An interesting article for those needing ammunition to sell Asterisk within their organisation or to others:
"Is open source IP telephony ready for prime time? Yes" by Zenas Hutcheson, St. Paul Venture Capital Network World, 06/07/04
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/0607faceoffyes.html
On a related note, they also have an article arguing the contrary position (see link within article). I'm too busy right now to write up a response showing the flaws in that column but others on the list might wish to contribute to the fray.
George Pajari www.netvoice.ca www.IP-Centrex.ca
The opposing view had some good points, though I don't agree with many of his comments.
http://www.nwfusion.com/columnists/2004/0607faceoffno.html
I'm not even going to try to post a reply on NetworkWorld's broken, ad-strewn, and ambiguous forum manager.
I think I can disagree with all of Zeus' comments except this: management(*) for IP telephony is just as important as the telephony itself. Without the ability to measure, manage, and examine performance, it is a tough sell for open-source software in the enterprise.
Perhaps that doesn't matter, actually. Enterprise isn't really where Asterisk is written and supported, so we don't see the robust features that an enterprise would require. Remember: there are no sales brochures for Asterisk, and the CTO who is looking to implement Solution C or Asterisk will not have anything to use in the Asterisk column except for (maybe) my feature spreadsheet and an enthusiastic network admin who runs it at home. This will not typically lead to Asterisk as the winner.
I am not saying that this is good or bad, actually. It's neutral. The purpose of Open Source is not to defeat commercial implementations of the same features, but to provide a "better" solution for some people who want to get in there and make things work exactly they way they wanted, if they have the spare time, clue, and don't have any money to pay someone else to do it.
JT
(*): for a quick definition of what "management" means, here are some concepts: provisioning interfaces, per-stream QoS examination, overall QoS examination, call routing interfaces (GUI or otherwise), cost control and cost examination tools, etc. You're saying "Well, all of that can be easily built!" Sure it can, but careful with that word "easily." The question is: are these components a patchwork of third-party tools, or is it a well-planned whole-system design? Is management an afterthought? As an example of what enterprise users might need, view this post and note that there have been no movements towards answering these items:
http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2003-July/014965.html
Again, this is not a fault that these management reports don't exist. If nobody develops these reports, then maybe they're not used by the people that use Asterisk. Enterprise users aren't so hot on developing things themselves, so maybe this just languishes, and so they don't use Asterisk (yet?) because the combined effort of doing all that stuff is just more than it's worth when they can have the CFO sign a check for Vendor A to get it all done.
_______________________________________________
Asterisk-Users mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
