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:
- 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.
- 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.