The Unified Communications marketplace is dynamic but mature, with a large number of platforms competing for market share.
There is a shift towards embedding contact centre capabilities into the voice platforms used by even the smallest businesses, and as businesses shift applications and workloads to the cloud there is a trend towards fully hosted communications systems.
For an MSP seeking to find the best option to recommend to customers, the wide range of choices can be daunting.
Would a SaaS style product, such as Ring Central, 8×8 or DialPad, be the best option?
What about single-tenant options such as 3CX that I can host for my customers, or even install on-site?
MSPs’ tend to evaluate systems based on technical criteria, with a focus on feature set, reliability, integration and ongoing support, and with our background in running a successful MSP the team at Activa completely understands that perspective.
However, we humbly suggest that there are other criteria that are highly relevant to the selection process, and in this article we explore several key factors that we believe MSPs’ overlook when selecting a UC platform to offer to their customers.
We also explain why we feel that Xelion – the leading UCaaS platform now available in Australia and New Zealand – is the ideal UC platform for MSPs’.
Simplicity for the MSP
In many ways the approach taken by SaaS style platforms, such as Ring Central, 8×8 or DialPad, provides MSP’s with a very simple option. The entire platform is hosted and managed for you and your customers, and you only need to provide as much assistance and support as you wish to. However, this approach does come at a significant cost, because you are not able to control the relationship with your customer or the pricing of the services – instead you are only able to earn commissions.
If your business model is more aligned with billing your customers, or if you wish to control the pricing that customers’ pay for the UC services that you provide, then other options that you can control more directly may be more appealing, such as a single-tenant system such as 3CX, Yeastar or one of the many Asterisk based systems. However, with those systems you accept more responsibility. 
Hosting
Managing the hosting of single-tenant voice systems for customers is something MSPs’ are well placed to do, but as many business owners have found, it’s not a model that scales well. Once you reach a few hundred customers, managing and monitoring all of those hosts has become a significant undertaking, the cost of which will significantly impact your bottom line.
Patching and Updating
One of the key concerns with single-tenant systems, such as 3CX, is security, and because of what happened in 2023 we know that MSPs’ are very aware of the risk of a security breach affecting their customers. As each customer’s host is running its own instance of the software, each one needs to be patched and updated. Whilst we know that this can be automated to a degree, even with just one update and ten patches per year if your MSP has two hundred customers that’s a grand total of 2,200 updates to be applied. That effort is often not factored into the cost of offering the platform, but in reality it has a significant impact on your profitability.
Backups
As an MSP you are very familiar with being responsible for the backup of customer data, and UC or just phone systems are no exception. But would you tolerate being responsible for customer backups where each customer’s ‘instance’ had to be managed separately? Depending on the single-tenant system you have chosen, managing backups may involve not only a very manual process that won’t scale well, but also a slow disaster recovery process where a new host environment needs to be built and software installed so that the backup can then be restored.
Simplicity for the customer
Unified Communications platforms can be very complex, and while they vary greatly in user interface and design it’s true to say that the majority of UC platforms would be seen as ‘complicated to use’ by end users. For businesses that are operating a permanent contact centre in the traditional sense the specialised interfaces designed for call centre workers may be suitable, but for businesses who need a system that caters to all of the staff of the business, ranging from reception to executive, and boardroom to stock room, many current UC platforms are inflexible and provide a user interface that caters to the needs of only one type of user.
Very few platforms have been developed from the ground up with a focus on empowering the user of the system, but that’s precisely how Xelion was conceived and designed.
In contrast to other UC platforms, Xelion was designed with a modular user interface that allows the user of the system to configure the software to suit not only their normal role and needs, but also to change how the system looks and works ‘on the fly’ as their needs change. For modern businesses, where staff may be working from any location and where roles and responsibilities may change at short notice, Xelion gives the user control. The best way to appreciate how unique the Xelion user interface truly is would be to arrange for a 1:1 demonstration of the system. You can arrange a demo by clicking here.
The benefits of the powerful UI of Xelion are many, but for the MSP delivering the system to the customer the key benefits to consider are:
- Lower administration and support costs – users of the system can manage and control their communications, including of staff they manage, with minimal support and assistance.
- Easier training and onboarding – customers learn the software quickly because the system is intuitive and designed to be easy to learn.
- Long term engagements – customers tend to use a lot of the features of the system which creates long term ‘stickiness’.
- Easy to sell – the single license and version of the software means that you never need to worry about supplying different licenses to suit staff in specific situations.
Control over pricing and higher profits
A key consideration for any business is to maximise the profitability of their operations, and in this area there are significant differences between the types of UC platforms that an MSP can select.
However, as an MSP –
When did you last evaluate the profitability of the UC or phone platform you are selling to your customers?
Does your chosen platform allow customers to pay a convenient monthly fee, with no annual maintenance or renewal costs, and with no hosting or associated maintenance and support costs to consider?
Is your chosen platform available under a simple license model, where all features are included with every license purchased, eliminating different versions or editions of the product to manage?
Is your chosen platform provided as a fully managed service for you and your customers, where you only need to manage the configuration of the system, while patches, updates and backups are taken care of?
