3CX Makes SkySwitch A Certified Solutions Provider

Partnership of business concept.

Greg Steinig talks why 3CX and how they plan on “cross-pollinating” 

TMC’s Editorial Director, Erik Linask, speaks with Greg Steinig, VP of Sales at 3CX during an interview at this year’s Vectors 2019 conference. They talked about his session introducing 3CX to the Vectors attendees, how 3CX is getting their name out to other resellers and their new partnership with SkySwitch. By working with SkySwitch, 3CX is able to offer its partners a one-stop-shop for buying their hosting, SIP trunks, DIDs, phones, etc. 

SkySwitch’s white-label SIP trunking portal lets you assign access to customers and agents under the resellers’ own brand. The fully-automated reseller portal provides control over essential services, such as Inbound CNAM, E911 and even SMS. Plus the SIP origination and termination services are built on a scalable geo-diverse network, all developed to provide resellers with the services and support needed to sell 3CX successfully.

3CX Vice President of Sales, Greg Steinig talks with Erik Linask about how their partnership with SkySwitch makes it easier for you. 

#Vectors2019 #SkySwitch #TransformCloudComm #TMC #3CX 

Full Video Transcript Below

Erik Linask 0:07
Hi, we’re here in Orlando, Florida, at Vectors 2019. That is SkySwitch’s user conference. Joining me this morning is Greg Steinig from 3CX. Greg, good morning.

Greg Steinig 0:17
Good morning, thanks for having me.

Erik Linask 0:19
So, we’re here on the third day and final day of this year’s show, you know, what are your thoughts? What have you seen?

Greg Steinig 0:25
It’s been a fantastic show and the thing that I’ve liked is that people are actually excited to see 3CX here. First it was, what are you doing here? And then when they realize what it is we’re doing here, it’s, you know, you saw that, you walk by grabbed my hand, man, that’s great. We’re going to be a partner of yours and that’s been really exciting for us.

Erik Linask 0:44
Absolutely, that’s fantastic. With that said, talk a little bit about your relationship with SkySwitch and why you are here at Vectors.

Greg Steinig 0:51
Excellent. So we’re a an IP PBX solution. We’re a software company right, and in the past you put together your own server, you hosted it yourself, you got your own SIP trunk, you kind of built it all yourself, you made your margins on all those edges, you were very profitable and you didn’t have to discount your services. But there are some partners out there, it’s easier for them to go to one place and buy one in place and just do it all at once and so SkySwitch is our partner for that.

You can be a SkySwitch partner, you can go into their shop, you can go ahead and buy 3CX, you can buy your hosting, you can buy your SIP trunk, you can get your DIDs, you can buy your phone, and it’ll be delivered. The phones will arrive to the customer and everything’s cool. It’s one stop shopping and the supports there. The price for us is the same if you bought it direct or buy it through them and we’re really, really pushing this relationship with him because it’s really advantageous to many, many, many of our partners.

Erik Linask 1:50
So why work with SkySwitch? You know, there are a lot of other potential folks that you could be working with out there.

Greg Steinig 1:57
Well, you know, that’s that’s a good question and SkySwitch isn’t our only solution partner or solution provider, but they’re a really good SIP trunk solution, and they have a white label solution and their pricing is very, very good. Our existing partners that do business with them are very, very happy with that. They like the fact that when the customer gets the bill, it says, you know, our partner ACC Telecom, right? He likes that. And so we explore this and say, well, let’s bring them into the fold at least as a supportive SIP trunk. Then as we were talking to Eric, we realized, hey there’s other business here, other partners that aren’t aware of 3CX, so we can make this bigger than it is. And we did that. So we’re going to cross pollinate, some of our partners are going to choose them as SIP trunks and hopefully all their partners will choose us as at least one of their choices for a PBX.

Erik Linask 2:47
So you had a chance to get on stage and talk a little bit here this week. What’d you tell the attendees?

