OT:Exchange good? - And the flame wars begin (Was:Re: new hotness?)

[JD Austin]

On Mon, Feb 23, 2009 at 10:59 PM, Bryan O'Neal
<boneal at cornerstonehome.com>wrote:

>  I apologize for not having more time, perhaps to dig up some of my old
> data.  However the methodology went something like this.  Equipment +
> Install + Configuration + User time cost + Time cost for upgrades,
> maintenance, and expansion/changes.  Assuming you have an average size small
> business.  In that small business you have ~40 phones and 50 employees.
> Each employee gets their own did.  ~5 phones are "executive" (fancier model)
> and you have two which are for receptions.  The receptions will monitor one
> of three "main" incoming lines and will need to know which one has been
> dialed before they answers.  Similarly you will need 3 different dial by
> name directories which may or may not have some overlapping people.  Each
> person needs to be able to switch between 3 preprogrammed settings on how
> their calls are handled. Integration with their business calendar so the
> phone system automatically switches between several settings depending on
> the individuals availability (in a meeting, out of office, etc.) is a big
> plus (ShoreTel does five settings as a base and was expandable but their was
> something about the expansion that I can not remember.
>

It's probably been at least two years since you surveyed Asterisk offerings;
it is a FAST moving target. You get all of the above with a standard
Asterisk bundle (some of it works differently but accomplishes the same
thing); it just has to be set up by someone like me initially (same as
shoretel).  The settings are a bit more flexible in an Asterisk/Freepbx
based system; you get follow-me (call all of my numbers when you call my
extension), vmx locator (mini-pbx press 1,2, or 3 to reach different
destinations when they reach your voicemail), voicemail to email (I see you
mentioned that below).  There are other features built in that you didn't
mention like built in tele-conference rooms, fax to email, and custom IVR's
(menu's) to do things like give people directions and other information.
You can build in just about anything.  Systems come with standard
integration with sip and iax voip; you can add skype.  You can even have
soft phones that employees can use when traveling when they have enough
bandwidth to do so.

ShoreTel also did the integration with Outlook, Lotus, and a half dozen
> other applications calendars out of the box, but since they publish their
> API you could program your own if you wanted) The business has 10 remote
> sites to manage.
>

 Some Asterisk Distributions have this, most don't.  A few use Sugar CRM to
accomplish this kind of functionality.  There are MAPI plugins you can use
but it's not widely used.

About 10 users will require custom soft buttons. You hotel desks so that one
> physical phone may be used by several people during the course of a day so
> people need to be able to login and out of their phones easily. People also
> need to be able to quickly and easily record phone calls and manage those
> recordings.
>

It is as easy as pressing a few buttons on the phone during a call (*1 on
most systems). You can also use the phone as a dictation machine; it sends
the resulting message via email.


> Voicemail must be integrated into email.  It also needs to be trivial for
> people to mange DND exception lists.
>

Both built in.  It's fun to black list telemarketers.


> And you need to assume you will change out about 15 employees a year.  You
> also require 10 departmental voice mail boxes that are integrated with a
> personas individual mail box for people who are authorized for that public
> box. In addition all equipment must be warranted for ten years. (etc. etc.
> etc.)  This is what I remember of the PBX requirements Cornerstone Homes had
> back in 2005.
>
>
Ah.. 2005; Asterisk was very primitive back then and probably WAS more
expensive than shoretel.  Freepbx as asterisk management portal then and
didn't have 1/10th of the features it has now.
Depending on which vendor I buy it from I can get a lifetime warranty for
phones for an extra $20/phone usually; that only covers the hardware itself.
  With Asterisk systems you can pick whatever phone you want from a cheapie
$50 phone to an expensive $300 phone; I just did an asterisk installation
with all Cisco phones... it turned out nice!  Does Shoretel warranty their
phones if you don't use them with a Shoretel system?  If so I'll gladly use
them :)


> Running this sort of system the cost of having some one set it all up,
> train local non-technical staff on how to maintain this, and provide
> support had a total cost of about $20,000 for equipment, install, and
> training.
>

The one place Asterisk lacks right now is training.  It is such a fast
moving target that there is little end-user documentation out there.  I'm in
the process of writing my own.


> In addition training cost was about 15 min per employee plus 45 min for the
> HR department who managed the systems operation.  I originally estimated
> this at about $2000 of cost for employee time.
>

My work (I have a job too) has a Cisco/Nortel system and we didn't get any
training on it.
In my own installs I provide documentation and train a few people and let
them teach others.  There are modules for bulk loading extensions in
Asterisk but I wouldn't have HR doing it (more like IT).

In addition I estimated and additional $2000/year of operational
> & maintenance cost.
>
Since it is standard server hardware and linux except for the telephony
hardware/software most companie's IT departments could do their own upgrades
on the server (CPU/Memory/Motherboard/add disk space).  Do you spend
$2000/year maintaining your linux web servers/etc? I don't.


> In fact cost less then $5 of my HR departments time to set up a new user
> and a new phone with custom soft buttons, voicemail, phone call handling
> (when should it ring, when should it roll to an assistant, when should it go
> to voice mail, which voicemail greeting should it give, etc), the companies
> directory, personal directory (usually integrated with their pim, but it
> could be via a text file too) and automatic updates (if using pim
> integration).
>

Soft button setup varies by phone. This is probably the same with asterisk.
The company I just did used Cisco phones; the company directory comes right
out of the Asterisk Database (I wrote the directory services myself).  When
an extension is added then it magically appears in the directory on their
phone.

