Telephony match in Cloud mode: 3CX plays in the big leagues

The COVVI-19 crisis recalled the importance of having a unified communications solution offering advanced collaboration functions.Teams, publishers or pure players offer their cloud solutions.

The COVVI-19 crisis will have highlighted the limits of traditional telephony facilities.Companies with an on -site coach (PABX)) have not always had all the agility necessary to equip their employees in a telework situation.A cloud solution would have allowed them to maintain the quality of their intact communications while offering remote collaboration spaces.Beyond advanced telephony features such as the call group, the interactive voice server (SVI)) or the management of incoming calls (ACD, Automatic Call Distributor)), cloud solutions offer videoconference or sharing ofdocuments.

To go to telephony in cloud mode, two options are available to businesses.The first is based on a shared infrastructure of public cloud.IPBX (or Internet PABX)) is hosted by an operator.We also talk about Centerx IP.Another possibility: private cloud or virtualized IPBX.In this case, the company has a dedicated server in the operator's data center.Which is a guarantee of safety and reversibility."This is the solution pushed by integrators from 50 positions," notes Laurent Silvestri, president of the club of network and telecoms managers (CDRT)) and the company Openip.Faced with the heavyweights of the sector that are Alcatel Lucent Enterprise and Mitel, 3CX is doing well with a hybrid solution to the clever positioning.

In full recomposition, the French telephony market should experience an acceleration of the switch to the cloud.There are three major typologies of actors: historic network equipment manufacturers, publishers from the collaborative and the pure players of the Cloud.Coming from the first category, Alcatel Lucent Enterprise (ALE)) and Mitel are leaders with 40% and 35% of market share respectively.

Two leaders and a myriad of challengers

Ale who celebrated her 100th anniversary last year has passed under Chinese pavilion since his sale in 2014 by his historic parent company, Alcatel Lucent, to the China Huaxin investment group.For its part, the Canadian equipment supplier Mitel has become number two of the French market since its merger the same year with its fellow citizen Aastra Technologies.Ale and Mitel who both used to sell equipment must now review their economic model to compose with the emergence of the cloud.

Ale's response to get into the cloud is called Rainbow.Marketed in 2018, this is a unified collaboration and communications solution, including telephone calls and videoconferencing.Mitel's Cloud offer is called Micloud Flex (ex-Micloud Enterprise)).It is a UCAAS Unified Communications Environment (Unified Communications AS-A-Service)) for large companies.Its Micloud Connect version is aimed at SMEs.

The most credible competitor to these two heavy goods vehicles is, in the eyes of Laurent Silvestri, 3CX."This editor of Anglo-Dutch origin takes up the best of telephony and collaborative with fairly aggressive prices, and the number of its partners explodes", notes the expert.In cloud mode, the solution is operated with a partner host.It can also be deployed on a public cloud, or on site (One-Prime)).

Two other equipment manufacturers are in ambush.Avaya recently combined with Ringcentral, a supplier of communication software, to launch his own telephony cloud.Officially available this spring, Avaya Cloud Office will associate the Avaya telephony applications with the UCAAS platform in Ringcentral.For its part, Cisco bought Broadsoft, a specialist in telecommunications software, for $ 1.9 billion in 2018.Objective: Add a Calling Cloud Brick to your Webex Teams messaging.

Teams, zoom and google meet

Among the essential actors is obviously French Aircall who has just raised $ 65 million.Its main highlight?Its Cloud Mode Telephone platform is part of some 60 applications, mainly in the CRM (Intercom, Kustomer, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Shopify, Zendesk...)).It can thus synchronize telephone data with the information system.In the case of a support service based on Zendesk for example, Aircall can notify the calls and names of the correspondents directly in the interface of the tool, and bring all the data of Call: number, date, time, recording, voice message, etc..

Other specialists in telephony in Cloud mode, the Belgian Allocloud, the German NFON or the Italian Wildix also try to break into France.

Enfin, on ne peut boucler ce dossier sans évoquer les pure players de la collaboration à distance comme Zoom, Microsoft (avec Teams)) et Google (avec Meet)).These services saw their number of users explode during the containment period.Unstable bandwidth, safety flaws...They also showed their limits.In this game, Teams is the one who is doing the best.The client company has the choice to buy call packages from Microsoft, or to integrate its existing telecom operator in the platform and thus keep its historic phone numbers.