[VoiceOps] Which Softswitch?

[Alex Balashov]

On 06/20/2015 04:46 PM, Carlos Alvarez wrote:

> I'm currently working on my third successful open source based company.
> We use Asterisk and haven't needed support in years.

Indeed, but - to play Devil's Advocate - you have to keep in mind that a 
lot of LECs and ITSPs:

- Are primarily sales companies, with an engineering appendage as an 
afterthought. This means there's no engineering culture, and 
consequently, it's not a place where a lot of engineers want to work, so 
they have trouble retaining quality talent and end up bleeding OPEX.

- And/or: rely on vendors' consulting to build and maintain their networks.

- Need to replicate and scale business processes to large customer 
volumes and workforces consisting, in the main, of relatively average 
do-gooders.

Depending on the precise mixture of these variables, they may or may not 
be able to utilise open source. I've seen a lot of companies, 
particularly large, where open source voice platforms, usually having 
come in through the acquisition of a small company, just couldn't 
assimilate into the "corporate DNA". These acquisitions were usually 
abandoned because the vast armies of cookie-cutter Broadsoft and Oracle 
people just didn't know what to do with all this Asterisk or Kamailio stuff.

Furthermore, there's always going to be a CAPEX vs. OPEX trade-off; it's 
a well-understood fact that open source isn't free. Savings in 
licencingand support cost are to some extent transferred into 
cultivation of sufficient operational expertise to run the technology, 
or to contractors to do the same.

So, like most things, it's really a question of company culture and 
talent mixture. As a general rule, you need some sort of nontrivial 
internal engineering apparatus to properly own open-source technology. A 
lot of ex-ILEC and Bell System people have a know-nothingism that 
consists more in throwing money at the problem, seldom altogether 
successfully.

-- Alex

-- 
Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC
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