R.I.P. Sangoma Being Acquired

[jt1001001]

Sangoma to be acquired by BRC Holdings. Press release here:

Sangoma Technologies Corporation Enters into Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by BRC Group Holdings, Inc. - Sangoma Technologies

View Press Release Sangoma Technologies Corporation Enters into Definitive Agreement to be Acquired by BRC Group Holdings, Inc. Transaction Creates an Industry Leader in Unified Business Communications Toronto, Ontario and Los Angeles, California: September 28, 2026 – Sangoma Technologies...

sangoma.com

 

[phonebuff]

Saw it also on Redit..

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260928333255/en/Sangoma-Technologies-Corporation-Enters-into-Definitive-Agreement-to-be-Acquired-by-BRC-Group-Holdings-Inc.

 

[KNERD]

A Holding company is only there for profit.

 

[kenn10]

A Holding company is only there for profit.

Guess what happens to non-profit generating parts of the company like FreePBX.

 

[KNERD]

Guess what happens to non-profit generating parts of the company like FreePBX.

Either sold off or going closed source probably

 

[kenn10]

Either sold off or going closed source probably

And so the next existential threat to FreePBX has entered the conversation. I've made the move to FS PBX and am not using FreePBX much any more. So far, there is constant development and improvement with no drama. FusionPBX also continues to move forward. These are good alternatives for commercial and hobbyist installations.

My experience with corporate buyouts by holding companies has not been great. I was a c-band manager at Avaya. I started with AT&T, spun off as Lucent Technologies, and spun again as Avaya. I was a 14 state manager over the implementation and PBX provisioning workforce for the southeast USA. I had the most profitable group in the country with 25 project managers, dozens of software support personnel, and installation and provisioning personnel. Over a period of a year, the entire team was gutted and outsourced to business partners.

Avaya was bought by two holding companies. They bought Nortel's PBX group so they could get the maintenance customers and then shut it down. Then they systematically closed Avaya facilities and sold off intellectual property from Avaya's Bell Labs arm (called Avaya Labs.) Then huge layoffs happened. Without adequate support or sales forces, customers fled for cloud solutions or Cisco CUCM installations. Home Depot was one of the largest customers and they dumped Avaya.

Large corporations who had been loyal AT&T/Lucent Technologies/Avaya customers did not want to spend millions of dollars for big projects and have to deal with a remote project manager in India and installation teams from 3rd party business partners. The "whole team" approach to implementation was tossed out the window and customers who had willingly paid for it moved on.

Avaya is barely hanging on after two bankruptcy filings within six years, but the holding companies got rich in a hurry and left the corpse behind..

So no, I don't expect good things from a holding company buyout of Sangoma.

 

[chris_c_]

Is any foundation or group going to fork Asterisk and FreePBX and continue them on as free open source software?

 

[KNERD]

Is any foundation or group going to fork Asterisk and FreePBX and continue them on as free open source software?

TangoPBX

community.tangopbx.org

 

[Hometech]

It would be great if there was an import to from FreePBX to FS PBX I would start the move over. Just so use to Freepbx not looking forward to the learning curve...

 

[kenn10]

FS PBX and FusionPBX have made conversion a bit easier with spreadsheet imports for extensions and some other portions off the system.

The difficult part is a totally different jargon: Gateway = Trunk, Phone Number = Incoming DID Route, Virtual Receptionist = IVR. There are many different features and details but FS PBX has excellent documentation to get the system up and running. I learned it by spinning up a test system and just pounding away until I learned it.

 

[kenn10]

An insightful look at the sale of Sangoma from Crosstalk Solutions:

 

[wardmundy]

And now you know why Incredible PBX 2027 was planned as our final release. Turns out we weren't off by much in our projected timetable. As much as we like the new Incredible PBX 2026 platform, the tea leaves don't look all that promising, and we may very well be the only Debian 13 platform supporting Asterisk 22 & 23 as well as FreePBX 17.

So... I join @kenn10 in suggesting you begin taking a careful look at FS PBX and FusionPBX. Except for our honeypots, we've been running these platforms for more than a year now with zero problems.

 

[Samot]

An insightful look at the sale of Sangoma from Crosstalk Solutions:

Chris' logic and break down is completely off. In referring to the $184M in services revenue Chris says and I quote "Most of it comes from Star2Star which doesn't run on Asterisk it runs on FreeSwitch" and "The 184M in recurring revenue doesn't need Asterisk or FreePBX to keep running". These are inaccurate statements.

The services bucket includes numerous things including support services, Switchvox subscriptions, module renewals and Asterisk development support contracts to name some. On top of that the entire services platform is based on

* Star2Star
* SIPStation
* FAXStation
* VI Communications
* Netfortris

To break it down more:
2019 bought VI Communications - Recurring Revenue: $17M
2020 bought Star2Star - Recurring Revenue: $63.5M
2022 bought Netfortis - Recurring Revenue: $43.5M

So those alone would be $124M in recurring revenue. In order for Star2Star to be "most of the 184M" in 2026, even it was 70% of the bucket would require a 12-13% growth rate while things like VI and Netfortis took major dives. The maths just don't jive.

Considering that the Star2Star purchase is what broke Sangoma and they also overpaid for Netfortis....all their debt is from those two purchases and like almost $68M in non-cash goodwill. So the $72M in debt is mostly Star2Star and Netfortis.

