Новости линейки IP-телефонов Flat-Phone

In the program:

The event was opened by Maria Bobtsova, Director of IP Phone Product Line Development at Flat-PRO.

In January 2024, we launched the production of Russian Flat-Phone phones in the Russian Federation. And every day we answer the question, "Do you really produce phones in Russia?" And the second question from the same category: "Why are Russian phones so expensive?" I will answer these questions immediately on this slide.

Yes, we really produce phones in Russia, our production includes the manufacture of printed circuit boards, the application of all components and modules to it. Then this printed circuit board undergoes various controls, washing, blowing, and quality control again. And only after that the final assembly begins, which includes installing the board in the case, screwing in bolts and nuts, installing the keyboard, assembling the handset, etc. That is, we really produce phones in the city of Elektrostal. For large customers, we have an option such as a tour of the factory, where we can bring a customer who is very doubtful with us, we will show and tell them, and they will see live that the phones are really assembled in Russia, and this is not some large-scale assembly. But I will immediately stipulate that they do not like to bring outsiders in large numbers to our production, so this should be a significant project, and we will plan this excursion together with you.

Why are Russian phones so expensive? Firstly, when there is a technological process based on machines, where everything is done by automation, the cost of work is approximately the same for us as in China. But for the final assembly, both we and Chinese factories use manual labor to put a weighting agent in the handset, screw on the speakers, etc. And manual labor in our country, where all specialists, especially young ones, want to receive a decent salary, is expensive. And this, of course, affects the cost. And the second important factor that affects the cost of phones is the cost of Russian microchips. In phones that are produced in Russia, according to the requirements of the legislation, there is a Russian microchip. This Russian microchip, not only did we redesign the board for it, because it is simply physically larger in size, but it also costs exactly 10 times more than the Chinese analogue. And this also significantly affects the cost. This is the cost of components plus the cost of logistics, delivery of all components, when they need to be assembled in one place, brought, etc., which also gives a markup. Therefore, the cost of TOP (telecom equipment of Russian production) phones that you see from us and our competitors is approximately the same for everyone. And it is born not because we want to earn three to four times more than our Chinese colleagues, but due to the fact that our overhead costs are still much higher than theirs. We are constantly working on optimizing all these costs, but at the moment the situation is like this, and this is an honest position that can be told to the customer. It's just that Russian workers also want to work for a good salary, and therefore the cost of our devices is still higher.

We do not make plastic cases in Russia, this would also greatly affect the cost. Plastic that would not be ashamed of, and which would be pleasant to hold in your hands in terms of cases, and phones are tactility, this is visual acceptance and pleasantness. Therefore, we still bring cases from China.

The model range of our phones has not changed much over the year, only one model has been added. We also have three telephone sets in the line. And the next question is, which phone models are included in the Rosreestr? And here we have something to boast about. We launched production in January. In April, some models were added to the Rosreestr. But on December 27, on New Year's Eve, the Flat-Phone B6 phone model and our expansion console were also added to the register of the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Thus, all our phones can currently be found in the register of the Ministry of Industry and Trade. And the customer now has a choice in terms of expensive, cheap, medium model and expansion console.

Our phones are also included in the register of PAHs of the Ministry of Digital Development. And our phone software is all included in the register of the Ministry of Digital Development, in the software register, thus the domestic origin of the phones is confirmed at the level of two ministries. Moreover, when we pass the inspection of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, this is necessarily an on-site inspection, a commission that comes to the production, checks whether the production process is really underway and studies the documentation. Colleagues from the Ministry of Industry and Trade work conscientiously. Therefore, we have confirmation of Russian production.

The next question that almost every partner asked me. How to find phones in the Rosreestr?

The Ministry of Industry and Trade has one basic register, this is the register of radio-electronic products, which was created according to government decree PP-719. And a little later, a separate register was created for telecommunications equipment, according to decree PP-878. And our phones, since they belong to the category of telecommunications equipment, are included in the TORP register, i.e. telecommunications equipment of Russian production according to decree PP-878. At the same time, if you go to the website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, there is both decree PP-719 and decree PP-878, but even if you select the section decree PP-878 and type IP-phones in the search, you will not find a single phone there, neither ours nor anyone else's. A large blue button on the website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, which says decree PP-878, allows you to fall into the TORP register only in this case, and there the search works normally for them, you can find IP-phones, IP-PBXs and other telecommunications equipment. Here's a life hack for you. The button is big, but for some reason no one notices it. We have a separate small instruction for the customer who cannot find the confirmation he needs, on one page: how to fall into the desired register in order to find the register numbers and get an extract from it.

