On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 8:52 PM, Bryan O'Neal <boneal@cornerstonehome.com> wrote:
Thank you very much for the update on Asterisks! I have always had a soft spot for it and am exited that it is expanding into the market nicely :)  As for maintaining my servers, with cornerstone I was the director of IT but their was never a desire to higher another sysadmin so I spent almost 20% of my time "touching" my servers in some way. With my salary that is significantly more then $2K, however I never broke down how much was truly "development" that I just categorized as maintenance.  however, this includes regular system audits and other functions that would be performed no mater what the server OS.  When you say you don't spend $2K a year I have to ask, do you not maintain your servers or do you have some incredibly inexpensive sysadmin :)  At speekback.com I spent closer 10 60% of my time doing sysadmin work, but we were in the midst of a fast development curve.  As for support they will continue doing critical support with regards to upgrades and patches for free even after the support contract expires, however if you just want some new funky module that does not effect you current base system (say you wanted the ability to upload your own custom rings onto your phone in mp3 format) you have to pay for it.  This really was something that came up after our contract expired.  As far as the support of Linux vs. Asterisks in house support it is just a matter of additional workload.  If you have follow resource it is not a real expense, however if you resources are already close to max, you must consider employing a new person to handle the additional workload...  Or pay your current people more, or run the risk of them getting burnt out. 
 
From what you say, I would say Asterisk cost has come way down and I am very happy :)

Asterisk has come a long way since I started using it in late 2003.  Back then it was in my opinion a neat toy.  Sure you COULD build great things with it back then but it had too many issues at the time to put all your eggs in that basket (the same as Linux was in 1995).  Each issue released was a crapshoot.. some worked and some didn't.  It has attained very serious momentum since then and changes so fast it's sometimes hard to keep up.  I waited 3 years for it to get mature and stable enough to build a production system with it. 

Digium, the company driving the asterisk/zaptel/dahdi source, keeps changing the API's for no good reason which breaks existing installations built on it; they're 'upsetting' the developers.  Some time in the next few years I believe FreeSwitch will over take Asterisk and be the telephony back end of choice.  Some great projects like FreePBX (it used to be called Asterisk Management Portal) have given Asterisk the stability it needed and made building re-producable systems possible.  At the core of the most popular Asterisk bundles is Linux+Asterisk+FreePBX.

I was attracted to Asterisk because it had almost everything I knew wrapped into one thing and it just has the neato factor :)
From it you can build office PBX systems, call centers, calling card systems, and other custom telephony applications.  It's going through the same kind of transformation that Linux did.. started out as something only geeks could use and evolved into a stable platform that rivals the big unixes. 

I'm glad to be in the middle of it's evolution like I was with Linux.  I installed BSD first and said ok.. now what.   Then installed Linux because I'd picked up a book on it.  Funny to think that I'd have been a BSD guy if I'd had a BSD book instead in 1993. 

--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
jd@twingeckos.com
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com


Fran Lebowitz  - "You're only has good as your last haircut."