Support, Quality, Cutting corners

Please understand this opinion is solely my own. @penguinpbx
please consider rescinding the ban set on James. I consider the loss of his input (even a temporary duration) to be a HUGE negative blow to our FreePBX community. There are folks on this forum that are pillar members to FreePBX(Many of them have commented on this post, including yourself), as someone who truly loves FreePBX I am so thankful for them and all those who have provided input, ideas, and solutions.

James, in general is straight forward and I truly respect that aside from his technical expertise, he shares personal thoughts and feelings with the community, because he doesn’t have to. It is cause for concern to me to see something like this muted.

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Sangoma’s silence is deafening.

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Hi everyone.

It’s sad to hear this kind of message indeed.
I don’t see anything that could ban James here, and I think it’s unfair and undeserved.
Anyway, I could never bite the hand that fed me, because that’s my state of mind. But I think Sangoma goes hard on punishment.

I’m worried about the FreePBX project and open source at Sangoma like most of the members here.
For my part, I worked at Sangoma for 6 years and I enjoyed this part of my life within Sangoma. I think of Andrew, Bryan, Tony…etc

For moderators, please unban James. That would be reasonable.

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Don’t be surprised if this thread magically disappears or gets closed abruptly. So much for Chris Maj’s pontifications heralding a new era of free speech.

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Anyway, My feeling about FreePBX is the destruction of this Open source project.
It’s arrived when Sangoma signed with Asterisk. It’s like a wolf in the sheepfold. Sangoma hired a wolf and eaten all goats.

It’s just my opinion.

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BTW, I know how is not easy to exchange with Sangoma even when you worked with them after to be fired.
Some people forget you or ignore your messages. Sad!

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Maybe it’s time we all book 15 min slots below to get him to communicate since so far we have been ghosted for the last 24 hours now.

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Well I think the solution is pretty clear. Obviously Sangoma are no longer interested in FreePBX, and are letting it wither and die. I, as the original author of FreePBX, am perfectly willing to take it back.

As it doesn’t really have any monetary value left to Sangoma, I offer USD$1 for the trademark and the transfer of any Sangoma owned FreePBX code back to me.

I’ll spin up all the old infrastructure that I turned off, and everything can just go back to normal.

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Hey Rob.
That sounds like a good idea. By the way, Sangoma will also fire a bunch of guys in India if you can do that. But it will happen one day anyway. Maybe I’m wrong. I hope the Indian team gets enough work. I’ve got a thought for them, worked with them for some years and this situation is not easy for everyone. There are humans people behind, like you and I.
But yes, I agree with you if something can be done to save FreePBX which is a good project.

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I also don’t agree with doing this without a measured response to the financial points he raised and it does not surprise me it backfired with all of the negative blowback posts here. Reponding to the points in the following paragraph while ignoring the first paragraph is like responding to the bread and ignoring the meat of a hamburger.

With that said, I do feel free to inject some realism and logic into this discussion:

  1. With regards to the issue of executive compensation, while yes Amerika is supposed to be all egaltarian and so on, the actual reality in business is that compensation at the director level and above IS NOT based on “fairness” whatever you term that - because despite what every HR and company publically claims, the reality is that you CANNOT just fire someone at that level or above and replace them with the next eager beaver willing to work cheaper, like you can do with lower level employees. Instead, exec compensation is set by what OTHER companies are willing to pay to steal your execs away. That is a fact - as much as people find it indigestible - it IS a fact.

The top brass in a company is paid what they are paid for the following reasons: who they know and have trust relationships established with, OR their industry knowledge of the industry market, OR their technical knowledge of the industry. All 3 of these make those people valuable to your competitors so if your compensation is too low, they WILL leave and then use their knowledge with their new employer to take your customers.

If those people are MORE valuable to your competitors than to you - this is more of an indication of how you have managed, or mismanaged, your company compared to how your competition has managed, or mismanaged their company. In other words, if you can’t find a way to make money, one of your competitors will - and your top brass will then leave for them.

With that said, the issue is complicated by the fact that your top brass are SUPPOSED to be out there making you money. Which means, if you want to blame anyone about exec compensation - blame the CEO. It’s that person’s job to KEEP the company profitable, PERIOD. If they DO it - then since exec compensation is THEIR baliwick - then whatever they are paying out - it’s the correct amount. EVEN IF you don’t like it because you aren’t getting that rareified dollar amount.