When considering these factors, the trade-off between a SaaS style platform, such as Ring Central, 8×8 or DialPad, and a single-tenant system, such as 3CX, are clear.
With a SaaS style approach your responsibility is reduced and you can focus on selling and supporting your customers, but you lose control over your billing, pricing and margins, and are only able to earn commissions as a reseller of the platform. With a single-tenant system, you are able to control your pricing (although we would point out that many single-tenant systems such as 3CX make their pricing very public) but you are responsible for more aspects of the platform, and you have to manage a more conventional licensing process based on annual licensing and renewals.
What if there was a way to maximise your profits by combining the best aspects of the SaaS and single-tenant approaches?
Well, we humbly suggest that there is a way.
Xelion is a true multi-tenant platform that is delivered to MSPs’ and their customers as a managed service. The hosting, updating, patching, backup and support of the platform is managed for you, allowing you to focus on managing the configuration of your customer’s tenants and delivering great service and support to them.
However, this SaaS style approach does not come with the same restrictions and costs as you may expect from systems such as Ring Central, 8×8 or DialPad. With Xelion, MSPs’ retain control over the billing, pricing and margins that they can generate and there are no license versions, editions or annual renewals to worry about – all features are included with every license under the simple license model.
Xelion really does provide the best of SaaS and single-tenant UC platforms.
Exclusivity and a way to stand out
While Xelion is a proven platform, with thousands of businesses and hundreds of thousands of users of the platform every day, it is new to the Australian and New Zealand markets. In fact, we brought the platform to both countries!
This is both a challenge and an opportunity.
For an MSP offering customers a well-known SaaS or single-tenant UC platform, it can be very difficult to add value to a platform that literally any other MSP can also deliver. In many cases, customers can be driven to compare alternatives based on price alone, because there is little to distinguish proposals offering them exactly the same system.
Offering the same platform as many other MSPs’ also makes it very difficult to offer customers a point of difference, and in a crowded marketplace finding a way to stand out and offer customers something they didn’t know they needed is a big advantage.
This is just one reason that Xelion is a compelling UC platform for MSPs’. Not only is it a powerful and profitable solution that customers love using; it also has a uniquely flexible and empowering user interface that customers won’t see in any other system. One demonstration of Xelion to customers is usually sufficient to convince them of the power and flexibility of the platform.
The challenge of bringing a platform that is well established elsewhere but new to your region is one that can be addressed in a number of different ways.
First, we can establish the history of the platform to demonstrate that it has been developed and has grown over a period of time and will be around for the long haul. Xelion was founded in the Netherlands in 1988 and has grown to become a leading UC platform in Europe and the UK.
Second, we can look at the awards and accreditations the platform has secured, and in this area Xelion has recently excelled by securing one of the largest communications industry awards in 2024.They also won in 2023.
Xelion is available in Australia and New Zealand exclusively through partners of Activa Communications, and we take partnerships very seriously. Any MSP offering Xelion as a UC platform to their customers can be confident that they won’t be just one of many companies offering exactly the same system, and this provides you with an opportunity to choose a UC platform that will help you stand out in the marketplace.
Trust and alignment in partnerships
As an MSP you may have experienced what it is like to deal with a toxic vendor or supplier. Vendors who don’t value your business, or your partnership with them. Vendors who treat the channel as an afterthought, and who are happy to deal directly with your customers, even after you’ve introduced them to the product.
With a background in successful operations as an MSP, the Activa team have experienced these sorts of behaviours first hand. 
The simple truth is that any partnership between an MSP and a vendor or supplier needs to be based on trust, and unfortunately some of the more widely used single-tenant phone systems offered by MSPs’ in Australia and New Zealand are provided by vendors who have shown that they don’t value or respect their partners.
The team at Activa have decades of experience operating a highly successful MSP, and we’ve applied that understanding to design our partner program, which is tailored to the needs of MSPs’ in Australia in New Zealand.
We know that trust is key, and we place our partnerships with MSPs’ at the centre of everything that we do. In fact, our operations and business processes have been specifically designed to help us make our MSP partners more efficient and profitable.
We have a 100% channel-only business model and will never provide services directly to the customers of our partners, and we are committed to helping our partners to be more profitable and efficient in their operations by tailoring everything that we do to suit the business model of MSPs’.
Conclusion
Xelion combines a number of key attributes that make it the ideal platform for MSPs’ to offer UCaaS to their customers.
It’s simple and easy to sell, even easier to manage, and the powerful UI empowers the customer to manage their communications in a way that generates long term revenue streams.
It’s offered under a pricing model where MSPs’ can generate attractive ongoing commissions, or set their own pricing, with everything included in the simple license fee per user, and this results in superior profitability than either the SaaS or single-tenant hosted options available today.
The saturation of the market with MSPs’ offering the same platforms, in the same ways, has made it very difficult for any MSP to stand out in the marketplace, but Xelion presents an opportunity to leap-frog the competition and provide customers with a proven UC platform that customers won’t see in every alternative proposal they receive.
Activa knows what it takes to succeed as an MSP and we know that nobody has time to do business with vendors who don’t respect their partners, and who don’t value their partnerships. Instead, we provide MSPs’ with services and business processes that are tailored to how they do business.