Emmix ran the same Asterisk-based platform for nearly 15 years. It worked fine, right up until the risk of one outage taking down every voice customer became the reason the company stopped chasing growth it knew it could win.
TL;DR
Who: Emmix, a Little Rock, Arkansas managed IT and cloud communications provider founded in 2002, led on the technical side by CTO Devin Sain.
What: A platform replacement led by reliability, then sealed by roadmap, open APIs, and ecosystem.
Outcome: Dual geographically redundant cores, no platform-wide voice outages, and expansion underway into Colorado, Memphis, and Dallas.
- The exposure was architectural, not operational. A 15-year-old Asterisk design had no failover path, so a single outage could reach every voice customer at once.
- The real cost was growth Emmix never pursued. Leadership would not expand onto a foundation that could not guarantee uptime.
- Six requirements shaped the search. High availability with no single point of failure, geographic redundancy, a clear long-term roadmap, open APIs, an expanding ecosystem, and economics that scale.
- Redundancy was answered by architecture. Emmix now runs dual cores, one in Little Rock and one in Dallas, with automatic failover between them.
- Trajectory sealed the decision. During evaluation, Emmix watched the NetSapiens end-user base climb toward 8 million while other platforms stood still or wound down entirely.
- The migration was honest work. Emmix is candid about the growing pains. What made the difference was a Crexendo team that stayed engaged throughout.
Table of Contents
Most platform decisions get framed as feature comparisons. Emmix’s decision was not one of those.
For nearly 15 years, the Little Rock managed IT and cloud communications provider ran on an Asterisk-based platform that worked. It had carried the business from its early days as a managed IT shop through its expansion into telecommunications. The problem was never what the platform could do. The problem was what happened when it stopped.
A platform without redundancy does not fail gracefully, it fails completely. Every voice customer shared the fate of a single system, which is a risk a company can absorb at one size and not at the next.
The new customer story, No More Single Point of Failure: How Crexendo Freed Emmix to Grow, walks through what happened next. Here is the short version, and why it should sound familiar to any provider still running a platform that works fine right up until it does not.
The Risk That Was Always There
Legacy platforms rarely fail loudly enough to force a decision. They fail occasionally, get restored, and everyone moves on. That is exactly what makes them dangerous to plan around.
Emmix understood the arithmetic. When the platform went down, everyone went down with it. An outage could take an entire customer base offline at once, and no amount of good service recovery changes what that means for a hotel front desk or a medical clinic in the middle of the day.
The more expensive consequence was quieter. Emmix held back from pursuing growth it knew it could win, because leadership did not want to expand on a foundation that could not guarantee uptime. Every new customer added to a fragile platform widened the blast radius of the next outage. So the company throttled itself.
That is the part of the legacy platform story that never shows up on a maintenance invoice: the market you decline to enter.
What Emmix Was Actually Shopping For
When the company evaluated its next move, it worked from a defined list rather than a feature grid:
- High availability with no single point of failure
- Geographic redundancy to protect customer uptime
- A platform with a clear, long-term roadmap
- Open APIs for future integrations
- An expanding ecosystem of complementary solutions
- Affordable economics that would support continued growth
Reliability quickly became the deciding factor. Everything else was a qualifier.
Redundancy by Architecture, Not by Promise
Uptime commitments are easy to write into a contract and difficult to engineer. Emmix wanted the second one.
The NetSapiens platform answered the requirement directly with a multi-core architecture. Emmix runs dual cores, one in Little Rock and one in Dallas, with automatic failover between them. If something happens in one location, traffic routes to the other and customers stay online.
“We wanted multiple cores, so if something happened in one location our customers would stay online. The NetSapiens platform has helped us avoid a single issue that would take down all of our voice customers.”
Devin Sain, CTO of Emmix
The distinction matters. Geographic redundancy is not a capability that gets bolted on later. It is either in the architecture or it is not, and no roadmap promise substitutes for it.
Why Trajectory Mattered as Much as Uptime
Reliability was the foundation. What sealed the decision was where the platform was headed.
During its evaluation, Emmix watched the NetSapiens end-user base climb to almost 8 million. Read as a signal rather than a statistic, that number said something specific: Crexendo was investing while other platforms stood still or wound down entirely. Affordability mattered too, since some competing platforms were simply out of reach for a company at Emmix’s growth stage.
The surrounding ecosystem carried real weight. Emmix was drawn to the growing Crexendo Marketplace and the open APIs that made adding capabilities straightforward, including Crexendo Extend, which ties in mobile phones without additional software. An active annual user group conference reinforced the point that this was a community and a roadmap moving forward, not a platform in maintenance mode.
That last distinction is the one worth borrowing. Plenty of platforms are supported. Fewer are being built.
