At the Channel Partners Expo 2019, Mike Cromwell had a chat with Dave George from Netsapiens about what excites him this year.
“For us, personally, it’s all about sessions not seats,” he says, enthusiastically. Netsapiens sells on concurrent, active calls, not on a per-seat basis, which means they are more interested imn installing lines that actually are going to be used for calls than seats for locations like break rooms and kitchens that may see only very occasional use.
Customers can “oversubscribe, and make more money”. This flexibility in pricing allows those who offer Netsapiens the chance to bill more in line with how their customers used to pay with their former phone company or service provider.
Other providers charge their dealers and partners on a per-seat basis, so this is definitely an outlier. He takes this varied approach forward as he looks to the future. “I think what you’re going to see is verticals being adopted..CPaaS is going to become a buzzword, it’s going to really take shape. Contact center as a service will come into its own.”
And that’s where his model of calls vs seat stands out. By being able to charge your customers for their calls rather than for seats that may remain idle, billing may be more complex but it will be more accurate, and in the right circumstances, lower.
CPaaS, or Communications Platforms as a Service, is the ability to “apply, on top of the UCaaS layer, specific API-driven products and services.”
This sounds like a step in the right direction and really starts to put the ‘Unified’ in Unified Communications as a Service.
Listen to more of Dave’s insights here: