Key takeaways:
- Controvo is built by a dedicated team working on it full time, not alongside a day job at a phone system shop
- At 1:11 AM this morning our lead dev added TCP latency to the Phone System Table, the NOC, and the NOC drilldown, and posted the screenshots straight into the partner chat
- We have done more than a hundred video calls with partners, most of them an hour or longer, spent listening, onboarding, and training their teams on what just shipped
- Every partner has a live chat that reaches the developers, and that channel turned into a peer group where partners answer each other
- All of it is checkable: release notes going back to January 2025, a public launch thread on the 3CX community forum, and an independent penetration test
1:11 AM on a Thursday
At 1:11 this morning our lead dev dropped three screenshots into the partner chat. TCP latency now appears in the Phone System Table, in the NOC, and in the NOC drilldown. 13.6 ms, 8.7 ms, 13.1 ms, 11.2 ms, one row per system, with a threshold line drawn across the graph.
It measures a TCP handshake rather than a ping because ICMP is unreliable from cloud infrastructure, and a number you cannot trust is worse than no number at all. How long it takes to open a connection to a PBX is closer to what your users actually feel than a ping was ever going to be.
Nobody asked him to post it at one in the morning. That is when it was finished, and the people who would care were in the channel.
5am for the UK, 8pm for Australia
Our partners are not in one timezone, which means our working day is not one either. A problem that surfaces at 9am in London surfaces at 4am here. We have fixed bugs at 5am because a UK partner was in the middle of their morning and could not wait for ours. We have taken 8pm dinner meetings because that is the next morning in Australia and it was the only hour that worked for both of us.
This sounds like a complaint. It is not. It is the part of the job we would keep if we could only keep one part, because it is where you find out what is actually wrong with the product.
A Hundred Video Calls
We have sat on more than a hundred video calls with partners. Seventy-four of them were recorded, and those alone add up to over seventy-six hours. Not demos with a slide deck. An hour or two of somebody walking us through their fleet, their tenants, the spreadsheet they built because the product they were using could not answer a question, and the specific thing that made them want to throw a monitor across the room last Tuesday.
Every one of those recordings got transcribed and read. That produced 1,024 separate pieces of feedback, which deduplicated down to 291 distinct asks, each one ranked by how many partners raised it and then checked against what we had actually shipped. That list is the roadmap. Not a strategy document, not a competitor’s feature grid. A ranked list of things real partners said out loud on a call.
We also help with onboarding directly, and we get back on a call to train teams when a feature they asked for goes live. Shipping something a partner requested and then leaving them to find it in a release note is a waste of the work.
The Chat Became Something We Did Not Plan
Every partner gets access to our Slack channel, and private DMs with us. That was the intent from the start: no ticket queue, no first-tier script, a channel where you type a sentence and the person who wrote the code answers you. Feature requests usually get a real answer within hours. Bugs sometimes get fixed while the person who reported them is still typing.
What we did not plan is what the channel turned into. 3CX partners started answering each other. Somebody asks how they handle a particular kind of tenant, and two other partners reply before we do, with better answers than ours because they are the ones running that setup. We would argue that the access they have to each other is now worth as much as the software. That was not on any roadmap.
What You Can Check
We are a young product and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Controvo went generally available on the first of August. What we can offer instead of size is a paper trail, and everything in this post is verifiable if you want to spend ten minutes on it.
The release notes start in January 2025 and run monthly from there, so the cadence is on the record rather than in a claim. The launch thread on the 3CX community forum is public, and so is what partners said in it. Peter Terpening at Synfone put it better than our marketing copy does:
Controvo is a game changer. The most impressive thing about Controvo isn’t a particular feature or tool, but instead how responsive the dev team has been.
An independent penetration test by ISP Security was completed in July, with findings remediated and retested. The full timeline, from the year Controvo ran only on our own fleet through the pilot and into launch, is laid out on our Battle-Tested page.
Today our partners manage more than a thousand 3CX systems and over twenty-seven thousand extensions inside Controvo.
Why We Are Telling You This
If you are choosing something to run your 3CX fleet with, you are not really choosing a feature list. Feature lists are easy to write and easy to copy. You are choosing who picks up when something breaks on a Friday afternoon, and whether the thing you asked for in March exists by June.
We cannot prove that in a comparison table. The best we can do is tell you what the work actually looks like, and point at the timestamps.
The coffee is set for 6am. If you manage more than a couple of 3CX systems and you want to see what a fleet looks like in one place, tell us about your portfolio and a real person will get back to you.