Actually, I beg to differ. We are an IT services company. We do sales, repair and IT services. Many of our clients are heading in the direction of managed services. They are moving many of the things that used to be hosted locally "to the cloud". The majority of small to medium sized businesses can't afford the expense of an on-staff IT guy (much less one that properly understands a server environment).
We see this all the time: Client has a problem with their on-site Exchange mail server. Turns out they weren't doing proper backups. Long story short, we spend a few days rebuilding the server, recovering data, and reconfiguring workstations. A very hefty fee to restore their e-mail services (which is usually at emergency labor rate, since e-mail servers are business critical to most of these companies). Not to mention the cost of new hardware. Due to incidents like this, many clients are opting for our "in-the-cloud" managed services. Our $4.95/mo Exchange 2010 e-mail hosting service is a much more affordable option for them when you compare it to the cost maintaining and repairing an in-house Exchange server.
We are trying to take that same methodology to the phones realm. Again, phone are business critical, and they can't afford to have them go down due to hardware failure or other lack-of-maintenance issues. They also need to be managed and backed up; which is easier for us (and thus cheaper for the client) in some sort of multi-tenant environment.
When presenting all the benefits managed services and hosting things in the cloud to our clients, they realize the value immediately. The cost savings of not having to constantly purchase new equipment, do updates, monitor the systems, maintain proper backups, etc. and pay a set monthly fee (something they can budget) for is always very appealing to the business owner. More importantly, downtime is virtually eliminated, since we're running these servers in a datacenter with multiple redundancies.
I, for one, would be able to make a ton of sales if this was implemented. For now I'm stuck with virtualizing each installation of 3CX and Windows (a real pain when I want to add a new tenant or change a setting that needs to be changed on all installations).
But maybe 3CX is not geared towards such an advanced scenario? I mean, 3CX prides itself on being a WINDOWS based PBX. I'd venture to say that many of the users of the 3CX PBX do not have the skills necessary to implement a more corporate type of PBX (like something by Cisco or Linux based Asterisk). Maybe 3CX is gearing their marketing and their product to the novice/intermediate users who don't have the skills or the time to learn how to setup and probably manage a more complex system?
Just my 2 cents.
