3CX is a unified communications platform, one that can be hosted on-prem or in the cloud, whether that be private or public. 3CX first emerged in 2005 as an on-prem PBX and has continually evolved to become the flexible Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform we know today. The flexibility offered by 3CX can however also lead to complexity and confusion.
When choosing 3CX for your clients you need to determine which features you require before selecting the license type, you need to consider resilience and backup strategies before selecting how you want to host it, and you’ll need to have your required channel count clear and a SIP trunk provider selected.
The essential building blocks for a 3CX deployment
These are key elements to consider when scoping a 3CX deployment for your clients:
Licensing
You will need to get these from a 3CX distributer, and we will detail the difference between the 3 license types in the 3CX playbook that covers everything self hosted 3CX.
Hosting
Your level of in-house skill, whether you have a private cloud environment, or if you are used to deploying within AWS/Azure/Google Cloud will determine how much value you can add and how best to deploy 3CX.
You can read about the hosting requirements here.
SIP Trunking
Ideally you will partner with a supported SIP provider so you can rest easy knowing that the trunks have been tested against all versions of 3CX, and it’s even better if you choose a 3CX preferred supplier so that the trunk can be associated to your instance without manual configuration being required. I’m sure you guessed since we are mentioning it, but Lightwire is both a 3CX supported and preferred SIP provider.
Billing
There are a number of ways to bill for 3CX services as an MSP. You can bill for the Licnese on an annual basis or ammortise it into your monthly charges. You can limit your charges to the 3CX element and have a telco bill the end users directly for the calling, or you can access that on a wholesale basis and bundle it all into one customer facing charge.
Variable billing can be time consuming and prone to human error, so we will go into more detail later in this book to detail how you can automate and streamline the process and make it worth your while.
You can also choose to outsource the provisioning, hosting, management and calling to a 3rd party wholesalers and pass on the charges to the end user as you see fit.
At Lightwire, we’ve partnered with Datagate and have built our own wholesale rebilling tool to simplify billing.
Looking to self host 3CX?
The Lightwire voice engineers and advanced certified 3CX engineers put together the ultimate playbook that your MSP team needs to scope, design, sell, provision, and support self hosted 3CX.
No forms, no spam, no cold calls – the 3CX Playbook is 100% free.
