So…are we finally going to get SMS integration?
Well that explains the very vague and non-informative call I got from my VI account rep this week. A rep that was clearly new as my original one was male and this one was female and had absolutely no clue about my account and what I did even though I went through all this like less than three months ago when I got the account with my other rep.
It was basically to tell me the Pay As You Go model was going away. No idea when it would happen but they want to get all their PAYG clients on monthly commitments of $199.99 or something like that per month.
The best part was when I said “Huh, so you’re going the route of Vitelity are you? See part of why I got this account was to do testing on it because I have MSPs/small providers that want to get away from Vitelity because they did this exact same move. So I guess I won’t bother continuing my testing or working on integrating VI into my offerings.”. All of a sudden I was offered the exact same deal but at a $25-$50 monthly commitment.
That is to be seen. VI’s SMS wasn’t that robust to begin with as it was mainly SMS to Email forwarding, beyond that they don’t really even have an HTTP API for sending/receiving text messages. On the flip side SIPStation supports SMS over SIP/SIMPLE and thus only FreePBX/PBXact can get SMS to truly work via only ZULU or the UCP.
That’s unlikely related. In deals like this anyone lower than a certain level learns about it right before announcement. So many of them probably found out today sometime. Policy decisions are not a zero hour thing either. The soonest they would direct any policy would be after the sale closes and is announced. That said there is a lot of logistics at play prior to a policy change that is customer facing. It is likely this decision about prices and plans has been in the works longer than the acquisition. The acquisition has probably been in the works about 3-4 months as that is when sangoma announced a round of funding.
I’ve always been on a $200 minimum since like 2008. I’m on $1000 commitment right now for better pricing.
Perhaps. My account rep was very curious as to how many FreePBX, Asterisk or 3CX systems I had or were planning to have connected to them. When I said “Zero, I use Kamailio for switching” she was completely lost.
Regardless of them being related or not someone should have had better sense about them in regards to this. Foremost, the rep was completely lacked knowledge on what they were trying to up-sell me. They couldn’t provide any concrete details on when this policy change would happen, how much notice would be given or any other real questions about it asked. Like since they were basically doing the same thing as Vitelity would they still offer a retail level for non-commitment based accounts and the answer was basically “We haven’t decided”.
I mean that call alone was enough for me to decide VI wasn’t going to work. My account rep showed she was not familiar with my type of setup even after simply said “I’m an aggregate like you”. However, if that wasn’t the case the sale to Sangoma would have been because my experiences with SIPStation over the years have been beyond subpar.
Because you could be a 100% right and VI had this move planned before the sale was completed or started but now it looks like the call was made with vague details because it all could actually change. Sangoma could come in and say “Yeah, no. This is the new pricing structure we want”.
It just not the greatest optics, in my view. But then everyone has their own optics on things.
I was employed with Sangoma through I believe 6 or so acquisitions and every time they were “the devil” for whatever policy or decision just happened. In reality during. M&A you want to rock the boat as little as possible. Sangoma is a public company so they have to walk a very straight line when doing a purchase. Any unintended disclosure could land them in deep Doo Doo with regulators. Also they have to do a bunch of FCC stuff with this kind of acquisition so they aren’t going to summarily do anything. I am no longer an employee so i know as much as anyone else but I am still a shareholder so I want to see these things go well.
I just got my letter today, letting me know that they value the 20 years of work we’ve done together. It sounded a lot like “Oh Dog, we don’t want to alarm you and please don’t panic.” Kind of funny.
Welcome to the Jungle.
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