Now the phone cost about $150, and with licensing and the estimated cost to
> house and maintain the equipment required for voicemail.  Of course both
> those costs are fairly typical when compared to Asterisk and are moot if
> just replacing an employee.
>

You can find phones cheaper than that but that is a good average amount for
a decent voip phone.  With Asterisk voicemail storage is built into the
server and is not limited to the number of ports/etc like most pbx systems.

Professional support was free for 2 years with 4 hour service guarantee and
> $6K per year their after, but no one I interviewed ever renewed support
> since the equipment had a lifetime guarantee and was so easy to set up and
> maintain. Professional support was $75/hour for remote support and $150/hour
> for on premises support up to 6K/year (at which point you purchased a
> support contract) if you needed it after your first two years was over.
>

You're giving me ideas :)  I typically give 6 months support built into the
initial installation.  It is long enough to work out any issues.


> Equipment is warranted for life.  All upgrades, patches, etc. are also free
> and done by ShoreTel professionals.
>

I suppose if I over charged for the server and phones and get a warranty
from the vendor I could warranty for life.  If I were charging 6K/year for
support I'd do patches/etc for free too!  Does Shoretell keep doing patches
and repairs if you don't have a support contract?

I wish I had my information from when I was looking at Asterisks, but if I
> recall correctly, the numbers I got from the one asterisk vender came in at
> about $18,000 for equipment, install, and configuration.  No training
> and $150/hour for support; but the first 5 days of support was free.
>

This will vary by the vendor that installs the system. Thank you for posting
this; I'll probably change a few things!

I just ran a ball park of a dual pri, 40 phone system with 8FXS ports for
fax machines, plus one virtual fax to save paper and it came out to $17,500
with 50 hours remote support and 10 hours on site support (training).
The phone server itself was $4k, phones were 6.6k, and labor was 7k.
The server can support 1000 users and 300 concurrent calls.
But that was using $150 phones...polycom 320's are under $100 (there are
many phones that cost less).. I could trim out another 3K by choosing a less
expensive phone.



> They did not offer an inclusive support contract at the time.  While
> interviewing asterisks owners I got to an average estimation of about 20
> hours a month by in house technical staff to support the users and maintain
> the system, plus about 100 hours of education per tech/year to keep the
> system updated, secure, and providing advancing service for the users.  So
> if you have two qualified people (so one can take a day off some time) then
> you are looking at about  440 hours.  Lets call it 400 hours or about
> $14,000/year of in house support cost.  Now this may seem like a large
> amount of time, however it was the average from the people I
> interviewed. Though I only included groups that had not had an outage in the
> last 2 years.  The cost per hour of telephone outage in the middle of a work
> day for my employer at the time was calculated to be approximately
> $10,000 and one call center I interviewed averaged 4 hours a year of outage;
> so I just tossed their estimation of maintenance time out.  Although it was
> really inside the range of others, but they were also a larger institution
> having about  200 phones attached to the system in three different call
> centers (funny thing is they shrank to less then 40 in three years, funny
> economy)
>
>

How is this different with Shoretel?  The same guy that supports the company
linux web servers could support the asterisk server.


> So, I have a two year cost of ShoreTel as $26K (actual cost was actually
> about $35K including the fax system, but we would have plugged that fax
> system into any phone system we would have purchased, save Avaya, which had
> their own fax system)
> Estimated cost over two years for a Asterisks system was about $45K or
> almost twice the cost.  This is not to mention I could not find nearly the
> refinement of productivity tools or PIM integration.
>

Ok.. so I throw in an extra 10K so I can pay someone to babysit the client
for 2 years.. it's about the same.


>
> What do you believe a modern cost of installing and maintaining this sort
> of system would be today for Asterisks?
>

About the same (at most) and less typically.


>
> I know, this is really short and not a full analysis, and I also understand
> the number of people supporting asterisks in the valley has increased so my
> numbers may be a bit off.
>

There are a few major vendors right here in town; I'm a reseller for them :)
I wouldn't have any hope of success if I had to build every server myself.
It's just too hard to get the same hardware again and again.
Having them build the server and provide stable predictable hardware is a
godsend.
In 2005 there weren't many companies doing asterisk; it just wasn't ready
for prime time until 2004 or so.

>
> By the way, if you already have an experienced ShoreTel person on staff and
> purchased ShoreTel equipment off of eBay today from small and mid size
> companies that have not survived this economic downturn, then your looking
> at about $5K in equipment and licensing costs for the same install.
>

The initial cost is pretty close either way.  The big upside with going with
an Asterisk based install is flexibility.  You're not locked in to a
specific company, phone, hardware vendor, and don't have to pay any
licensing fees unles s you buy phones from a vendor and WANT to pay for the
license.  You can extend and expand the system a lot of ways.
If I go belly up, there are plenty of other companies out there that can
provide support.  I inherited 3 such systems when a company in the valley
stopped supporting their installations when they lost their Asterisk guy.
They don't have a contract and I get a call maybe once a year when some
retard ISP technician messes up their DHCP server or changes their settings
on the router.

In one case I completely rebuilt their installation because it didn't have
the modern features they needed and wasn't built on standard software. They
instead wrote everything in ruby on rails... when the asterisk API changed I
wasn't about to re-write their spaggetti code!  Instead I re-implemented
their system using standard distributions that other companies could also
support.  I can't fault that company though... in 2005 when they built it
you just couldn't build a multi-tennant system from standard distributions.
It is a PITA now but it works.

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