And, checking Sangoma’s results - they are profitable:

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20241106234313/en/Sangoma-Announces-First-Quarter-Fiscal-2025-Results

So all of this argument over exec compensation is completely a moot issue. The exec staff’s job is to keep the company profitable - they did. So they get the gold. That is as it’s supposed to be. And as for golden parachutes - those exist to prevent stupidity by the board - because part of the job of someone who is top brass is to make hard decisions and some of those WILL piss off board members who then MAY be inclined in a fit of stupidity to respond by firing the top brass member who pissed them off. The golden parachutes are there to make that cost the board member. I will point out that LOSING money is certainly considered a good reason for firing a CEO - so according to the post James made, those parachutes wouldn’t apply if a top brass like the CEO was fired for losing money.

  1. Now, as for the second point - firing development staff, particularly open source staff - what I find odd is the same people complaining about this are ALSO saying FreePBX is SMALLER than it used to be. So let me get this straight. The market for FreePBX is smaller so we are supposed to hire MORE devs for it? Let’s look at this for a moment.

First, WHY is the market for FreePBX smaller? Simple - it’s because of cell phones and it’s because the market for Cloud PBXs like what Sangoma has made a lot of it’s profit off of - are growing. But, how many people know WHY this is happening and WHERE the growth is coming from? Well, I’ve seen this first hand and MY opinion - NOT based on market research but just based on what I’ve seen with my own two eyes - is that the VAST MAJORITY of “cloud” growth is coming from SMALL customers NOT LARGE ONES. In fact, “cloud repatriation” is a “thing” nowadays - and it’s almost exclusively LARGE orgs that are doing it. Who knew! To that I say “DUHHHH!!!”

Sangoma’s cloud PBX may have “tens of thousands of extensions” but I think that is smoke screen blown up anyone’s hind end - it’s for sure almost all small orgs making up those tens of thousands of extensions.

Cell phones are certainly making inroads to companies, but not as the primary phone system - there are still way too many signal problems with operating mobile phones in buildings for them to have the reliability of a landline phone system.

I walked into a Kroegars grocery store yesterday and walking down the aisle I saw a “courtesy phone” a digital Rolm phone. Last week I saw a Cisco 7940 at another store. Kroegar is a GIGANTIC behemoth not a small org. They DON’T, obviously, do “cloud phone systems” Somewhere in the bowls of those grocery stores I saw is an aging P.O.S. Rolm CBX and an aging Cisco UCM likely running version 8 code - if that. Obviously, there are still vendors out there OPERATING COMPLETELY UNDER THE WIRE who are raiding Ebay for parts for those systems and keeping them alive.

And this is the key to the PBX market, people. Small orgs like for example a 25 extension vetinary practice, when their Toshiba or Panasonic system loses a power supply and takes a dive - they can immediately call up some office supply company who will rush over there with 25 piece of crap basic Yealink phone sets, and “go to the cloud” immediately. OR they can call up a “traditional” phone vendor who will have a whole warehouse of used, still running, complete phone systems that were deinstalled from some other customer. HOWEVER, the problem with doing #2 is…unless the “traditional” phone system vendor has absolutely nothing going on that week - the 25 extension vet practice is just completley uninteresting to them as a customer. Not enough money, no chance for a monthly contract. Yes they might be able to work them in - if they have free time - otherwise, “they are too busy”

Large orgs like Kroegar have enough money to be attractive to the greying fleet of “traditional phone system vendors” while small customers just don’t. Which is why I can see antiques like the Rolm phone and the Cisco phone still in use at large customers.

So Sangoma is doing what is COMPLETELY predictible. Their competion IS NOT other VoIP companies. No, siree. Their competition is those tens of thousands of antique Panasonic, Rolm, Toshiba, NEC and other 25-50 extension phone systems that were sold, installed, used, and deinstalled and are now sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting to steal a potential sale away at a small customer. So how do they compete?

They do it the SAME way I just outlined.

Product #1 is their cloud system - air-freight 25 phones to the small company that their antique Rolm system just died, or, have them download and install “soft phones” and do a phone number port and wham, bam - customer is back online

Product #2 is PBXact - air-freight 25 phones PLUS a hardware box to the small company that their antique Rolm system just died and wham, bam - customer is back online.

Which do you think is faster and easier for them to do? Which is cheaper for the customer?

To do #2 requires MORE than just hiring a bunch of Open Source devs. It requires developing a HUGE fleet of techs out in the field - we’ll call them “independent phone system consultants” who have the ability to walk into that 25 extension customer, drop down 25 VoIP phones from a warehouse somewhere, drop in a 4 port FXO gateway, boot Debian on some retired Windows 10 box, and rebuild the phone routing and dialplan.

