[asterisk-biz] Open Proposal

[Robert Roach]

This letter is addressed to all the businesses like mine that are 
developing, deploying and supporting Asterisk based PBX systems for the 
small to medium size business market.

I believe that we are starting to see a need for a formal organization 
that is focused exclusively on supporting our business model.

Our customers have specific needs, both from a product and business 
perspective, that present unique challenges to us and differentiates us 
from companies deploying Asterisk for call centers and independent 
consultants.

IMO, it is our common focus and background that not only presents 
challenges, but gives us an opportunity to leverage our common interests 
to build a stronger product.

In addition, I'll suggest that the majority of us are, by virtue of 
working in relative isolation from one another, on the whole duplicating 
a lot of effort in terms of product development, sales and marketing and 
human resources.

In short, there must be a way for us to combine our resources, apply the 
virtues of Open Source Development to our business model and thereby 
realize the common goals of lowering business costs, speeding product 
development, increasing quality and last but not least, providing a 
global support organization to provide a fall back to both our customers 
and ourselves.

A bit of background: Last June I attended Astricon in Madrid and floated 
the idea of an Asterisk Business Consortium - A group of like minded 
companies across the globe, sharing a common business goal and working 
together to share resources. At the time, I met with a decidedly mixed 
response to the idea. Most people were choosing the go-it-alone 
strategy. Speaking to Digium about it, they are focused – rightly so – 
on growing their own business. However, based on what I have read 
recently on this list – notably Michael's recent request for a 24x7 help 
desk - it seems that the time has come to make a more formal proposal to 
the community at large.


My proposal is to create an organization comprised of member companies 
to address the following issues:

1. Business Related

a. Customer Support - Need for 24x7x365 support for Asterisk installations.

b. Continuation 'Insurance'- Provide an umbrella organization to give 
your customers the assurance that they are not necessarily relying on 
you as the single source for future support/upgrade of the system.

c. Boiler plate contracts – In as much is practical – develop 'standard' 
contracts to offer customers.

d. Marketing – Sharing the development of marketing materials e.g. data 
sheets, FAQs, etc


2. Technical

a. Standardization of 3^rd party application integration to the Asterisk 
platform (Jive IM Server, AsterFAX, Sugar CRM integration, etc). We 
would all benefit from having a coordinated effort in this area reducing 
duplication of effort.

b. Internal development of Asterisk related applications – In order to 
fill voids in functionality, we can again make a coordinated effort to 
build the applications we need. IMO, relying on third party proprietary 
applications for critical features introduces an element of risk into 
our product based on the viability of the 3^rd party's business. 
Additionally, you don't have direct control over the development time 
line or features.

c. 'Standardized' extended functionality for dial plans – For example, a 
speed dial implementation or password protected extensions – As this is 
not supported natively in Asterisk – it is implemented in any of a 
variety of ways by each of us. Difficult for a 3rd party to troubleshoot 
and again working in silos duplicating effort.


Near Term Tangible Benefits.

I can think of several, but two specific examples spring to mind.

First, our business is based in South East Asia, but some of our 
customers have offices in the US. We would like to have a reliable 
partner to service the remote offices. As each new customer presents 
their own unique scenario, building relationships with other Asterisk 
support companies on the fly on a one-off basis is just too time 
consuming and potentially risky.

Second, our company has developed a GUI for business users that is 
specifically NOT a graphical representation of the Asterisk dial plan, 
but is rather a user centric application giving them desktop SMS 
features, call forwarding customization, extension password protection 
etc in a format which does not require any knowledge of how a dial plan 
is configured. I know that others out there have done the same. If we 
had coordinated our efforts from the outset we would likely have saved 
time, have a more robust and feature full application. It is still early 
in the deployment cycle for Asterisk overall and we can still capture 
some of these benefits.


How would this work?

I think most everyone would agree that the above goals are laudable, but 
just how can you get everyone to agree on how it should be implemented 
is the tough part. I have a rough draft of ideas on how to execute this, 
but at this stage, I'd like to get some reactions from all of you to see 
if this is something worth pursuing.


Regards,

Rob