Equipment vendors, VARs and users are buying open source software because they hear it will save them money, said Kevin Fleming, senior software engineer for Digium Inc. of Huntsville, Ala., which makes Asterisk, a Linux-based open source PBX operating system.
“To some degree, it’s completely irrelevant to the end user that it’s based on an open source product, other than the fact that they get a much more powerful system at a lower cost,” Fleming said. “They don’t necessarily care that it’s open source, they just go to the vendor and say, ‘This is what I want to do,’ and the vendor says, ‘Okay, we can do that for $4,000,’ and they go, ‘Wow. Okay. When can I have it?’”
He added systems integrators and resellers can use it to customize telephony installations for their customers.
“We hear a lot from resellers who have learned that they can solve the customer’s problems in more creative ways when they have a tool like this available that lets them basically modify anything they want to modify, even to the point of being able to integrate their systems with maybe some carrier,” he said.
Adapted software
One vendor using Asterisk for customized installations is Montreal-based Aheeva, which also uses Asterisk for a contact centre software product.
Aheeva’s IT director, Claude Klimos, said his company made some changes to Asterisk for a customer who wanted to be able to transfer calls without losing the call.
“We had to adapt to make it an assisted transfer, not a blind transfer,” meaning the person doing the transfer would remain on the call until they hung up.
Another feature Aheeva added was the ability for companies doing telemarketing campaigns to detect whether the call was answered by a person or an answering machine.
“Some features that will give you a little advantage over competitors, we hold on to for a certain time, and then after maybe a year or two we submit them to the (Asterisk) community,” he said, adding Aheeva also fixed some bugs and submitted them to the developer community.
Asterisk includes telephony services such as voicemail, conferencing, three-way calling and caller ID. It includes a central switching core, four application programming interfaces for telephony applications, hardware interfaces, file format handling and codecs. Version 1.2, released last November, supports the Distributed Universal Number Discovery protocol and supports more session-initiation protocol (SIP) features than previous versions.
SIP allows telephony and conferencing devices from different vendors to work together, and support for open standards is one reason users choose open sources telephony, said Joshua Stephens, CEO of Switchvox Inc., a San Diego-based maker of IP telephony.