Now, granted, TCO on option #2 is cheaper - if you spread the capital install cost of the phone system over 5 years. But not many small 25 person orgs have $10k in cash laying around they can blow at the drop of a hat on a phone system. And not many small 25 person orgs are going to replace a perfectly functioning 4x32 KSU that’s processing phone calls just because “it’s old and it might die”

It’s a LOT easier for Sangoma to develop that “fleet of independent phone system consultants” if they make that fleet up out of guys who know nothing about dialplans, phone routing, extension labeling, phone provisioning, etc. All THOSE “phone consultants” need to do is know how to plug in cheap P320s, or install softphones on PCs, modify the DHCP server on whatever P.O.S. router that the customer is using, and dial 855 280 0020 and talk to a REAL phone tech.

Now do you folks understand what’s going on here?

Sangoma only needs Asterisk (and maybe FreePBX) to run on it’s cloud servers, they don’t need it to run on a plethora of hardware out there. They need some devs to do that. But they don’t need devs to do all these border case requests that keep coming up.

I’ve used FreePBX for over a decade to provide call handing for my 1 person independent computer consultancy, with 3 versions now. I’ve NEVER had any NEED for ANY of the dev requests I’ve seen on the mailing list. My primary desk phone on my consultancy desk is a Polycom, configured via webinterface on the phone itself. I’ve been INTERESTED in the Cisco phones mainly because I got a bunch of them 100% free 5 years ago but I never needed them for primary call handling. Now that I’m not doing the consultancy anymore and am back in the corporate world, I’ve been LOOKING for a local independent phone consultant who would do FreePBX and come up empty. While at the same time I get at least 5 pitches a week by guys who would love to come in and switch us over to a cloud phone system.

It’s clear to me that Sangoma is most likely feeding on the small customers and gradually growing their cloud business with them, while the large customers with installed Rolm and Cisco phone systems with 300 or so Rolm or CP 7940 extension on them are continuing to bandaid their older systems.

I SUSPECT that the small customers will probably keep having phone systems die, and rushing around like chickens with their heads cut off, for some time now. Sangoma will have it’s hands full engineering phone number ports and things like that from those systems to it’s cloud UCaaS

I WOULD LIKE for Sangoma to KEEP IN MIND that those large orgs with aging Rolm, et al. systems will EVENTUALLY run out of gas - even though you can buy plenty of parts for stuff like that still - and are definitely more interested in pre-emptively replacing antique systems that might unexpectedly die. Those systems DO require a fleet of independent phone system consultants who can walk in and engineer a replacement of a 300 extension setup. Yes, for right now, there’s enough parts in the world to keep old stuff like that going. But I give it 5 years, maybe 10 max, before the remaining parts on the market are too old to be reliable, and the techs that know how to deal with them are all retired. It would pay to try developing that network of young consultants and have them in position for those larger sales when they become available.

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They had a net loss of $1.9M for this quarter. Net Loss = Total Revenue - Total Expenses which means Sangoma spent $1.9M more in Q1 2025 then they generated in revenue. The 2024 total net loss was $8.7M which, again, means they spent $8.7M more than they generated in the 2024 fiscal year. Additionally, they are in the midst of spending all of 2025 reducing their roughly $60M in debit the company is holding right now.

Sangoma is operating at a net loss every quarter and fiscal year. The entire fiscal year of 2024 saw the gross revenue drop quarter by quarter and outside of the Q2 2024, all other quarters saw a 2% drop from 2023 (Q2 stayed equal). Even now Q1 2025 was weaker than Q4 2024 and down by 5% compared to Q1 2024.

Some of this can be attributed to their shift to more be services based than product based along with their deemphasis of low margin products (FreePBX, PBXact, etc). It’s very clear that the open source stuff just isn’t high on the priority list.

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You are digging your own grave by shooting the messenger.

Your forum, you get (generally) to treat people how you want. That doesn’t mean Sangoma is free from the consequences of censoring valued contributors.

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OK I missed the net - that’s on me - however I’d argue that if they didn’t do debt reduction and were just carrying the debt via interest payments, and were profitable without it - then they are profitable. Now. That doesn’t relieve the need to repay the debt of course.

