I completely appreciate
@N_G / 3CX's position - a business has to make $. If they don't they fail to exist. Simple as that.
Without $, they can't employ people, they can't do R&D, they can't innovate which means you don't get any features.
SC licensing has always been a balance. It's no different to the days when we used to sell BRI and PRI ISDN.
Some customers had lots of users (handsets on desks), but make very few calls. Think about the phone that was in the kitchen which no one actually used, but it was there. It really was just internal so that people could communicate.
We used to sell lots of analogue and digital key systems with 100's of handsets but only 2 x ISDN2 or even 4 PSTN.
Some customers had not many users and made lots of calls and we had 8 handsets and 2 x ISDN10 PRI.
Even within the 3CX Model, we have many customers where they have high users, low call volume and SC requirement.
I think a lot of that also is contributed to the fact that many enterprises use Teams as their internal "Chat / Collaboration" and the 3CX deskphone as their "PSTN" external calling, so the volume profile has shifted.
No two customers have the same calling profile or user profile.
As I say, it's a balance.
3CX made it clear in their previous comms that they're looking to reduce their support costs / load and that was the change in the 4SC > 8SC. I completely get that supporting lots of small customers gets very time consuming and expensive. It also means people aren't investing in learning the product and being experts if they are not focused on it. Makes perfect sense.
The move to the MCM product in that smaller end of the market has made good economical sense, both for 3CX having to support fewer partners with bigger installs, and for us as partners being able to support less infrastructure with more users.
Being able to define a "User" (a warm body) vs a "Service Account" (like a shared mailbox) would be good. That way, it's super clear as to what the definition and expectation on both sides is. Even being able to separate out VMBOX as a separate type perhaps? Just a thought.
Finding the happy medium in business is difficult, you'll not always please everyone all the time.
We've seen this for years on Open Source projects, where the project and the community have differing views.
We've seen it with Microsoft when they got rid of Small Business Server and Perpetual Office Licensing.
As long as it's fair and reasonable, where both parties can make a buck and provide a good service / product, then I think it's a good thing.
3CX has put a huge amount of dev effort in a small amount of time with v20. We've seen lots of new features with each release.
If we can get to feature parity on MCM to the Professional / Enterprise in each department, then we have many smaller customers who we would look to migrate from dedicated to MCM. Again, this is good for us both for support, infrastructure, licensing and maintenance.
You'll break some hearts
@N_G, just stay focused and deliver good product and together, we'll all win.