A Migration Nobody Pretends Was Effortless
Moving off a platform the team had run for 15 years was a significant change, and Emmix is candid about the growing pains that came with it. Any provider considering a similar move should expect the same, and should treat a vendor who promises otherwise with suspicion.
What made the difference was a Crexendo team that stayed engaged throughout: proactively reaching out, working around the schedule of a busy engineering team, and making sure every issue that surfaced was addressed.
“Any problem I’ve had, they’ve addressed. Jackie’s been amazing. She’s flexible and keeps making sure we’re moving forward.”
Devin Sain, CTO of Emmix
That hands-on partnership mirrors the way Emmix treats its own customers. The company built its reputation on enterprise-grade technology delivered with hometown service: real people, direct cell phone numbers, and the same salespeople and technicians from installation through ongoing support. A vendor relationship that worked the same way turned a major platform transition into a manageable, forward-moving process.
What Changed, and What Comes Next
Emmix replaced a single point of failure with a resilient, geographically redundant architecture, and gained the confidence to grow on it. The company reports no platform-wide voice outages. Open APIs and the Crexendo Marketplace let the team add features quickly without heavy engineering lift, and a clearly evolving roadmap means the platform keeps pace as the business expands.
Freed from the constraints of its legacy system, Emmix is expanding beyond Arkansas into Colorado, Memphis, and Dallas. The company sees particular opportunity in hospitality, where it already serves a large share of the Arkansas hotel market and is now targeting connected hotel markets in Dallas and beyond.
“We’re confident Crexendo will let us grow out of our comfort zone and beyond Arkansas.”
Devin Sain, CTO of Emmix
The platform that once limited growth is now the one enabling it. That is the whole story in a sentence, and it is available to any provider still planning around a risk they have quietly priced in.
From NetSapiens
- Partner Spotlight: Emmix (video and podcast with CTO Devin Sain)
- Why Service Providers Regret Their Platform Choice
- The Cost of Doing Nothing: Why Delaying Consolidation Is the Biggest Risk
- MetaSwitch, BroadSoft, and the Innovation Graveyard
- What Channel Partners MSP Summit Revealed About the Future of MSP Growth
- Why Operational Efficiency Is Becoming the New Competitive Advantage in UCaaS
Frequently Asked Questions
Emmix is a managed IT and cloud communications provider headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas. Founded in 2002 as a managed IT provider, the company later expanded into telecommunications. Its key verticals are hospitality, assisted living, and medical clinics. Emmix positions itself around enterprise-grade technology delivered with hometown service, meaning customers reach real people and direct cell phone numbers rather than an 800 number and an offshore call center.
Emmix ran an Asterisk-based communications platform for nearly 15 years. It served the company well but carried a single point of failure: when the platform went down, every voice customer went down with it. That fragility also carried a business cost. Emmix held back from pursuing growth it knew it could win because leadership did not want to expand on a foundation that could not guarantee uptime.
Emmix evaluated against six requirements: high availability with no single point of failure, geographic redundancy to protect customer uptime, a platform with a clear long-term roadmap, open APIs for future integrations, an expanding ecosystem of complementary solutions, and affordable economics that would support continued growth. Reliability was the deciding factor.
The NetSapiens platform uses a multi-core architecture, allowing a provider to run more than one core in separate geographic locations with automatic failover between them. Emmix runs dual cores, one in Little Rock and one in Dallas. If something happens in one location, traffic routes to the other and customers stay online.
Emmix replaced a single point of failure with a resilient, geographically redundant architecture. The company reports no platform-wide voice outages. Open APIs and the Crexendo Marketplace allow the team to add features quickly without heavy engineering lift, and an evolving roadmap means the platform keeps pace as the business expands.
Freed from the constraints of its legacy system, Emmix is expanding beyond Arkansas into Colorado, Memphis, and Dallas. The company sees particular opportunity in hospitality. It already serves a large share of the Arkansas hotel market and is now targeting connected hotel markets in Dallas and beyond.
Emmix is an example of exactly that path: a managed IT provider that expanded into telecom and outgrew a self-managed open-source platform. Providers in that position typically evaluate on redundancy, roadmap durability, API access, and economics that improve rather than degrade with scale. The Emmix customer story documents how one MSP worked through that evaluation.
The full customer story, No More Single Point of Failure: How Crexendo Freed Emmix to Grow, is available in the NetSapiens customer success stories library at netsapiens.com. A companion Partner Spotlight interview with Emmix CTO Devin Sain is also available as video and podcast.
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No single point of failure. Redundancy in the design, not the SLA. Open APIs and an expanding ecosystem. A roadmap still being built, not maintained.
Read the Full Emmix Case Stud
See the complete evaluation: the six requirements, the architecture that answered them, and what the migration looked like from the inside.