Gross revenue is going to drop if a market is shrinking. And I discussed WHY I think the market is shrinking and where the new customers are most likely coming from. I would assume the stockholders are demanding through their board representatives if Sangoma is responding to their own market research. Unfortunately a company carrying debt can’t respond that quickly to a changing market. Most larger companies buy their way into alternative markets and it’s hard to do that when you have debt, and you don’t want to allow VC’s into the tent

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Ted

Just to correct everyone here. Paying down debt is not an expense. It will not hit the Profit and Loss and Income Statements. It has no bearing on the profit of a company. If they paid off all the debit today there would be no expense line item on the income Statement and would not reduce profit. It only saves on the interest which is a expense.

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It’s an assertion, not an “attack.”

“Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit.”
Does not apply. Nothing “obscene” nor “sexually explicit”

Someone declaring they will continue to complain is not “disrespect.”

Guess I will flag this post as it is on the verge of slander:

a malicious, false, and defamatory statement or report

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That’s a simplification since whatever you took on debt for is very likely an expense and that WILL hit the P&L.

If Sangoma takes on 60M in debt and went from $0 cash on hand to $60M cash on hand, then yes you are correct it does not hit the P&L except for the expense of debt servicing.

If however they take on $60M in debt and buy a gold plated Tesla for $60M then how it hits the P&L depends on if they take a depreciation expense over 5 years or whatever, or take the entire hit now. HOWEVER, they still have to pay for the gold plated Tesla - so their profit will be reduced by $60M over whatever period of time they are paying down the debt. Paying the debt won’t hit the P&L twice as you pointed out, but it most definitely will reduce profit since they cannot take expected future profits on today’s P&L.

The argument the company makes of course is that without the gold plated Tesla they can’t make money driving people around in it.

I have no idea what Sangoma took debt on for. I presume the CEO justified it to the Board who is happy with it.

If the Board is ignoring what Sangoma execs are doing, then it’s much more likely the company will fail. Few companies can basically go on “autopilot” with no oversight for a long period of time.

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Ted

The debt was taken for acquisitions to boost revenue. That write down happens over 15-30 years as the goodwill becomes impaired. If we want to get deep into GAAP and IFRS practices that have to be used here I am happy to educate but I think it’s a waste of time as few people will understand it. Very little of that 60M is hitting expenses on the Income Statement and we can see that based on the balance sheet of the last 2 years of the assets not being heavily amortized or goodwill impairment.

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I moved away from 3CX because of corporate shenanigans and what is this?

This is childish. He brought facts, you brought a ban. Maybe you don’t like them, and that’s fine. Just state a factual reply or state that Sangoma can do what is doing and you confirm this is the direction. That’s fine too.

You are silencing people because they state something you don’t like, hiding behind a code of conduct. This is ludicrous. Reinstate the guy and learn to have an adult conversation.

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While I do understand the accounting side of it (30 years ago I worked in A/P) I frankly hate it. (no offense to accountants!) That’s why I didn’t stay in an accounting career. The part that I like would be the answer to the question:

Was the debt worth it?

And that’s the part that nobody seems to have addressed. I TRIED outlining it from a marketing perspective but I don’t have actual market figures so I don’t know. It SEEMS to me that Sangoma is being pushed into the Cloud because that’s where the market for the majority of their customers is going to - but I don’t know.

If they took on $60M in debt for acquisitions to boost revenue the main thing that matters is, did they make more than $60M in revenue? I mean it SHOULD be self obvious that you don’t take out a business debt unless what you are spending the debt money on is worth more in revenue than what you are paying for it - but I’ve learned over time that this basic fact of business OFTEN escapes people - who can frequently get enormously creative as to why they need to spend money on something. LOL

It also should be obvious in business you don’t spend money on ANYTHING that doesn’t in some way bring in revenue.

I remember many many years ago a former employer of mine got a bug up his behind to repaint the office. He did so. It looked nice. But with the exception of him and a few administrative staff who were in the office all day, and most likely bored with the color of the walls, the staff of techs making the company actual money were not in the office when they were making money. They were at client sites. They didn’t see the walls. Therefore, the money spent on the paint job was obviously pure vanity. That business ended up folding eventually.

And I have seen this exact same pattern repeated over and over during my decades in business. To be successful in business - and I was, for 13 years I ran a computer consultancy - it is really quite easy. Make sure that ANYTHING you spend money on - makes you more than what you spend it on.

