Cisco VoIP Ditched for Open-Source Asterisk 159
An anonymous reader writes "Sam Houston State University (SHSU) is moving 6,000 users off a Cisco VoIP platform to an open-source VoIP network based on Asterisk. One big driver, of course, is cost. From the article: 'We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,' says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at SHSU."
Asterisk versus CCM features (Score:5, Insightful)
From the article:
"While Asterisk and the SIP protocol lack some of the more extensive features on the Cisco CallManager..."
This may be true for vanilla Asterisk, but there is an extensive community adding a wide range of additional features and services to Asterisk. For example, <plug>our Enswitch product [integrics.com]</plug> provides a layer of billing and commercial services on top of Asterisk and SIP Express Router. Having work extensively with both Asterisk and CCM, I would claim that with Asterisk plus all the applications that work with it already surpasses the features of CCM, and Asterisk has the momentum behind it. Over the next few years, CCM will fall further behind, and before long Asterisk will be the dominant telephony platform in the same way Apache is the dominant web server platform now.
Re:They went just a little bit too cheap.... (Score:2, Insightful)
Unversites are overrated. (Score:4, Insightful)
Universities have cheap skilled labor. A slew of talented kids/young adults who are willing towork for free or near minimum wage, but when they leave to the real world they will be demanding $35,000 and up a year for the same job. This is the reason why many Open Source projects work and save money in Universities but when a Corporation gets it, it becomes a money pot. Because for a company it is cheaper to call Cisco and pay them $1000 for a fix to their problems then having a team of 10 people at your company taking a day to fix the problem because they do not have the answer sitting right in front of them or able to contact the engineer who created it. vs. a University where this 10 people 8 bucks an hour are much cheaper then calling Cisco for help.
Universities are allowed to experiment almost by charter. If something goes wrong this screw all the people who are not getting phone service. You will have wait until we fix the problem, it is not like we are loosing money with the phones down for a couple of hours. Private companies loose money when their communication are done so they want Cisco to come and fix it right away and they better know what they are doing. Being an Education facility it is allowed to experiment in different products while Companies find better value in using what they know works.
Liberal University vs. Conservative Corporations, basically means if it not exactly what we want we keep on trying and trying until we get it right (perhaps making it worse in the process) or If it does what we need we hold on to it until we find the perfect solution (which guarantees that they are going to use a product they don't like for a long time)
This is why Open Source is popular in Universities but in Corporate and government use they need to work a little harder to get acceptance.
Re:Asterisk in the workplace (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy there, Cowboy (Score:5, Insightful)
You forgot a question mark in your post correcting him - that's an even more bonehead error.
His message was adequately communicated - you don't need to be annoying and correct him. If you were adding clarity to his post, it would be one thing, but you are just nit-picking. Add something to the conversation or go the hell away.
asterisk kills call manager (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why do they price themselves out of the market? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's the support. Company A spends a large amount of money buying (say, Microsoft/Cisco/whatever) and at the same time takes out an expensive support contract. Company B uses FOSS.
Something goes wrong. Company A gets on the phone, and they have an engineer on-site within the hour, and the problem is fixed within 3 hours. Total cost? Loss of 3 hours business + SLA payouts.
Company B runs around for a bit trying to figure out what the hell it might have been, before flash-hiring a bunch of software consultants (thing $$$) to try and figure out what the problem is. These consultants probably resort to asking the question as to what went wrong on the FOSS's community forum. Problem eventually gets solved in 3 days. Total cost? Company B goes out of business.
FOSS is fantastic, but big corporates don't have time for it. They can't afford to have downtime (total significance depends on what business they're in, but in the business I work for, you lose a minute's worth of data, people buy from your competitor) and so buy the only thing on the market that comes with a decent support contract. This just happens to be stuff that's expensive in the first place (Windows etc).
As has been mentioned earlier, Universities are fine. If their phones/IT goes down, they don't lose money. Business is not like that.
Re:Why do they price themselves out of the market? (Score:3, Insightful)
One more reason I have observed is that people get used to a particular platform. More often than not, a commercial vendor enters a market first, or even creates the market. So people start using that vendor's products and then it becomes difficult for them to switch and learn something new. Many are satisfied if something just simply works, and they don't want change. In this SIP case, they probably purchase the hardware and software as a bundle.
This same thing can be said of peoples' reluctance to stop using Windows. Sure, some games don't run on Linux and there are some other drawbacks, but otherwise Linux can serve pretty well in the personal desktop area. ["OpenOffice doesn't open my Word document" is not really a great excuse as the Word document format is not an open standard, but Linux distributions do implement open standards well from basic internet protocols right till MPEG audio/video.] People start on Windows. So that's where things need to be changed.. in schools and universities, and at places where people get their first computer.
Re:Asterisk really is best bang/buck (Score:2, Insightful)
If you want to contribute to GCC you have to give up your copyright on the code to the FSF. The only difference between the FSF and Digium is that the FSF publicly state they won't release code not under the GPL (though they still legally could), and Digium publicly states that they will release the code not under the GPL.
This doesn't have any impact on the "freeness" of the code; as code released under the GPL is code released under the GPL, regardless of who own the copyright or if that code is also released under other licenses.
This is really common practice, and it annoys me everytime it comes up on Slashdot, especially since the FSF (creators of the GPL) require this practice to contribute as well.
You're missing the point. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Why do they price themselves out of the market? (Score:2, Insightful)
Also re the 'Universities are fine' point. These days they depend on commercial services for lots of their revenue, example [warwick.ac.uk].