Open Source Business » asterisk

Asterisk awakens open source love in telecom entrepreneur

tina — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 20:43:43 +0000

Marc Fribush, a former “Microsoft guy,” is a telecommunications industry entrepreneur who discovered the benefits of open source when he launched a turnkey SAAS telephony business based on Asterisk. “It’s really powerful stuff,” Fribush says.

Fribush’s previous company produced Web telephony software for the online dating industry. When that business was sold in 2006, he started looking for his next project and noticed an interesting trend. “We were looking at the Asterisk movement, and we started looking at some of the momentum,” Fribush says. “It was a big disrupter. And we thought that one of the missing pieces was a turnkey solution where the application was actually hosted.” Fribush partnered with his friend Michael Rand to launch Aretta Communications. “That’s really the start of my open source background. I’ve really always been a Microsoft guy. You get converted when you see the power of open source tools. Now it is the majority of our infrastructure.”

Fribush says that with open source he’s had to change his mindset on software support, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “When you come from a .Net background, there’s more professional support that goes along with that. With open source, the bulk of it is going to be community-based. You can’t expect to pick up the phone and have these applications supported. You have to find your answers another way. You just have to change your mentality.

“Primarily, we go to the community, but certain applications have professional versions. We start our development on open source versions, and if we have to we migrate up to the supported version. The code base is typically the same, and you can usually leverage a lot of the community-based support resources. I happen to believe that the community-based support mechanism is superior in many aspects. You can search on your specific error message and see a whole slew of other users who have experienced a similar problem. It’s a much more friendly support mechanism, as opposed to calling an 800 number and you don’t know if anyone else is having the same issue.”

Aretta’s customers have no objections to their telephone service being built on open code. “There are two different flavors. The early adopter enthusiast — a lot of those come from the Asterisk community, and they want it to be an open source product. On the other side is the day-to-day business user that just wants a telephone system that works. At the end of the day, they don’t care that it’s running on open source. We have the entire spectrum.”

One of the biggest benefits of building on Asterisk has been the low cost. “There’s no question that it’s a whole lot cheaper than buying licenses from Microsoft to do your development work,” Fribush says. “The other thing is flexibility. Open source really gives you tremendous freedom to make any kind of modification you might need to get it working in your environment. If I need the software to do something, maybe someone else has already developed it that way. And if we can’t find people locally, there’s usually always someone internationally that’s got really solid experience with the application. Dealing with those people, even on a contract basis, is a lot cheaper.”

Patience is a virtue when it comes to working with open source, Fribush says. “A lot of open source projects are on fast release schedules, and it doesn’t leave time to do a ton of testing. You have to be real careful before you upgrade to the next release. It could fix a problem but create others. When we first started Aretta, we would upgrade after every release, and sometimes have fatal errors afterward. There was really no need for us to upgrade. With open source, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Asterisk opens one company’s eyes to open source

tina — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 19:02:39 +0000

American Fiber Systems (AFS), with headquarters in Rochester, NY, provides fiber optic network services directly to enterprises and to carrier resellers. Bill Ciminelli, vice president of network development and services for AFS, noticed that internal communications were becoming increasingly difficult because the number of mobile company workers like field technicians and salespeople was growing so fast. With an old-fashioned voice messaging system separate from email and other collaboration tools, AFS workers had to manage communications from cell phones, laptops, office workstations, and company phones. Ciminelli began looking for a solution that would move AFS into the 21st century. To his surprise, he found it in Asterisk, an open source product.

One of the most important factors that led Ciminelli to choose Asterisk was its price. “When we were working on trying to put together a plan to upgrade our internal phone system, one of the things that struck me was that in a company our size, we have to be very tight about how much money we spend,” he says. “We went to the traditional vendors like Cisco, Avaya, and Nortel, and the costs were just out of line with what we felt we could commit to.” Not only that, but the prepackaged systems that the big commercial companies offered weren’t customizable. Ciminelli wanted the flexibility to be able to customize prompts, greetings, and options on the fly, as well as perform system configuration changes without having to wait for a technician to show up. To make things more challenging, Ciminelli needed to be able to integrate the phone system with the company’s existing Microsoft Exchange environment.

Ciminelli was beginning to see some interesting movement in the open source world, so he decided to call in Adomo, a Cupertino, Calif., telecom solutions contractor, to show him what they could do with an Asterisk-based solution. “They came back with a bundled solution that would integrate with Exchange,” he says. Adomo’s Asterisk solution had many optional features and was easily customizable because of its open source nature. Not only that, but it was about $140K cheaper than the alternatives. “I had my eyes opened about the economics and then was able to gain confidence in the product,” Ciminelli says.

Coming from a proprietary software background, Ciminelli says he had never trusted open source software. “In my history of being involved with software development, I found [open source] to be a difficult process to put out quality products. And I had a high threshold of expectation to deliver a quality system. I was reluctant to trust my company’s telephone infrastructure to that. But as I looked at the improvements in Asterisk and saw the performance … it’s basically been a matter of setting aside my preconceived notions and looking at the advantages.”

AFS runs the Asterisk phone system on two Linux servers — one in Rochester and another in Atlanta — using the Inter-Asterisk Exchange (IAX2) protocol to connect the two via a VPN. If the VPN goes down, the system is designed to immediately begin using the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). The failover system that the commercial vendors offered was less elegant and cost much more, Ciminelli says.

Ciminelli says his experience with open source has gone so well that he is now looking for other opportunities to use it. He recommends that other IT directors look at open source with an “open mind. Take a smaller project and build some confidence in the approach. Use that as a way to maximize the economics for your company. I was able to implement a system across my entire company for about 10% over what I had budgeted to do just one office. Now we have a single way of communicating across the entire company. We all speak the same language.”