Tonight I have the most interesting assignment of all. I have to tear down open source telephony. Not literally mind you but next week I go on stage with Mark Spencer the guru of open source, founder of Digium and Asterisk and have to debate him one-on-one. He is taking the (no surprise here) pro-open source side of the argument and I am against it (or at least that's the role I play onstage).
If you can believe it, we couldn't find a PBX vendor to debate Mark and I thought my idea was great (I have my moments) and I wouldn’t let it die.
This is how the scenario worked out... We called Mark and asked him if he would do an open source telephony shoot-out with another PBX vendor. He agreed. We called a few PBX vendors and no would debate him. I called Mark back and said, the Hell with it... I will fill the role of the PBX vendor.
So here I am now, coming up with the questions and framing the session. I am looking forward to seeing how it shapes up next week. Hope to see you at the show. If you have any ammo for me (I know this isnt fair but open-source uses the web to its advantage, so can I :-) send me an e-mail.
Check out http://www.itexpo.com for details.
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Not much of a debate. They fit in totally different market places. Large Enterprises can't afford to tinker around with their telecommunications. This is the single most important technology in the enterprise. Small PC networking companies could make this a viable business by supplying it as a potential service to SMB's and SOHO. It could easily be a new revenue stream for them. Small companies and SOHO's will try this for the cost savings. I hope it gets promoted in this area. It really is the way telecommunications should be implimented in this market area.
Lol Dave - you can tell that you dont have a clue, sometimes it's better to say nothing and at least look intelligent rather than opening your mouth and confirming you know nothing.
There are an approxiamte 20,000 asterisk installations globally, the largest single site installation i know of is 1500 extension University residential campus though the largest networked asterisk is www.freshtel.net , they run a 20,000 user voip carrier on asterisk (albeit highly customised).
The highest concentration of calls on a single server I know of is a call centre using asterisk as a call quality control recording solution. Using a 12gb ramdisk they were terminating up to 512 calls simultaneously (then archiving calls to a fiber SAN) for later retrieval as necessary.
To start check these links out;
www.asterisk.org
www.digium.com
There is also growing wealth of information on the wiki http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk
Asterisk includes features out of the box such as
• Voicemail to email
• Fax to email
• Conference rooms with secured passwords
• Gui web control for conference rooms
• Agent and call centre stats
• Web displayed operators console including drop and drag transfers
• Dial from outlook/dial from html command.
• Text to speech – when I dial extension *61 my asterisk box downloads a text file of the New York weather report from the bureau of meteorology and then reads it aloud to me –
(to get it to do this took only 40 lines of code)
• Remote agents – you could answer your office extension from your home pc/second phone in your home office.
• Auto/manual recording of calls (auto archive or email of calls to conversation participants)
For the non technical there is now asterisk@home http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net (don’t be put off by the name – people run entire companies on this version)
The asterisk@home solution the easiest way to get started. It is an .iso cd that you burn, load into a suitable PC (I run mine on a P3-700) and this super smart scripting code automatically installs the following software;
• Asterisk (the open source switching software)
• AMP (an open source release of a gui configurator) they have their own separate sourceforge website https://sourceforge.net/projects/amportal
• FOP (a graphical web page for transferring calls, monitoring who is online etc) http://www.asternic.org
• Web meetme (a graphical web page for monitoring and controlling conference calls)
Asterisk gives you today for free what the very best Cisco, Nortel or Avaya can offer you for $40k+
Asterisk also gives you the ability to intuitively customize your solution as much or as little as you want, allowing this project to be open sources means you have 1,000+ developers out there working for you on customizations you can implement when/if you choose and as this technology is gpl’d you never need to worry about increasing costs or license fees.
Here’s an old URL that gives you an overview on where Asterisk came from and where it’s headed http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3504931
At the end of the day the best parallel is Apache. No one would dare say Apache isn't suitable to serve corporate websites yet it's open source.
The days of coporate closed box IP-PABX's aren't numbered, there will always be a market for off the shelf solutions but to say asterisk isn't enterprise ready is just ignorant of the facts.
I think you better go and do some research before you say asterisk isn't 'enterprise' ready.
Cheers,
Dean