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Asterisk (News - Alert) – the open source telephony platform created and developed by Digium – will continue to see increasingly wide adoption among developers, even as hosted, virtualized PBXs hit the market and become common business models, an official with an Irving, Texas-based provider of voice and data solutions told TMCnet in an interview.

 

According to J.R. Richardson (News - Alert), chief technology officer at Ntegrated Solutions, the major benefit of Asterisk is that it’s open source.

 

“We can take the code base and customize it to whatever the customer needs,” Richardson told TMC Editorial Director Erik Linask (News - Alert) in an interview, printed in full below. “We are not locked into hardware or application constraints dictated by some equipment manufacturer. Using Asterisk we have the tools to build voice solutions that add value and fit the customers business. Without Asterisk, we would have to fit the customers business to the telephone system.”

 

Richardson, who is speaking on “Virtualizing Asterisk with OpenVZ “ next week during AstriCon 2009 – to be held Oct. 13 to 15 in Glendale, Ariz. – Asterisk helps relieve companies’ pain points because it allows Ntegrated to centralize a client’s PBX (News - Alert) within its main office or Ntegrated’s data center, “so all location phones operate in one phone system environment.”

 

“Also, we can install an Asterisk PBX at each location and, using native trunking, tie all the office together to simulate one phone system environment,” Richardson told Linask.

 

Their full exchange follows.

                                

J.R. Richardson (pictured left): The software works out of the box for 95 percent of the PBX user market. The support in the user community is second to none.

J.R.: We are a Voice and Data services provider for business customers. We provide on-site VoIP PBXs and hosted PBXs built with Asterisk. Also our core voice switching network is based on Asterisk and OpenSER. We are Asterisk community participants and contributors.

J.R.: Our target customers are medium size multi-location enterprises up to 500 users. The biggest pain is the non-continuity of data and telecom services between multiple offices. We converge WAN/LAN across the enterprise for seamless business operations between locations.

J.R.: In some instances, we centralize the company’s PBX within their main office or our data center so all location phones operate in one phone system environment. Also, we can install an Asterisk PBX at each location and, using native trunking, tie all the office together to simulate one phone system environment.

J.R.: The biggest benefit with Asterisk is that it’s open source. We can take the code base and customize it to whatever the customer needs. We are not locked into hardware or application constraints dictated by some equipment manufacturer. Using Asterisk we have the tools to build voice solutions that add value and fit the customers business. Without Asterisk, we would have to fit the customers business to the telephone system.

J.R.: I am speaking on virtualization of Asterisk with OpenVZ. Attendants will get an overview of several virtualization technologies and examples of why they would want to virtualize Asterisk. Also we will show benefits of using OpenVZ as the base operating system. We will also go into details of building and OpenVZ base system and installing Asterisk as the PBX system for hosting voice services.

J.R.: It is always fascinating to see what others are doing by way of customizing Asterisk for niche marked business and also mainstream PBX deployments. The improvements in hardware and cost reductions help to drive Asterisk acceptance as well, so I enjoy learning about the embedded systems that folks are developing as well.

 

J.R.: I envision continued growth as we have seen in the past few years, but also I believe hosted, virtualized PBXs will hit the market and become common among many business models.