What gave Sangoma $15M in free cash flow in 2026....FreePBX/Asterisk ecosystem. So again, Star2Star wasn't the blushing bridge that caught BRC's attention.

 

[wardmundy]

Chris' logic and break down is completely off. In referring to the $184M in services revenue Chris says and I quote "Most of it comes from Star2Star which doesn't run on Asterisk it runs on FreeSwitch" and "The 184M in recurring revenue doesn't need Asterisk or FreePBX to keep running". These are inaccurate statements.

The services bucket includes numerous things including support services, Switchvox subscriptions, module renewals and Asterisk development support contracts to name some. On top of that the entire services platform is based on

* Star2Star
* SIPStation
* FAXStation
* VI Communications
* Netfortris

To break it down more:
2019 bought VI Communications - Recurring Revenue: $17M
2020 bought Star2Star - Recurring Revenue: $63.5M
2022 bought Netfortis - Recurring Revenue: $43.5M

So those alone would be $124M in recurring revenue. In order for Star2Star to be "most of the 184M" in 2026, even it was 70% of the bucket would require a 12-13% growth rate while things like VI and Netfortis took major dives. The maths just don't jive.

Considering that the Star2Star purchase is what broke Sangoma and they also overpaid for Netfortis....all their debt is from those two purchases and like almost $68M in non-cash goodwill. So the $72M in debt is mostly Star2Star and Netfortis.

What gave Sangoma $15M in free cash flow in 2026....FreePBX/Asterisk ecosystem. So again, Star2Star wasn't the blushing bridge that caught BRC's attention.

It's been a long time since my math major days but, if you have revenue of $17M, $63.5M, and $43.5M, the statement that "most of the revenue" comes from the $63.5M source would not be "completely off." In fact, it would be an accurate statement given the $72M in debt service resulting from the overpriced acquisitions. But keep that bashing going, @Samot. As usual, your red herring adds nothing to the points Chris was making about the future viability of Asterisk and FreePBX which is all any of us care about in this forum. Hopefully, you'll move on to the MajicJack forum in coming months.

 

[atsak]

I feel like I'm getting to old for this sh*t. Venture capital ruins another super useful thing. I know they haven't ruined it yet, but they will . . .

 

[chris_c_]

My question:
Is FreePBX and Asterisk licensed in such a way as close-sourcing them would be impossible?
EDIT: This was the whole idea of GPL, when you make a useful change, you MUST contribute it to upstream.

 

[billsimon]

Asterisk and FreePBX have a long and rich history; if Sangoma goes crooked on them, there are plenty of ways of continuing to build on the strong foundation of those two projects.

Even if the projects were suddenly made closed-source, they can be taken from the last point where they are open and developed from there.

These days, software development is practically free if you know how to say the right words to Claude. As an example: "here's what the commercial module XYZ does; implement it as open source." You would (or wouldn't, at this point) be surprised at how far you can get with this.

 

[Samot]

if you have revenue of $17M, $63.5M, and $43.5M, the statement that "most of the revenue" comes from the $63.5M source would not be "completely off."

That was the revenue they generated back when they were bought in 2019, 2020 and 2022. If Star2Star is still only $63.5M in revenue after six years, that means it had zero growth or that any growth was completely undercut by losses. But those three things were just the companies they bought and the revenue streams they brought in. You're ignoring the other "services" revenue streams that make of the $184M.

Now if Star2Star is still only doing $63.5M of that $184M then it's only 34.5% of the total revenue stream.

As usual, your red herring adds nothing to the points Chris was making about the future viability of Asterisk and FreePBX which is all any of us care about in this forum

Well Ward, when you take away VI, Star2Star and Netfortis...you have all the FreePBX/Asterisk driven services that are left. That would mean based on our maths examples and numbers here....Star2Star is $63.M of the revenue and the Asterisk/FreePBX revenue is about the same....why would BRC walk in and kill 1/3 of the revenue stream? VI and SIPStation are integrated into FreePBX/Switchvox/PBXact, etc. there's a good size of both those user bases (VI/SIPStation) that are tied into that user base being on FreePBX/Switchvox/PBXact so chopping away FreePBX/Asterisk will also chop away at those other revenue streams.

So Star2Star is the driving force of the sale according to Chris but if it's worth the same as the FreePBX/Asterisk ecosystem why would they dump the FreePBX/Asterisk ecosystem and erode the revenue stream?

 

[Samot]

Even if the projects were suddenly made closed-source, they can be taken from the last point where they are open and developed from there.

Yeah, never going to happen. The GPL is irrevocable for existing code. They cannot just "close-source" Asterisk or OSS FreePBX modules. The legal nightmare alone is awful, all the other crap that would go with it would also be another nightmare. There's code in FreePBX Sangoma can't rightfully dual-license or change. FreePBX has a horrible history of contributed code with no licensing agreement over what Sangoma could do with the code.

 

[KNERD]

And now you know why Incredible PBX 2027 was planned as our final release. Turns out we weren't off by much in our projected timetable. As much as we like the new Incredible PBX 2026 platform, the tea leaves don't look all that promising, and we may very well be the only Debian 13 platform supporting Asterisk 22 & 23 as well as FreePBX 17.

I noticed on the FreePBX forum they have a thread about asking what people want in FreePBX 18. I wonder if that will get cancelled now