectively just another application on the network, it attracts resellers from across the spectrum. “We have a vast cross-section of partners,” he said. “We’ve got IT companies that use 3CX to put voice into an existing customer and ring-fence that customer completely; we’ve got legacy telephony guys who realise they have to make the transition to IP; and we have people who are already selling IP-based solutions and recognise it makes sense to add voice. If you are an IP security company that might already do a customer’s alarms, remote monitoring and CCTV, voice is an obvious next step.” Clarke points out that for technology resellers that are new to voice, 3CX is a very attractive proposition, both for its qualities as a product and for the strength of the 3CX partner programme. IP PBX 3CX is a software-based, open standards IP PBX that is designed to be very easy to sell, very easy to use and very easy to implement. As standard, it offers complete Unified Communications functionality out of the box, including Presence, collaboration tools and WebRTC-based videoconferencing (see box). In addition, 3CX offers a professional version with extra functionality, such as a hotel phone system with essential features like check-in/ checkout, wake up calls and billing. Once again, these are 3CX is a software-based, open standards IP PBX that is designed to be very easy to sell, very easy to use and very easy to implement Easy to sell, easy to install, easy to support: why the 3CX IP PBX is ideal for technology resellers