[asterisk-biz] case study on switching to Asterisk

[Paul]

You heard your economics professor always talking about "Acme Widgets
Corporation" so you're going to get our help and then sell them a new
phone system.

Are you comparing legacy against turnkey asterisk-based systems? That
means setup, repair and support can be included by the vendor.

Unless the company has an engineering department, just get proposals and
pick one.

Byron Pile wrote:

> I thought the biz list was most appropriate for this. Hope I'm not wrong!
>
> I'm trying to write a term paper on adopting an open source solution
> over a commercial solution and comparing the cost. Specifically if a
> legacy system is in use already,  when will the initial investment of
> hardware for an asterisk based system  pay off against the licensing
> fees of a proprietary system. After reading a good chunk of the free
> Asterisk book "Asterisk:The Future of Telephony" I think that Asterisk
> is an excellent topic for the paper. 
>
> I'm new to telephony stuff so bear with me if my questions are a bit
> dumb, I've tried to do quite a bit of research and reading before
> posting to the mail lists.  So my idea was to use the fake company
> "whatever" and they have 15 telephones and are currently using a 
> Norstar ICS with 4 incoming lines and 15 internal lines and I would
> like to switch this over to an asterisk based system.
>
> The reason for choosing the Norstar as this is a turnkey solution
> provided by a large local telecom so I will be able to get some
> pricing information for them fairly easily and I think it does what a
> 15 telephone small office might need...I'm open to a better suggestion
> if the Norstar is a poor choice.
>
> My quick questions are...is it possible that the handsets being used
> with a Norstar could be converted and used with the Asterisk system?
> (a bit of asset recovery)
>
> A system consisting of a suitable linux server running Asterisk and a
> Digium TDM2441B PCI Card 16FXS / 4FXO  would be a suitable replacement
> and could deliver the same performance/functions as the Norstar system?
>
> I'm going to try and be as thorough as possible in assessing the costs
> in switching to this system. The most obvious being some new hardware,
> but also, downtime, training, support costs, contract penalties (if
> there are any) etc....But this is a term paper and a highly
> hypothetical situation. And I know my questions are a bit general, but
> the paper will probably be kept quite general. I hope I can learn more
> about this cool app!