Pure cloud telephony provider NFON is planning a summer 2018 launch for a WebRTC version of its soft PBX which it claims will give resellers a simple path to profitable recurring revenues.
Ten years in development, the Web RTC solution is currently being fine-tuned by a team of 40-plus product managers, developers, programmers and UC experts at NFON's Munich base.
According to Markus Krammer, Vice President Products and New Business, it will enable NFON UK's 200 plus resellers to offer customers the 'rip and replace' web based cloud hardware alternative they are now demanding and will work seamlessly across all operating systems and devices via a web browser or downloaded app. The NFON app will form the basis for future collaboration services, such as screen sharing, group chat and video.
"NFON 2018 will not only unite the user interface of different services, but will also put these previously separate technologies into the background. There is one maxim in the development process - absolute ease of use," said Krammer.
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NFON says the new solution will integrate voice, call through, telephone handover, Click2Dial, call list and voicemail, contacts, eFax, subscribed audio conferences, source based call forwarding and other functions such as call recording at launch. Simple drag and drop and mouse click functionality combined with global connectivity in milliseconds has been at the core of the solution's development.
"What we will be offering is pure cloud communications. Users will be able to go to the start.nfon.comcentral landing page to set their devices and how they want to use them. So, if they want to use their desktop phone they can simply click to dial or if they're working from home or a hotel they can add those numbers in. The one number service is key. Wherever they are in the world the call party always gets the number they have in the PBX, on any device."
Summarising the revenue model NFON UK Managing Director Myles Leach said: "We recently took out a big telephone system that had 6000 users over 45 sites using mainly traditional ISDN. Somebody, somewhere was billing them for the ISDN rental and billing them for the calls. With our web based solution, resellers will of course lose the CAPEX profit on the tin and the maintenance revenue, but they'll be getting recurring revenue because every user buys a licence on a monthly charge so the reseller will make money on every single user, every single month before they even pick the phone up.
"And customers will love it because if they make a business call from their personal mobile via a browser the only cost associated with their personal device would be a very small amount of data to allow the connectivity. The actual call would always be billed by their business phone," added Leach.
NFON is lining up selected partners to test and train on a beta version of the new WebRTC solution in the spring.