Through the horizon. We are looking for an air corridor for takeoff of cloud telephony service
At the beginning of 2011, when we first thought about wanting to launch our cloud phone service, the SaaS sky was still relatively cloudless — the consumer had just begun to show interest in cloud telephony, the market was not yet strictly divided and, at first Look, the SaaS telephony business looked extremely attractive: broadband went across Russia by leaps and bounds, office centers massively sat down on fat unlimited channels, only lazy people were not interested in Internet telephony, and the community was actively discussing solutions based on Sensor PBX. Our company Iptelefon has more than 10 years of experience in the market of telephone services, had a loyal customer base, experience working with large customers and a good development team. It was at that distant and carefree time that the first release of our virtual PBX ZEON PBX was born .
For various objective and non-objective reasons, it was decided to leave the cloud service “for later” and to start “releasing” the box. At that time, many already engaged in boxed IP PBXs, leaders could be clearly traced on the market, there was a clear and well-prepared consumer and the level of competition instilled hope that "here is OUR solution that will precisely tear the market to shreds." Without further ado, we decided to take the proven and stable Asterisk as a basis, to finalize-modernize-color-improve and make our own release with all the beauties, convenient admin panel, support and other pleasures of a paid product. All this was done within one year and at the beginning of 2012, we began selling our box, offering it to existing customers who willingly replaced the aging Panasonic and Samsung with a new, outlandish VoIP beast.
')
Why a box, and not just a cloud? The answer is simple to the banality - it is much easier to make a box, it's easier to sell to customers (of course, first of all to your own), it is easier to develop and update it, releasing updates with the ability to quickly roll back to a stable version in case of critical bugs.
We started playing with “clouds” almost from the very beginning, offering to deploy ZEON PBX in a private cloud in our data center. In this mode, ZEON PBX existed for almost three years, several releases were released, the platform became very stable, the functionality developed, comfortable and somewhat unique “features” appeared - online call monitoring panel, corporate chat, mini-CRM functionality, called the “wager” (a convenient service for monitoring employee time) and the built-in simple help desk. In a word, everything would be fine, but something is not good: the market went forward uncontrollably and we suddenly found that the cloud trend - the public cloud - is trend number one and all our competitors are “sawing” telephone cloud platforms. It was the autumn of 2014, and we have not yet launched our own public cloud. As a matter of urgency, the highest management made the decision - we make our own public SaaS and we do it as fast as we can. But, before we start doing it, you need to conduct marketing research. Now without this anywhere: if you want to make money on the service, and not to code indefinitely in the hope of getting rich, you need market analysis and a clear roadmap.
We share our observations and analytics of the cloud telephony market in the Russian Federation (all assessments are subjective, but supported by certain studies).
As of the end of 2014, the cloud telephony market in the Russian Federation can be estimated at about 100 thousand cloud PBXs sold (not virtual VoIP lines, namely, contracts from 3 to 20 employees for each contract), which, in monetary terms, in our opinion, is about 300 million rubles a month or 3.5 billion rubles a year. Of these 100,000 subscriptions sold, more than 60% are accounted for by well-known leaders (we will not mention their names), and the remaining 40% are evenly distributed among the other market participants (among which we wanted to get into).
Further: it is clear that there is a market, its capacity is approximately known, but this is already a conquered segment and it’s not right to go there for newbies, to claim new connections. How does the cloud PBX market grow? Something like this - for 3,000 new subscriptions per month or, in monetary terms, 8–9 million rubles a month (based on the calculation - the average ARPU in the amount of 3,000 rubles / month), while 60% of the grants belong to no one has canceled , which means that all the rest (active SaaS phone projects we counted at least 100) account for about 3.5 million rubles a month or 35 thousand rubles of growth each month, which, frankly, is not impressive at all if you don’t hope for the best .
The market growth potential, according to our estimates, is as follows - by 2018, the SaaS telephone market will actively grow and grow by another 3 times, i.e. up to 300 thousand subscriptions sold (9 billion rubles a month), and then growth will slow down . And here, it seems, nothing - the cumulative figures are encouraging, the market is voluminous and you can earn, but there is one BUT - now the coverage of the addressed market in Moscow (the most delicious region) approaches 50-60 %% and this means that the most interesting there is a serious war for each client, serious marketing budgets are spent and we will have to invest in promotion in order to make our SaaS ZEON PBX a business that feeds itself not only bread and milk, but also butter sandwiches.
