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If I Could Turn Back Time…

Breanna Fernie

Did you hear Cher singing that? Reread it… that’s better.

Before running Marketing at ClearlyIP, I ran my own phone business. So for all the entrepreneurs, tech business owners, system administrators, and resellers in telecom, I have felt your pain. You will likely understand what used to keep me up at night; and it always came down to the bottom line.

Selling was the easy part. We sold both on-premise and cloud SaaS platforms, but it was an assortment of different systems with different endpoints in different datacenters. I get a headache just thinking about it.

Sales would identify what solution to sell a client, the platform, and the phone sets. The recommended phone sets were always based on the clients’ needs. Is it a call center, a remote workforce, an answering position? What features and functionality do they need? What is the budget? But then came the hard part, estimating the labor, the time it would take a technician to program and turn on the phones and the extensions. Plus, the ongoing maintenance of the extensions for support. We liked to say we had it down to a science, but we didn’t. In many instances, we underestimated and got burnt on the time it took for the initial install, deployment, and ongoing management.

Some of you reading this are much like we were, managing hundreds of extensions while selling and managing FreePBX® Systems. We needed one platform with a single GUI, security, and accessibility.

We dreamt of a solution to help us manage multiple systems, a solution designed to be agnostic from the PBX, something universally compatible with any sip server that does standard phone configuration with the phones we supported. A solution that would support any open standard SIP platform that provisions via user domain name or IP address. Ideally, the PBX or softswitch would auto-connect to a cloud device manager and feed information to the tool about extensions, so you don’t have to replicate all the data for things like the Extension Number, SIP Secret, Codecs, and other settings.

The ClearlyIP team realized there was a need to manage multiple SIP devices across more than 1 single PBX or softswitch. So we created the Cloud Device Manager (CDM) tool. A solution that could be universally compatible with any SIP server that does standard phone registrations with the phone. Working with any open standard SIP platform that provisions the same, using a domain name or IP address. And because it is cloud-based, it makes it easily scalable.
Cloud Device Manager

You can install this module in FreePBX, and after pasting your keycode, it will securely auto-connect to your cloud device manager location and feed information to CDM about your extensions and information about your PBX such as the IP Address, feature codes and Codecs, so you don’t have to replicate all the data.

In a world with CDM, suddenly managing deployments becomes exponentially easier. Handling multiple deployments with a single interface allows for a more straightforward overview of your deployments, replacing the need for you or your team needing to learn multiple systems, saving you both time and money.

For many companies, this will be a welcomed game changer. For others, it is a tool that can let them be more competitive while offering a level of service and management that was just not available before.

While I’m excited to offer CDM to our customers, I’m a little jealous that this tool was not available when I needed it. Now, if I could just turn back time…