However, it is really only over the last year that we have seen a marked change in the willingness of companies of this size in particular to consider full scale deployment of open source telephony.
Of course demonstrating value for money and the focus on reducing costs continue to be driving factors. Simply the cost benefits of VOIP and open source combined have won some business alone.
However, there does also appear to be a feeling of increased trust amongst IT decision makers in this market towards open source options and Asterisk in particular.”
Passingham puts this down to ‘a combination of increased education and awareness of Asterisk and open source telephony, a higher number of reference case studies that have emerged in this size of market and the demonstrated success in other areas of IT of using open source technologies...’ (and to some extent messaging from the UK government)
As businesses more heavily focus on customer service to compete and survive, Foehn observes that in this particular 100+PBX market that often means a decision to innovate their communications – It is this size of company who are likely to use their phone system for some customer service element. (more so than perhaps the smaller sized PBX market).
“We have been able to service a number of clients – especially call centres - who have been looking at an Asterisk solution as they had specific features and requirements in mind to fit with their commercial activities and help improve their customer service. The underlying flexibility Asterisk - to write specific code and easily customise their PBX was very powerful to them.”