Greg Steinig 2:54
I really told them about 3CX and then I told them like, this is our partnership, we’re going to make it easier for you. They didn’t know who we were, they wondered what in the world is 3CX and what are they doing here because they see us as a competitor of Netsapiens. And quite frankly, most of these users or partners, what SkySwitch calls them, they have their hosted solution with Netsapiens, but they’ve got tons of on-prem customers, too, and they can’t move them to the cloud. But guess what 3CX is Windows and Linux, it’s in the cloud or on-prem, we give you freedom. It’s just one more arrow in their quiver. It’s good for them, and it’s good for us.

Erik Linask 3:34
I feel like we’re starting to see more and more of that’s a sort of co-op-petition in the market where, you know, you may have some some competition or competitive environment, but the collaboration the partnership element outweighs that.

Greg Steinig 3:49
That’s true. Now, overall, the market is moving towards, you know, standards and collaboration and partnership and everybody kind of chooses their lane and you know, we have an API, we create a receptacle and someone creates a plug and they use it for telemedicine or they use it for their CRM or something like that. It just made sense. One of the things that a SIP trunk operator wants is to have sticky end users. And when it’s so easy to port a number, they’re not sticky so you add other services.

3CX is a huge partner environment when we look at 3CX and the money that the 3CX makes, and then the money that our partners charge for their phones, and their SIP trunks and services and everything else, where the size of RingCentral. And people never see that coming, and that’s who we are, and we make profit, where everybody else loses money. And we focus on the small to medium sized business that needs more functionality than what they can get from Google Voice.

Erik Linask 4:55
So when you talk about being being that size of a business, you know, you’ve done that fairly quietly. 3CX has been around for a little while, right? How have you been able to do that? You know, without, you know some of these resellers and others in the market realizing it?

Greg Steinig 5:10
Well, Nick galley is a visionary, right? And he took a look and said, I want to be in this business, but I need to make my money where everybody else isn’t looking. Now I have experienced when I got out of the army, I went to work for Enterprise Rent-A-Car and nobody had ever heard of Enterprise Rent-A-Car. Until one day Enterprise Rent-A-Car was the largest car rental company in the world, because they focused on a market that no one was aware of it was called insurance replacement. And guess what? That’s not at the airport, that’s a local offices. And that’s kind of what Nick has done. He said, I’m going to focus on these end users, these businesses that aren’t served by the big guys.

If you think about it, what was it 1995, Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, you know, the guys that enter the market, they go to the top where the people can pay for it right, so you got Avaya, Mytel, used to be ShoreTel and Cisco, and they’re right there at the top where everybody has tons of money. But guess what they forget about the middle where people don’t need high end functionality but they do need something other than OOMA or Jive, or RingCentral, or some of these others. And that’s exactly where we fit. We’re right there saying, look, we’re going to give you enterprise great functionality for a price that is, I mean, incredibly inexpensive, because you shouldn’t have to, you know, leverage your firstborn male child to get a phone system and that’s our belief.

Erik Linask 6:32
Certainly that’s a valid argument, as far as capabilities, features, functionality, you know, all the things that businesses are looking for, 3CX is comparable to all the other providers that you mentioned.

Greg Steinig 6:46
We we do it all. Now there’s a level that we’re not going to do it. So say Tech Data, their phones go down, they lose a million dollars a minute, so that’s a million bucks. If our system goes down, it may be down for a minute right? Well, they’re willing to spend a million dollars to avoid that. But there’s a lot of businesses out there that are willing to lose a call or two, and not have to pay for that. We have enterprise rate functionality. Within the last couple of years, we’ve picked up companies like Barracuda Networks, and Subaru of America. And I mean, we’ve got a lot of logos going our way because they realize that, they can do business with a partner who’s selling 3CX and move a ton of money out of that budget and somewhere else. School districts are another huge win for us. We’ve got school districts all over the country that are switching to 3CX and having the money in their budget to hire more teachers. Because it’s ridiculous that these phone companies, these competitors of ours, charge that much money for something that’s so basic.

Erik Linask 7:48
Excellent. That’s…

Greg Steinig 7:49
That’s inflammatory, right.

Erik Linask 7:50
Greg, this all sounds wonderful. Sounds like it’s been a really productive week for you here at Vectors. We’re so glad you were here and thanks for joining us this morning.

Greg Steinig 8:00
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, appreciate it.