Asterisk an under-appreciated Open Source Success Story

Responding to Tim's comments: Yes, Asterisk is the under the radar open source success story. But what is great is people are taking notice one installation at a time and it will take a little more time. The indicators I have noticed is that companies like Polycom and Sangoma are embracing Asterisk and that what will really help it push to Primetime. What I am seeing atleast on the West Coast is that companies are now finally sold that Asterisk is ready for their production enviroment. People will come around when they realize that Asterisk is not changing what phone you put on your desk but what hardware and service contract you put in your telco room. Also they are choosing if they want a phone system that either adds value or takes it away over time. Not to say the Cisco's of the world don't have a great offering and some truly useful features for certain customers. What Asterisk is saying is now there is another choice.

Sparked by a recent posting to Dave Farber's IP list about a Texas university dumping Cisco's VoIP solution for Asterisk, and Asterisk-maker Digium's new round of financing, I wrote to Farber's list myself, extolling O'Reilly's own switch to Asterisk. The functionality has been great, with voice now just another internet application for us, with new features like voicemail to email forwarding and the like.

I was talking with CJ Rayhill, our CIO, the other day, and she pointed out that when evaluating new PBX alternatives, we'd gotten several $200,000+ proposals for proprietary systems. Asterisk was not only free, the VoIP switch has allowed us to increase our network bandwidth fourfold to accomodate the voice traffic (and more data traffic) yet still save $5000/month.

I've been puzzled why there isn't more focus on asterisk in the open source world, as it seems to me to be one of the really big new open source success stories.

It seems a bit like the early days of things like Perl and Linux, when they were happening under the radar, known to all the hands-on practitioners in the industry, but not covered much by the mainstream press.

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Asterisk an under-appreciated Open Source Success Story

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