[Asterisk-biz] Re: Best stable asterisk release for SOHO for 35 users

[Greg Boehnlein]

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Tom Rymes wrote:

> > [Deleted]
> >
> >> You should take another look at the time saver.  Since that is  
> >> what it
> >> really is.
> >
> > Or I could just buy a commercial product that provides the same  
> > features
> > and saves even more time. ;)
> 
> And costs more. It's all a tradeoff, and each business will arrive at  
> a different conclusion.

If you are truly looking out for the customer's best interest, you will 
take into account the amount of time and maintenance that a solution will 
take over the total life of the product. Do you have any concrete 
information that can prove that the savings of $1,000 (Difference between 
SwitchVox Appliance w/ Asterisk vs. White Box w/ Digium Hardware w/ A at H) 
is going to save the customer money over a commercially developed product?

Where are the metrics?

This is an arguement that people bring up time and time again w/ Free 
Software. Just because it is Free doesn't mean it doesn't cost anything. 
Beleive me.. I've developed and sold Open Source based solutions for over 
10 years at this point, and I can tell you honestly that there is no 
universal truth. In most cases, with an appropriately educated IT manager, 
Open Source solutions (Asterisk, Linux, Apache, Samba, MySQL) can provide 
value to the organizations, but the single LARGEST expense in any small 
business is PEOPLE! How much time does it take to roll your own versus 
buying a pre-packaged solution? When something breaks, who are you going 
to call for engineering support? Every minute that a small business phone 
system is offline is wasted opportunity and every minute that the IT 
manager of a small business (who is often wearing 7 other hats as well) is 
working on their phone system affects every other area of the business.

Let's get practical and look at things from a business perspective. In 
many cases, Open Source, hand rolled solutions can be effective, but 
taking it down to the "It costs more for commercial so OSS is better" is 
not an arguement that will fly. In the end, small business owners want the 
Ronko "Set it and forget it" approach. Technically savvy small businesses 
are the exception...

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