By Doug Green
“We’re growing through our partners, and that partner community is what made eight million users possible.”
In this Technology Reseller News podcast, Jon Brinton of Crexendo discusses a major milestone for the NetSapiens platform: more than eight million active users, reached roughly five years after Crexendo and NetSapiens came together.
Brinton says the platform had fewer than 1.75 million users at the time of the merger. Since then, the user base has more than quadrupled, driven largely by the service providers and licensees building their own offerings on NetSapiens.
Today, the platform supports roughly 250 service providers globally.
Brinton says many newer licensees have migrated from legacy platforms such as Metaswitch and BroadSoft, while the overall licensee base has continued to expand.
A major part of the model remains what Crexendo calls “sessions, not seats.”
Instead of licensing strictly by individual user seats, NetSapiens is licensed on concurrent usage. Brinton says that gives partners greater flexibility to create their own service packages, user profiles and pricing models.
The platform is also designed to operate under the partner’s own brand.
That becomes increasingly important as service providers move beyond basic UCaaS and build solutions around specific verticals.
Brinton points to the NetSapiens ecosystem as a major growth engine.
Partners can combine the core platform with additional technologies in areas such as AI, contact center, mobility and customer experience.
Tango Networks is one example, allowing partners to extend UC capabilities to a user’s native mobile dialer.
Brinton says the model lets providers tailor offerings around markets ranging from education and professional services to highly specialized verticals.
That can also support higher revenue per user.
“When you add these new applications and really make the solution fit a specific vertical, partners can command significantly higher revenue and margin,” Brinton says.
Crexendo is also preparing a major NetSapiens platform update, version 46, known as NetSapiens Flow.
Brinton says feedback from some licensees has been that the changes are substantial enough to feel more like a new platform than a simple version update, with a redesigned user interface and changes across core functionality.
Those developments will be a major focus at the upcoming NetSapiens User Group Meeting in Austin.
The annual UGM brings together licensees and ecosystem partners to share best practices, demonstrate new applications and explore how they are building differentiated services on top of NetSapiens.
For Brinton, the eight-million-user mark is ultimately a reflection of that community.
Visit Crexendo.com and NetSapiens.com to learn more.