The Asterisk industry seems to be answering a loud, global call for open source IP PBX training. While Digium has started planning for the annual AstriCon conference, solutions providers and training centers are striving to educate the masses about the open source IP PBX. Here are some perspectives.
The AstriCon conference, scheduled for October 13-15 in Glendale, Ariz., is piecing together a conference agenda now. The event attracted more than 600 Asterisk enthusiasts in 2008, according to Digium — the company most widely credited with driving Asterisk forward.
Admittedly, 600 attendees isn’t a “massive” event, but it does represent the start of a broader open source IP PBX movement that’s spilling over into the IT channel.
More Voices In the Global Crowd
Meanwhile, solutions providers are stepping in to offer additional Asterisk training seminars. Infradapt, a Digium channel partner in Philadelphia, Pa., plans to host an educational Asterisk seminar at the Association of TeleServices International Seminar, scheduled for June 17-20 in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Across the big pind, in-depth Asterisk training — called the Open Telephony Training Seminar — will surface in the United Kingdom and Amsterdam, The Netherlands this June.
And in India, Enterux Solutions is now authorized to provide Digium training courses to businesses in India. Enterux’s educational efforts include a one-day Asterisk introductory course and a five-day “Asterisk Advanced Certification” course. Not by coincidence, Enterux owns and operates its own VoIP network and offers enterprise and hosted IP PBX options.
Competition Continues
Although Asterisk continues to build momentum, many members of the IT channel remain fiercely loyal to Microsoft. During the HTG Summit and peer group meeting last week in Dallas, more than 350 VARs and solutions providers spent time learning about Microsoft’s small business solutions — including the ResponsePoint VoIP phone system. And some solutions providers are launching managed services built around ResponsePoint.
But in terms of global mind share, Asterisk seems to have a loud, loyal, and growing crowd of followers.
Contributing blogger Len Sandy covers VoIP in the IT channel. Read all of his entries here. The VAR Guy is updated multiple times daily. Don’t miss a single post. Subscribe to his newsletter, RSS feed, Twitter feed , Webcasts and Resource Center.
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Are customers actually paying for Asterisk? I am curious to know if IT managers trained on Asterisk use free version and install it themselves on standard hardware. What’s the benefit of “paying” for Asterisk?
To answer Frank’s question… Yes, many IT professionals are getting trained on Asterisk and installing it themselves on commodity hardware.
The nice thing about Asterisk is that there’s an entire gamut of solutions available — for those with the skill or inclination to build their own solution, they can use open source Asterisk and have full control over their system. For those not inclined to scratch their own itch, there are commercial products (such as the Switchvox line of turnkey products) which are based on the Asterisk engine.
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Jared Smith
Training Manager
Digium, Inc.
Jared: Thanks for adding your two cents. The turnkey approach to Asterisk seems to be pushing the software mainstream, much in the way that Dell preloads of Ubuntu opened up the Linux market to a broader universe of users. Of course, The VAR Guy is over simplifying matters…
We have a mixed bag. The Digium Asterisk BE product running atop CentOS, configured in a two server cluster, is supplanting a Cisco Unity install for voicemail. For Call Processing we’re still on Cisco’s Call Manager platform. An open source Asterisk\FeeePBX system is providing Cenferencing Services (used in conjunction with DimDim) as well as Fax to email services.
Asterisk really fits in nicely into our environment. Would we ever completely drop our Cisco platform for Asterisk? Hard to say at this point.
But in answer to the question, we pay for support on our Asterisk BE platform because Voicemail is considered critical to our business. Not as critical as Call Processing. But critical enough to warrant support should we have a problem. However, conferencing and fax services are not considered mission critical, and therefore we’re willing to forgo support on these systems and instead do our own in-house support.
Type…sorry
Asterisk\FreePBX
Chris@4, @5: The VAR Guy would like to hear more. Please keep him posted as you continue to leverage Asterisk in new ways. Also, did you leverage a reseller/integrator to assist with the Digium/Asterisk deployment?
Readers of this article may be interested to know that the Asterisk SIP Master class comes to the UK for the first time this April (19-23), when TeleSpeak – the UK Digium Authorised Training Partner – host the course at their dedicated Asterisk training facility near Oxford. There are more details at http://www.telespeak.co.uk
In answer to your question regarding a reseller/integrator, we purchased support from Digium for our Asterisk BE systems via a reseller in Fremont, CA (Dicar Networks). However, we deployed everything on our own. I have an engineer who is very well versed in Asterisk, and he has been key in our deployment. Today, we have roughly 1K phones deployed using our Cisco Call Manager 6.1 platform, with Asterisk Business Edition as the Voicemail component. This number is set to double in the coming months.
We’re actually experimenting with the Elastix Distribution of Asterisk for ancillary services (Conferencing, Fax to email, etc.). And we’re looking at AsterCC as a possible replacement for our Cisco Contact Center Application. We’re still a ways off for either of these products moving into our production environment, but they sure show promise as methods of providing services while reducing capital outlay.
Regards,
Chris