Going to the regions, i.e. where the coverage of the telephone SaaS market is significantly below 50%, again, not the best option in terms of investment - in addition to advertising, you will need numbering capacity in the regions, sales offices and all other attributes of regional expansion. And we are not funded by silicone money, but we honestly live on our own, on blood. What to do in this case? The answer is simple as semolina - to look for niches in an already formed niche, i.e., to enter the market not with another cloud telephone service, which is no better (and no worse) than others, but go with a service that has a clear competitive advantage. and intended for 20% of the existing market.
What niches can be occupied in the segment of cloud PBX in our opinion and how to sell:
- boxed integration with popular CRM-systems and Help Desk. The cloud CRM market is growing very fast, every second client is interested in boxed integration with CRM. Clear, bright and clear trend. Put a tick. ZEON will be friends with popular CRM with all its might.
- API is our everything. Where the client has its own CRM deployed, one cannot do without API, give friendship to telephony and transaction cards. Put the second tick: we implement the correct and understandable API and give customers the opportunity to integrate with us at will.
- fashionable today integration with corporate cellular communication, it is FMC , it is also a recording of conversations and online statistics of mobile conversations in the functionality of the cloud PBX. Now it has become possible, there are companies offering an affiliate program for the integration of FMC technologies and cloud solutions. Tick number three.
- we sell not an abstract cloud PBX stuffed with functionality, but we offer cases on the basis of the previous three points for clear market segments: online stores, small wholesale trade, field services and all the other “non-digital agents”. The fourth tick.
- cloud call centers for small businesses, i.e., not mega-tight boxes for half a million rubles and more, but quite a budget subscription for several thousand a month, but with wide functionality for a large number of incoming calls.
- we are promoting all of the above not in the forehead, after 300 rubles per click in contextual advertising, but, again, we are looking for partners-integrators who, like us, have filed something there and are now sitting bored. Together we are strength, together we can do much.
The functionality that we decided to do in infographics looks like this:
All of the above is a theory, albeit long-suffering and sometimes sad, but it is very revealing and instructive and encourages action. Now about, in fact, the actions or the fact that we “filed” and that will be released in public in the coming month as a new cloud telephone service ZEON PBX.
Dashboard
It's all in one place or all that a genetic Asterisk is capable of, but in an easy-to-understand form - missed and answered / unanswered calls, active conversations, i.e., all that will help in one second to assess what is happening in the company.
Employee control panel.
I came to work - click the mouse and set the status “At the workplace”, otherwise go out of business, a fine and no beer on Friday. This option is earned and absolutely justified - the need to check in the morning really disciplines. Checked on yourself. This option ZEON is actively supported and developed by us.
Functional mini CRM
In our difficult time, without taking into account applications it is difficult to live. Every call is worth its weight in gold, every customer is priceless. To prevent sellers from clicking frantically with a mouse, switching between several launched services, we included some of the CRM functions directly into our ZEON. For an incoming call, you can create a new application with one click and assign a responsible employee. Very simple and convenient for those who do not want to additionally pay a third-party CRM subscription. However, if you already have CRM - no problem, we have an API and boxed integration with the main CRM platforms.
Telephony Settings Panel
A regular user rarely does settings, or rather, doesn’t do anything at all, but the admin does the settings, and we love admins because they are almost admins themselves. For fellow admins, it was decided to draw a simple and convenient interface in pastel shades, not causing claustrophobia attacks, since the overwhelming majority of admins are claustrophobic.
Call center module
Often, the call center functionality, in its most domestic sense, is also necessary for small businesses: a queue of calls, a staff call-up strategy, and a call from the list.
We have done only the most necessary and integrated this necessary in ZEON. Who needs a light call center - welcome. We tried to integrate only the really necessary functionality.
Corporate chat
At first glance, this is not a very necessary thing, since everyone has Skype and Facebook, but you should start using everything in one place, as you understand that there is a great sense in this: all claims to the accountant Lena are now stored in the same place where the recordings of conversations and deal. I quickly found the right phrase and poked my finger at it. The conflict with the client settled and bills paid on time.
