Defeating Zoom vs 3CX

[Felicia King]

I have a client with an existing, extremely well functioning 3CX instance for about 150 extensions. Their all in total annual cost is about $1700 annually with total phone services not exceeding $100/mo. It is an educational institution who has also adopted Zoom for meetings and slack for chat even though they had Teams and GSuite as options.
The client has had zero performance or functionality issues over 4 years and the only outages that have occurred are due to their own lack of having a backup generator for their own switching infrastructure.

Zoom is claiming that the org will save money by getting rid of the 3CX phone system. I don't believe it, but the CFO is not allowing access to the quotes for services that are supposed to be provided to the school.

Zoom does not provide a TFTP server or the Yealink phone configuration templates. Zoom literally suggested that the client code all that themselves or that they hand provision 150 desk phones. It is unclear how Zoom complies with Ray Baum Act or Kari's Law for a large school campus. Zoom claims that there is nothing special you have to do at the network layer to make their system work. As a network security engineer, I know that is preposterous. Furthermore, their own website lists out a whole host of lengthy resources that you have to whitelist in their terms.

I am looking for any help here in terms of arguments and documentation that can be used to defeat Zoom. I cannot possibly see how a per-extension fee based service like Zoom is going to be more cost effective than 3CX. The CFO seems to have no care about the management overhead of manually provisioning desk phones. It seems that his perception is that internal IT labor is free and unlimited.

 

[N_G]

I think you have done a pretty good job already with the content of your post! You cant fight complete lack of intelligence or corruption. I'd like to see the calculation by this "CFO" how Zoom phone system is cheaper than 3CX Something tells me you wont get to see it......

 

[ivank]

Make a bet: you'll pay the difference if the annual cost for Zoom is less than that of 3CX and the CFO pays if it is larger.

 

[Felicia King]

This is the same client that I engineered a fully open standards based, non-proprietary school lockdown and campus-wide paging system for that fully integrates with the video management system. With my system, the school security officers can initiate school lockdown with automation including recordings, automated unlocks, and on-demand live voice broadcasts with full duplex bidirectional audio.
This is based upon coding in the VMS, IP door controllers, IP video door stations, and it is also fully operable through the PBX on premise, from a mobile app for the VMS or the 3CX mobile app, or remotely through the VMS or even from an external phone that does not have a 3CX app installed.

This system has zero cost after implementation. It is not proprietary. It is fully supportable by internal IT. I invented it and everything is fully integrated. This requires a REAL PBX not some BS like Zoom. The CFO is considering ripping out the existing school lockdown solution that works rock solid and the school security officers are very happy with. Why? Because Zoom is not a real PBX and cannot interface with it. The school would have to put in the insecure IoT junk that is supported by Zoom whereas my system uses product from the global market leader in that space that has >65% of the market share.

I asked Zoom yesterday if they could configure a multicast subscription for all handsets managed in their system. I asked them a lot of questions. The "engineers" from Zoom could not keep up with the technical complexity of my questions, but Mr CFO is just obsessed with what he thinks are cost savings.

 

[Felicia King]

Make a bet: you'll pay the difference if the annual cost for Zoom is less than that of 3CX and the CFO pays if it is larger.

I think the CFO is thinking that Zoom is going to replace their Slack subscription, which is stupid to have anyway considering that the school already has GSuite and Microsoft Office 365 for free for the entire school, staff, and student base. Why they got slack to begin with is beyond me. Probably because the IT department needed to manage another system and all the users needed to have another set of credentials to manage (sarcasm). The CFO is also probably thinking about replacing all the phone stuff at the other remote campuses. What that costs, I don't know. But I know it is all Mitel and it is unreliable trash.

CFO initially wanted these other sites to go on the main school phone system because of how happy everyone was with it, but these remote campuses have non-technical front office staff that need to manage recordings for IVRs. They were told by school internal IT that this could only be managed through the one and only master admin account into the PBX, so the modifications of recordings, menus, holiday schedules, etc. would have to go through the central IT. Obviously, having a bunch of non-technical front office staff logging into the one and only master admin account to manage the recordings and IVRs is not acceptable. Too much access to them would be granted through the role based access control as it currently exists in 3CX. Basically, the front office staff told the CFO that they were not willing to go through IT to make these changes.
I suggested that we could put up each business unit their own PBX and bridge them together so they could have intra-org 6-digit dialing. This was also unacceptable for whatever reason.