The firmware is modified, the microchips are modified. Donor phones for us are Deanstar phones, we do not hide this. Last year we officially talked about this. If we are talking about searching in GISP (state information system of industry), this is a search for suppliers, you can fall out of there, but some go to the register and search from the register. In general, searching on the website of the Ministry of Industry and Trade is a separate quest that can be done in different ways, because some of our customers say: "Are your phones really in the register? We dug through the entire register and did not find you there." And where did you look? They were looking in GISP. You don't need to search for IP-phone in GISP. You need to search for Flat. There, the supplier will pop up, and you can already see all his products by the supplier. In general, there are nuances. But you can find us.

Who uses our phones? The first, main category of our users is users and customers who are sensitive to register models, to register positions, those for whom the requirements for the purchase of equipment from the register are mandatory. These are both government agencies and law enforcement agencies. We have successful cases of deliveries to energy companies, healthcare, education, transport industries, banks, etc. Why am I listing them? Because cases always work, and are always needed. If you need information about where it is already used in the industry in which your customer works, you are working on this issue, you need some real feedback, examples, recommendations, come to us. We already have successful implementations in all these industries, and we are ready to share them.

Well, the latest news in terms of who uses Flat phones.

Government decrees streamline who should and who should not use TORP solutions, what's new and what's interesting. Here is decree 1875, which was issued on December 24. Not everyone knows how to work with it yet. There is interesting news there, so I will also tell you about it. According to the latest decree, all categories of companies that are required to purchase TORP phones have the right to purchase them in a share of 60% of equipment from the register and 40% of equipment from outside the register. Last year, the standard was 50 to 50. This year, the share of TORP phones has increased by 10%. But at the same time, there is an excellent reservation in this decree that this delivery of 60 to 40 can be carried out within the framework of one purchase. That is, they immediately have the right to buy 60% of TORP phones within the framework of one purchase, and take non-TORP phones for 40%. Since our line also includes both TORP phones and non-TORP phones, which are much cheaper, that is, we can offer customers to optimize the budget, while ensuring a monovendor supply. Last year, our customers, when supplying 50 to 50, usually took 50 to 50, where it was considered not from the quantity, but from the amount of the purchase. Therefore, they usually take some amount of the most expensive phones, they close this 50 - 60 percent, the amount required by law for the supply, and then close the rest of the amount with inexpensive phones, but in a larger quantity, ensuring that they close their task and comply with the law. Not everyone knows about this rule. I explain all this on my fingers so that merchants and presales understand. But for lawyers and everyone else, we have excerpts from laws with article numbers and everything else. We have made this selection, you can give them the document so that they can figure it out themselves and explain to the customer how to work with it.

And one more important point that I would like to dwell on specifically from the point of view of legislation and work with TORP phones, according to the same decree 1875, customers are required to collect commercial offers.

At the same time, this decree currently obliges them to ensure that if they receive an offer for registered phones when collecting commercial offers, they are obliged to put the contract price up for auction, taking into account the phones that are included in the registers of the Ministry of Industry and Trade, and their Russian origin is confirmed. But nowhere in this decree does it indicate that the customer, when collecting these commercial offers, is obliged to indicate to everyone whether they have requirements for TORP. And further, having received these commercial offers, the customer is not obliged to double-check whether telephone sets or other equipment exist or do not exist in the Ministry of Industry and Trade. This applies, by the way, not only to our phones, but also to PBXs and everything else. And what we encountered at the beginning of this year on the example of several Federal Penitentiary Services, they collect commercial offers without indicating in their requests that they need registered phones, they receive inexpensive offers for Chinese telephone sets. Then they say that we did not have a single offer of registered phones, so we put the contract price at 5, 6 or 7 thousand rubles per phone, and the budget has already been allocated, the competition for this price has been determined and nothing can be done. Therefore, colleagues, please note that when you now respond to requests for commercial offers, form for NMCC, be sure to submit TORP phones there. As soon as a TORP phone, at least one, no matter whose, ours or our competitors, appears in the customer's offer, they do not have the right to allow the Chinese to bid. For us, as Russian manufacturers, this is quite relevant, because it is quite difficult to fight on price with inexpensive Chinese solutions. I announced the reasons at the beginning of the event. Therefore, a very important point: if you plan to work with Russian solutions, then be sure to submit offers for TORP phones, TORP PBXs, TORP servers and everything you work with. In this case, the customer will have to reject competing analogues produced outside the Eurasian Union as non-compliant. If the customer does not receive a single offer for Russian analogues, he calmly allows everyone else to participate in the competition. This is such an important point that I wanted to draw attention to.

Now I will tell you about our phones. So, in the model range we now have three phones, phones of the B-series and the C-series phone. What is important is that all phones are equipped with a PoE adapter by default. That is, we do not have phones without PoE.