The screenshots, of course, do not describe all the features of our ZEON PBX , there are still a lot of "chips" about which we will talk about with the following publications. The service now still continues to be a box and a private cloud, but very soon the moment will come when our main developer Oleg will give the command “Release” and we will press the cherished button “Publish” and then - “Hello World, I’m not just born, I’m ready go". In a word - comming soon and it will happen very soon. Thanks for attention.
For various objective and non-objective reasons, it was decided to leave the cloud service “for later” and to start “releasing” the box. At that time, many already engaged in boxed IP PBXs, leaders could be clearly traced on the market, there was a clear and well-prepared consumer and the level of competition instilled hope that "here is OUR solution that will precisely tear the market to shreds." Without further ado, we decided to take the proven and stable Asterisk as a basis, to finalize-modernize-color-improve and make our own release with all the beauties, convenient admin panel, support and other pleasures of a paid product. All this was done within one year and at the beginning of 2012, we began selling our box, offering it to existing customers who willingly replaced the aging Panasonic and Samsung with a new, outlandish VoIP beast.
')
Why a box, and not just a cloud? The answer is simple to the banality - it is much easier to make a box, it's easier to sell to customers (of course, first of all to your own), it is easier to develop and update it, releasing updates with the ability to quickly roll back to a stable version in case of critical bugs.
We started playing with “clouds” almost from the very beginning, offering to deploy ZEON PBX in a private cloud in our data center. In this mode, ZEON PBX existed for almost three years, several releases were released, the platform became very stable, the functionality developed, comfortable and somewhat unique “features” appeared - online call monitoring panel, corporate chat, mini-CRM functionality, called the “wager” (a convenient service for monitoring employee time) and the built-in simple help desk. In a word, everything would be fine, but something is not good: the market went forward uncontrollably and we suddenly found that the cloud trend - the public cloud - is trend number one and all our competitors are “sawing” telephone cloud platforms. It was the autumn of 2014, and we have not yet launched our own public cloud. As a matter of urgency, the highest management made the decision - we make our own public SaaS and we do it as fast as we can. But, before we start doing it, you need to conduct marketing research. Now without this anywhere: if you want to make money on the service, and not to code indefinitely in the hope of getting rich, you need market analysis and a clear roadmap.
We share our observations and analytics of the cloud telephony market in the Russian Federation (all assessments are subjective, but supported by certain studies).
As of the end of 2014, the cloud telephony market in the Russian Federation can be estimated at about 100 thousand cloud PBXs sold (not virtual VoIP lines, namely, contracts from 3 to 20 employees for each contract), which, in monetary terms, in our opinion, is about 300 million rubles a month or 3.5 billion rubles a year. Of these 100,000 subscriptions sold, more than 60% are accounted for by well-known leaders (we will not mention their names), and the remaining 40% are evenly distributed among the other market participants (among which we wanted to get into).
Further: it is clear that there is a market, its capacity is approximately known, but this is already a conquered segment and it’s not right to go there for newbies, to claim new connections. How does the cloud PBX market grow? Something like this - for 3,000 new subscriptions per month or, in monetary terms, 8–9 million rubles a month (based on the calculation - the average ARPU in the amount of 3,000 rubles / month), while 60% of the grants belong to no one has canceled , which means that all the rest (active SaaS phone projects we counted at least 100) account for about 3.5 million rubles a month or 35 thousand rubles of growth each month, which, frankly, is not impressive at all if you don’t hope for the best .
The market growth potential, according to our estimates, is as follows - by 2018, the SaaS telephone market will actively grow and grow by another 3 times, i.e. up to 300 thousand subscriptions sold (9 billion rubles a month), and then growth will slow down . And here, it seems, nothing - the cumulative figures are encouraging, the market is voluminous and you can earn, but there is one BUT - now the coverage of the addressed market in Moscow (the most delicious region) approaches 50-60 %% and this means that the most interesting there is a serious war for each client, serious marketing budgets are spent and we will have to invest in promotion in order to make our SaaS ZEON PBX a business that feeds itself not only bread and milk, but also butter sandwiches.