My sense is that the lack of ability to delegate the management of just one IVR to one extension is what put a fork in the functionality requirements from the end user perspective and now the CFO is just lying about costs. Each business unit would need their own IVR and have no ability to break anything else in the PBX configuration. They would also need to be able to manage their own holiday schedule.

They are also obsessed with having it "cloud hosted" since the primary school campus does not have backup generator. They have a symmetrical gigabit pipe and I built the network with a 10 GbE backbone, so there is no capacity or performance issues on main campus. I told them I could lift and shift the on-premise 3CX server to Azure if they wanted to cloud host it. We cannot use 3CX hosting because of the feature limitations there. 3CX hosting is not meant for these more complex scenarios with site-to-site VPN requirements for integration with other complex systems like VMS, IP speakers, and IP video door stations.

I will continue the fight, but please provide me any other feedback that you think would be useful. I would love to hear from other 3CX partners that have successfully defeated Zoom.

And Nick, you are correct about corruption and lack of intelligence being part of this. The CFO told the Zoom people on the call that the only thing the school had going on was a file server and some wireless. ROFLMAO.
They have three hyperV hosts, at least 12 VMs, over 1000 users, over 200 workstations, over 500 chromebooks, and more. The file server is actually a real-time replication set in DFS also for high availability. I chose not to correct him in the meeting in front of everyone.

Common sense would tell someone that the budget to replace one of the servers would not be $35000 if it was only a "file server". And yeah, he knows exactly what is in the budget.

 

[ChrisKoll]

From what I can see, Zoom Education licenses are $1800/y alone add phone system on top I am sure it will cost much more that 3CX

 

[StefanW]

@Felicia King

Zoom is claiming that the org will save money by getting rid of the 3CX phone system. I don't believe it, but the CFO is not allowing access to the quotes for services that are supposed to be provided to the school.

The business would save massive by getting rid of Zoom.

Given the public information available online for 150 users in the Edu sector (prices today) is:
Meeting License: $13.410 for 150 users (actually I can only buy 149 online...)
Phone License: 150 (Users) * $10 (License) * 12 (Month) = $18.000
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Zoom: $31.410 3CX: $1700 (your quote)

+1747.65 %​

Something from the small print:
a call minute to the US is $0,0318, which is about x3 more than a general sip trunk provider would charge you.
Here an outbound minute via one of our US-supported providers: $0.0050 (before volume pricing).

(Note: I am not a Zoom licensing expert, maybe someone in the community knows more and correct any of my statement made, it's just what I see black on white).

And to run 3CX for them in the cloud I think is straightforward enough plus the knowledge of who has access to their data and where it is is paramount to me.

 

[Evolute IT]

Whatever the finished result is, I hope you either win or fire the customer as those are waste of time.

They want Zoom? Let them buy it and live to regret it. After 2-3 times, you did your due diligence of trying to educate them.

My guess is the CFO thinks Zoom is the best for school, but he might just need someone to show him alternatives correctly. (Zoom likes to think they're the best when it's actually totally false.)

 

[Jeff Koertzen]

I would take an approach similar to what @StefanW has taken above, but I would extend it.

Show the implementation (investment made) and recurring costs (operations) of the lockdown system. Then show what the costs would be to replace it. You can also show the costs of the 3CX video system (free) vs. the ongoing costs of the Zoom system.

Also, when you show costs to a CFO, it's always a good idea to show the costs over a five year period in an Excel spreadsheet. That usually speaks to them in a way they understand. Unfortunately, you can't approach it as an engineer. It has to be strictly cost-based. You could potentially throw in the cost of the Microsoft phone system. Sure, it's already integrated with their Office365 system, but the costs are astronomical compared to 3CX. AND they are pretty much in line with what Zoom could offer, but not as integrated and without the lockdown safety system.

The CFO could also have some bad information. He could be unaware of the 3CX meetings mobile apps which allow their users to access the meetings on the go. Or that basic texting is now available.

But if he's deadset against it, it might be time to say goodbye. And look at marketing your lockdown system to other schools who are actually interested in saving money.

 

[Felicia King]

Update for you. We requested clarification from Zoom on how they comply with Kari's law and Ray Baum Act. They sent this https://zoom.us/trust/legal-compliance#certifications which has nothing to do with that.