During my 13 years as a consultant I didn’t buy or lease new company cars - why - I never drove clients around - I rarely bought new computer hardware for myself - why, my clients were more than happy to buy new computers for themselves so I could use theirs - and so on and so on. But I definitely spent money on top flight Internet connectivity for my home - with a static IP subnet and the works - because I used that to remotely support them. In the meantime, my fellow competitive computer consultants came and went. While I chose my own time to exit that industry.

And thus we come back to the layoffs and personnel changes at Sangoma that everyone is bent out of shape over and pointing to reasons that Sangoma is going downhill. Personally, I don’t like firing people and the first person I ever had to fire - a long sad story from 35 years ago that really stayed with me for a long long time - I felt terrible about having to do especially because he didn’t really do anything wrong from a business POV. He was, instead, recognized as having done something extremely terrible - unforgivable really - in his past. It is far far easier to fire employees who DO things wrong from a business POV - and one of the top things wrong is just as I said - spend money on stuff that does not bring in revenue. When you fire someone for sleeping on the job, for example, you are firing them because their sleeping doesn’t help the organization. The fact is - there’s organizations (like the Army) where they DO pay you to sleep - so it’s really not the sleeping that’s the problem it’s that the organization is paying them to sleep and that gets the business nothing. But, it definitely gets the Army something which is why they DO pay you to sleep. (and, do other things, LOL) So I actually do get it that laying off people is emotionally gut wrenching, which is why so many companies will delay laying off people who are not contributing to the bottom line.

But ultimately what it boils down to is this:

  1. We all WORK to make money to put food on our families’ tables. Trust me on this - if you went to ANY given company and just told all employees you couldn’t pay them anymore - just about nobody would say “I love my job so much I’m going to keep coming here and working for free” Instead they would all leave or make plans to leave. This actually did happen to me once years ago at a tech firm - and I left. Even though, I did like the job a LOT and the people.

  2. Because of #1, all businesses, even non-profits therefore really ONLY have ONE reason for existence - it’s to generate jobs that pay people money. It’s NOT to push open source or carry the torch down in history to revolutionize the industry or any of that pablum tired out crap terms I get so sick of reading about. (when I want to read that junk I spend time on Linkedin, LOL)

  3. The fundamental rule of carrying out #2 is maximize income and minimize expenditures, which is what I was talking about initially. Income must exceed expenses, PERIOD. It DOES NOT WORK for the long term if it’s the other way around.

  4. Open Source Software, by contrast, has a COMPLETELY OPPOSITE reason for existence - it IS to revolutionize the industry, that is be a change-agent. And how you do this is incredibly simple and basic - you write software that is USEFUL and you GIVE IT AWAY.

So then what happens with FOSS is magical. The people operating in #2 are FORCED by #3 - to USE FOSS SOFTWARE. Even if they hate it and hate Open Source Software, and are scared to DEATH of FOSS. Because, if they refuse to use it - they will competitively lose market share to their competitors who DO use it - because their costs will be higher and thus their profits will be lower, and their competitors will be able to then come in and undercut them - and the consumers will then shift to their competitors.

Sangoma is forced to use Asterisk (and FreePBX) because to put it bluntly, it’s CHEAPER than developing their own PBX in a clean room. Their competitors are using Asterisk and certainly won’t give it up - so even if Sangoma WANTED TO they couldn’t do it and survive. Those software packages are tied up in GPL and the SECOND that Sangoma attempted to interfere with GPL, someone would fork Asterisk and ultimately development on it would move to the fork - some competitor of Sangoma maybe would sponsor the fork, who knows.

The “dual license” of Asterisk is meaningless - UNLESS you are a competitor who does NOT want to hand out code modifications - or maybe a customer who has a bee up their ass about giving away code modifications - so OK - they have to pay. What that means of course is that if they have to pay, then their product isn’t going to be able to undercut Sangoma’s product. So instead, they have to rely on plain old marketing FUD to convince people that their “Northern Telecom PBX” or their “Rolm PBX” or their Wonkulating Gronkulator PBX that uses Asterisk is just plain old superior to Sangoma’s.

And yes, some can do that by slapping a name brand on their stuff. Some can even write PBX software clean-room that is completely different than Asterisk and MAINTAIN it over the long term.

But you see, there’s the rub because maintaining it means keeping developers on staff, which is rule #2 and that requires a constant income. You can’t depend on an expanding market of PBX sales when everyone out there buys your PBX then uses it for the next 100 years without paying you anything for it. So now you have to convince your customers that not only is THEIR name brand “better” but it’s worth continuing to pay for year after year after year - release after release after release - when the reality is, your product and telephony itself - simply isn’t changing.