Going to the regions, i.e. where the coverage of the telephone SaaS market is significantly below 50%, again, not the best option in terms of investment - in addition to advertising, you will need numbering capacity in the regions, sales offices and all other attributes of regional expansion. And we are not funded by silicone money, but we honestly live on our own, on blood. What to do in this case? The answer is simple as semolina - to look for niches in an already formed niche, i.e., to enter the market not with another cloud telephone service, which is no better (and no worse) than others, but go with a service that has a clear competitive advantage. and intended for 20% of the existing market.
What niches can be occupied in the segment of cloud PBX in our opinion and how to sell:
- boxed integration with popular CRM-systems and Help Desk. The cloud CRM market is growing very fast, every second client is interested in boxed integration with CRM. Clear, bright and clear trend. Put a tick. ZEON will be friends with popular CRM with all its might.
- API is our everything. Where the client has its own CRM deployed, one cannot do without API, give friendship to telephony and transaction cards. Put the second tick: we implement the correct and understandable API and give customers the opportunity to integrate with us at will.
- fashionable today integration with corporate cellular communication, it is FMC , it is also a recording of conversations and online statistics of mobile conversations in the functionality of the cloud PBX. Now it has become possible, there are companies offering an affiliate program for the integration of FMC technologies and cloud solutions. Tick number three.
- we sell not an abstract cloud PBX stuffed with functionality, but we offer cases on the basis of the previous three points for clear market segments: online stores, small wholesale trade, field services and all the other “non-digital agents”. The fourth tick.
- cloud call centers for small businesses, i.e., not mega-tight boxes for half a million rubles and more, but quite a budget subscription for several thousand a month, but with wide functionality for a large number of incoming calls.
- we are promoting all of the above not in the forehead, after 300 rubles per click in contextual advertising, but, again, we are looking for partners-integrators who, like us, have filed something there and are now sitting bored. Together we are strength, together we can do much.
The functionality that we decided to do in infographics looks like this:
All of the above is a theory, albeit long-suffering and sometimes sad, but it is very revealing and instructive and encourages action. Now about, in fact, the actions or the fact that we “filed” and that will be released in public in the coming month as a new cloud telephone service ZEON PBX.
Dashboard
It's all in one place or all that a genetic Asterisk is capable of, but in an easy-to-understand form - missed and answered / unanswered calls, active conversations, i.e., all that will help in one second to assess what is happening in the company.
Employee control panel.
I came to work - click the mouse and set the status “At the workplace”, otherwise go out of business, a fine and no beer on Friday. This option is earned and absolutely justified - the need to check in the morning really disciplines. Checked on yourself. This option ZEON is actively supported and developed by us.
Functional mini CRM
In our difficult time, without taking into account applications it is difficult to live. Every call is worth its weight in gold, every customer is priceless. To prevent sellers from clicking frantically with a mouse, switching between several launched services, we included some of the CRM functions directly into our ZEON. For an incoming call, you can create a new application with one click and assign a responsible employee. Very simple and convenient for those who do not want to additionally pay a third-party CRM subscription. However, if you already have CRM - no problem, we have an API and boxed integration with the main CRM platforms.
Telephony Settings Panel
A regular user rarely does settings, or rather, doesn’t do anything at all, but the admin does the settings, and we love admins because they are almost admins themselves. For fellow admins, it was decided to draw a simple and convenient interface in pastel shades, not causing claustrophobia attacks, since the overwhelming majority of admins are claustrophobic.
Call center module
Often, the call center functionality, in its most domestic sense, is also necessary for small businesses: a queue of calls, a staff call-up strategy, and a call from the list.
We have done only the most necessary and integrated this necessary in ZEON. Who needs a light call center - welcome. We tried to integrate only the really necessary functionality.
Corporate chat
At first glance, this is not a very necessary thing, since everyone has Skype and Facebook, but you should start using everything in one place, as you understand that there is a great sense in this: all claims to the accountant Lena are now stored in the same place where the recordings of conversations and deal. I quickly found the right phrase and poked my finger at it. The conflict with the client settled and bills paid on time.
The screenshots, of course, do not describe all the features of our ZEON PBX , there are still a lot of "chips" about which we will talk about with the following publications. The service now still continues to be a box and a private cloud, but very soon the moment will come when our main developer Oleg will give the command “Release” and we will press the cherished button “Publish” and then - “Hello World, I’m not just born, I’m ready go". In a word - comming soon and it will happen very soon. Thanks for attention.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/292546/
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