ChannelVision Magazine is spreading the word about Crexendo’s tremendous growth in recent months by featuring it on the cover of its March/April issue. ChannelVision sat down with Crexendo’s President and COO, Doug Gaylor, to discuss the company’s impact on the UCaaS and CCaaS markets and Crexendo passing the three million user milestone. Read the full interview below.
Crexendo Celebrates Three Million End Users
By Brady Hicks
Businesses today need to collaborate on-the-go like never before. With an evolving, post-COVID landscape, they crave scalability to adjust as demands change and flexibility to use these capabilities alongside existing software.
Crexendo – despite being a smaller company pitted against giants such as Cisco and Microsoft in the UCaaS platform space – has emerged as a true heavyweight in its field. The firm is currently the third largest provider of UCaaS platforms in the U.S., as well as the fastest growing UCaaS platform in North America, per Frost & Sullivan.
It offers products through both Direct and Platform channels. The Direct division – its “Crexendo Classic” unit that functions as its telecom services side – focuses on directly distributing UCaaS services to end users. On the Platform side, its collection of “Software Solutions” is largely based on the 2021 acquisition of NetSapiens. “Software Solutions is where we’re selling the platform to over 205 UCaaS licensees for their businesses,” said Crexendo president and COO, Doug Gaylor. “This can be anywhere from a national provider like BCM One Skyswitch to a smaller MSP that handles maybe a few thousand stations.
“We’re making an impact in the UCaaS market with our Platform and Direct offer,” he continued. “We go the extra mile from a customer service perspective.”
Crexendo assists partners and customers in a myriad of ways. In contrast to what Gaylor calls competitors’ “plug-and-pray” method, it offers a 100 percent uptime guarantee on the Direct side, lifetime warranty on Crexendo-branded phones and a more personalized touch. There’s also its per-session – not traditional per-seat – pricing on the Software Solutions end.
“If you’ve got 10,000 desktops with Cisco or Microsoft, you’re paying for 10,000 licenses,” noted Gaylor, who believes that necessary telco services need to shift with the post COVID world. “It doesn’t matter if they’re being heavily used or not. Not everyone is in the office and using their desk phones. But with Crexendo, I might have a 20:1 ratio, so I might get by with 500 sessions for 10,000 individual seats. It’s a lower cost-point and allows licensees to make good margins.”
On the Platform side, this also plays into Crexendo’s new contact center as a service (CCaaS) offering. This omni-channel software facilitated Crexendo’s entry into the enterprise market. And for a company that’s traditionally played in the SMB area, this represents another leap into larger organizations.
“We’re positioning ourselves to be the best platform for the benefits we offer,” said Gaylor, noting that Crexendo incorporates contact center, text, voice-to-speech translation and other features into its platform. “Think about our offering on the platformside. It’s feature-rich, and is a perfect fit for traditional UCaaS providers in addition to MSPs.”
In all, Crexendo boasts 240+ API applications on its platform, helping extend integration into other areas. With it, users can employ UCaaS on Microsoft Teams, or employ CRM app integrations with packages from Salesforce, Zoho and HubSpot, among others.
And with AI, the possibilities grow even more endless.
“We also have sentiment analysis,” added Gaylor. “You want to be able to identify and listen to how one of your customer service representatives says this word or that word? We can easily build that into a solution.”
Recently, Nasdaq noted on its big board in New York City’s Times Square that Crexendo had eclipsed the three million user mark. It’s a point of pride for an organization that prides itself on being an “unsung hero in the marketplace.”
“That was such a threshold for us,” smiled Gaylor. “When we acquired the [NetSapiens] platform, it had 1.7 million users. We’re growing that rapidly. Even though we’re a little guy, we’re one of the strongest organizations in UCaaS. This means security for partners and customers that know we’ll continue to enhance our capabilities to ensure we’ve got the latest and greatest in every aspect of our UCaaS offering.”
This interview originally appeared in the March/April issue of ChannelVision Magazine, and is reproduced here with permission from the publisher.