Cisco’s solution was to write a “call home to Momma” into their PBX that they call “Smart Licensing” which shuts the PBX that you own, down, if you decide that your new product changes aren’t any different than your old product, which is why I enjoy going after them so much, since their product changes AREN’T any different year after year. But they ALSO moved into Cloud which Sangoma has done - for exactly the same reasons - telephony really isn’t changing much (in fact in some cases like video it’s REGRESSING in some areas) that pesky rule #2 of business.

And this now gets back to something that is tangental to what I said a few posts ago - Sangoma’s focus on the small fry that are moving to the Cloud. OK that’s great, it gets them recurring revenue they can skim off something from the money people pay them for a cloud phone subscription and the money they pay for circuits to the PSTN

But, what it DOES NOT DO is pound the drum on how Asterisk, FreePBX, PBXAct, Switchvox and whatever other products other than Cloud that Sangoma is selling - are EQUAL OR BETTER than the PBXes that Cisco and Avaya and the rest of them are selling.

I said before Sangoma needs to pull it’s head out and look at large org sales. Well you DON’T make large org sales by just telling large orgs they are better off in the Cloud. “Trust us, we can do phone calls better in the Cloud than you can do on prem” is a stupid argument that falls apart when the IT director of the large org says to Sangoma “Uh, are you eating your own dog food? Are you using Asterisk and FreePBX in YOUR cloud to provide a Cloud PBX to all your customers? Because, if you ARE, then what YOU are using is the same as my own prem stuff so quit blowing air up my ass that you can do phone calls better than I can since you and I are using the same thing”

Large org sales are made when Sangoma walks into a customer and bold as brass announces “Ok see here it’s all about money. You can go to Cisco and buy their UCM and it’s gonna cost you $1 a phone call and that’s gonna be constant. Or you can go to us and it’s gonna cost you $0.10 a phone call subtracting the amortization of your capital expense of buying our stuff. And our stuff is gonna WAY outlast your depreciation schedule”

This is the danger of Sangoma focusing too much on collecting up every small customer and putting them into their Cloud. They get into that small mindset. They lose sight of the large customer picture. They turn their backs on the fleet of phones large orgs have thousands of on desks like the Cisco CP7841’s and 8845’s that I keep harping on, which the support already exists for.

And eventually, when the day comes that the last small org has made their choice of a Cloud phone system and moved to them or their competitor -then Sangoma won’t be getting any new customers by competing with antique Rolm and Toshiba and Panasonic and Northen Tel key systems that are losing power supplies and getting impossible to find parts for. They will be competing with other Cloud phone system providers who may indeed be using Asterisk in the cloud. And the large orgs who ALSO have had expiring antique phone systems like Rolm and Toshiba and Panasonic - well they will have on-prem systems running Asterisk built by their competitors who DID have the vision to say to customers “it’s gonna cost you $0.10 a phone call subtracting the amortization of your capital expense of buying our stuff. And our stuff is gonna WAY outlast your depreciation schedule”

This isn’t a “the sky is falling Sangoma is laying off FOSS developers and advocates” problem. This is a “What is Sangoma DOING to prepare to meet the future” problem.

This isn’t as cut and dry as you think. We are a regional telecom and a lot of our business is in the hospitality sector. The company has been around for about 20 years, I’ve been there for half of it. 10 years ago we were doing a ton of standard “POTS” lines for these hotels because they all had old Mitel’s with FXS cards in them. It was our highest selling product. Now over the last 10 years when they need to replace the Mitel’s some were moving to an on-prem IP system and SIP trunking. However, in the last 5-6 years the hotel chains have embraced IP based systems and cloud solutions for their hotels. As well over these last few years many of these owners are retiring and passing the business on to their children or selling to a property management company.

That is important as the children and these management companies want more modern features and more management access to their services. So we’ve gone from a customer base that never cared about extra features, web portals, mobile integration, etc to a customer base shifting to wanting these things. The upside is that in our market region there are only one or two other competitors in the hospitality sphere doing what we are doing. The downside is they have more modern interfacing for their customers.

So now I have been spending the last parts of 2024 completely updating and revamping our customer facing interfaces. There is a big cost to this and it isn’t going to make us more than what we are spending on it. This is about customer retention just as much as it is about potential new customers. Because while there is a growing “younger” generation in the market there is still plenty of old schoolers that just want phones to work. So now we’re going to incur this expense to develop software and we’ll see that expense cover over the next 2-3 years.