Legacy PABX, no access control, one engagement. Hosted 3CX and biometric access delivered, live in 3 days.
A multi-office professional-services firm operating from Gigiri, Nairobi, was running on a legacy telephony setup that could not support modern business communication requirements. The system lacked remote work capabilities, offered no voicemail-to-email routing, had no auto-attendant functionality, and provided no path for video conferencing or unified messaging. Adding extensions required new hardware procurement — a constraint on operational flexibility as headcount grew. Beyond telephony, the firm's physical entry points were managed without biometric verification, leaving a gap between logical communications infrastructure and physical site security that needed to be closed under a single engagement.
Nine One Two Holdings presented two telephony options alongside a biometric access control system, giving the firm a clear comparison between cloud and on-premise delivery models before committing. The firm selected the hosted 3CX deployment at KES 148,000 all-in — a 3CX Pro License for 4 concurrent calls, Safaricom SIP trunk with VLAN tagging, 12 months of PABX hosting managed by 912, a staff desk phone, and a dedicated executive handset for the CEO with priority routing. No on-premise server hardware was required; 912 manages the infrastructure entirely. (The alternative — a local Yeastar IP PBX at KES 157,000 — was on the table for clients prioritizing resilience independent of internet connectivity, with the Linkus unified communications app as an add-on.)
The biometric access control system — a ZK Teko F18 fingerprint reader, 500 kg magnetic lock with bracket, door closer, emergency key switch, and power supply — was delivered at KES 71,500 with installation labour included, bringing physical security and communications under a single engagement and a single point of accountability.
912 met the delivery timelines it put in writing: hosted 3CX live within 3 business days of engagement, the biometric access system within 1 day. The platform runs call forwarding, voicemail-to-email, auto-attendant, and video conferencing accessible from desk phones, desktop softphones, and mobile devices via the 3CX app — and fingerprint-verified entry replaced the manual process, with an auditable access log. A 3-month post-deployment configuration support window was included across all systems, so accountability did not end at installation.
Unified communications and physical access security are frequently treated as separate procurement exercises with separate vendors and separate timelines. Consolidating them under a single engagement compresses deployment time, reduces integration risk, and creates a single accountability chain from day one. For growing businesses, a hosted PABX that scales by license rather than by hardware is the only architecture that keeps pace with headcount.