If necessary, we are ready to install additional power supplies, because different manufacturers have separate phone models that are not equipped with PoE, and you must not forget whether it is there or not. The second point is that all our telephone sets are equipped with a port for a wired headset. There are also no restrictions here. In the senior model B10, you can also install a Bluetooth adapter and connect Bluetooth headsets. A list of recommended headsets with testing protocols is available on our website. If this information is needed, you can also contact us and get this information. Well, in principle, all the basic and advanced functionality that is needed is present, and we have not yet encountered any extra functions that our phones would not support.

What else do we have? There are expansion consoles.

The expansion console is universal, it is suitable for both B10 phones and B6 phones. This is the same console, it can be connected directly from the phone of one model to the phone of another model. In the B6 model, up to three consoles can also be connected in cascade. And the difference between the B10 and B6 models is in the size of the display and in the number of BLF keys on the telephone set. In all other respects, these phones are absolutely identical in functionality, so we have a universal console suitable for both models at once.

Our phones, if the user wishes, can be equipped with software. This is Flat-Device Manager, a software service for auto-provisioning phones.

The auto-provisioning service allows you to centrally configure and manage a fleet of telephone sets. Centralized management includes automatic configuration, configuration, status monitoring, firmware updates, scheduled maintenance, reboots, etc. on a schedule, changes to the same type of different settings. That is, a full-fledged auto-provisioning service, which is included in the register of the Ministry of Digital Development.

Our software works under Astra, under redOS and Debian. At the same time, our Flat Device Manager is a platform independent.

Our auto-provisioning service also works with Cisco, Avaya, Yealink, Qtech, Fanvil phones. We are currently working with ELTEX, we will also work with them.

This is what concerns the auto-provisioning service. It can and should be included in offers for customers, especially if they use a large number of heterogeneous or homogeneous telephone sets. You can offer it for testing. We have successful cases, even for Yealink phones. The customer was forced to abandon the native Yealink auto-configuration service, because a version for Astralinux was needed, and the Chinese software did not really want to work under our Astra. The customer deployed our service, everything works, so we also have such cases. I suggest paying attention to this software, which can complement our telephone sets.

Moving on to competitors. The task here is not to scold or praise competitors.

Very often, when we receive a technical task, we need to quickly understand what customers are guided by, whether we can or cannot win in this competition, who the TOR was written for, what the customer is guided by, what he initially chose, that is, whether it is worth fighting there. If we talk about junior models, then the key difference that ELTEX phones have is the size of the display. Their display is larger than ours. But, if we take our phones, then the set of codecs that we support and are ready to offer the customer is the largest. This is what concerns junior models. And at the same time, a very important point that you need to pay attention to is whether the phone that is offered has PoE or does it need an external power supply. The cost of external power supplies for all three vendors is more expensive than ours. And, if Qtech power supplies cost slightly more than ours, then ELTEX power supplies cost significantly more, and therefore they always show their price separately. Therefore, when a customer compares the price just for phones, it definitely makes sense to show the cost of the power supply separately, because in this case the price comparison may be in our favor. There is just such a small trick of competitors, which I would like to draw attention to and share with you.

As for the middle model. We were very much waiting for the B6 model in TORP, it appeared there. The model has 6 BLF keys, as well as the LTEXVP 17 model. The differences are in the displays. They have a 3.2 display, we have a slightly smaller display, but we have a color display. Therefore, when we talk to the customer, we offer him to choose either a monochrome display, but two inches larger, which are not very noticeable visually, or a color display with more high-precision graphics, which is more pleasant to look at and easier to read.

If we talk about senior models, then the technical characteristics of the models are very, very similar.

But our set of codecs does not change from phone to phone. Colleagues on different phone models may have different sets of codecs, and this point is also very important to clarify.

As for expansion consoles, ELTEX has an unconditional advantage here, they have 22 BLF keys, we have 20 on the console, so if it is fundamentally important for the customer to get two more keys, we can understand them somewhere.

But here the question is already decided by the capabilities of the telephone set itself, negotiations with customers, etc. But if we talk about the initial study of the TOR, then if 22 keys seemed more attractive to the customer, although I have not met more than 20 keys on consoles except for ELTEX, and they have two more, and they are great, in this regard they are very seriously different from the rest. So they have such a technical task. And here we need to talk to the customer, whether he is ready to consider alternatives or not. Well, if he is not ready, then the partner who offered him these phones is great.

And one more question that is often asked to us and our distributors, is it possible to take phones for testing? Not only is it possible, but it is necessary. And we have a demo fund, and OCS also has a demo fund. And over the past year, we have conducted more than 150 different pilots and tests, and more than 90% of them ended with the fact that customers liked our telephone sets, they included them in the project precisely based on the results of piloting, testing and comparison, and accepted them into work.

Well, continuing the answer to the question, why do customers take phones for testing, I will answer. Phones are taken for testing in order to make sure that they will work with a particular telecom platform that the customer is already using or is going to use.

And here on the first slide, telephone platforms are shown.

Illustrations provided by the press service of «Флат-ПРО».