[asterisk-biz] Digium certified asterisk professional or CCIE VOIP

[Alex Balashov]

No doubt, I'm going to start a controversy here without wishing to, 
especially since Digium does have a vested interest in pushing dCAP, but...

1) As is generally the case with certifications, they are mostly useless 
and often actually an indicator of mediocrity.  All the best people I 
know - the rock stars of IP network engineering and/or anything else - 
don't have time or inclination to bother getting these.

The folks that do generally take the rote preparation required to get 
them too seriously and as a result evidence a certain lack of creativity.

You don't want someone who can answer some trivia questions for some 
standardised test.  You want someone who understands the technology at a 
fundamental - dare I say, ontological - level.  Someone who may not know 
the exact syntax to fix a weird DTMF problem or a funny bug *right* 
*this* *very* *minute* and can write it for you on a whiteboard faster 
than you can read it, but knows exactly how to Google the answer in 15 
seconds but still understand its implications at a conceptual level.

Besides, if you put that kind of emphasis on concrete skills, you'll 
find that people who tend to be the best at having them tend to be the 
worst at learning new ones and adapting.  You want someone who can teach 
themselves the equivalent of being a dCAP, not someone who has a dCAP.

Of course, I wouldn't hold it against a smart Asterisk guy if he was 
smart and also happened to bother to get dCAPified, but the important 
thing is that the converse is not true.  The fact that someone *is* a 
dCAP has little to no imaginable correlation to their actual usefulness, 
insight, or technical brilliance.  At least, in my experience.

While I've run into a few "enterprise" companies that seem aware of dCAP 
and use it as some sort of differentiator, they fall into that category 
of big, lumbering dinosaurs trying to think in very outdated ways about 
lowering their risk of running into incompetent vendors.

Fortunately, from a marketing perspective, the liability of not having 
staff with that sort of certification can be overcome with some decent 
marketing and pointing to other kinds of endorsements, partners, 
testimonials, etc.

2) A CCIE is way, way overblown for supporting Asterisk.  I've always 
expressed the opinion that strong IP network engineering skills are very 
necessary to make Asterisk robust in an environment of nontrivial 
complexity, but that's way too much.

A CCIE can take half a decade and more than ten thousand dollars to get, 
and the marginal benefit from having one as it relates to putting your 
clients at ease with your Asterisk/VoIP work will be virtually zero.

Also, as with point #1, a surprising number of CCIEs suck pretty 
astoundingly given the prestige and reputation associated with that 
level of certification.  In that case, you don't want a mediocre CCIE.

And a non-mediocre CCIE is way overblown for what you're looking for.

In short, don't rely on certifications--for what it sounds like you're 
wanting to do, they're basically irrelevant.  In all likelihood, the 
sorts of customers you most want won't be relying on them either.  If 
they can't recognise solid expertise and dependability in a vendor 
without keywords and titles, they have a decisionmaking heuristic that's 
going to give you other business-level problems as well.

-- Alex

George Kumar wrote:

> Folks,
> 
> I would like to start a VOIP consultancy services in my area (Silicon
> Valley), and considering one of these certifications.
> I am familiar with asterisk and have played with it at home by setting
> up a linux based PBX for interconnection 2 SIP phones,
> but have no professional certifications to put my customers at ease
> when trying to hire me to to fix/install their VOIP systems.
> 
> Any suggestions ?
> 
> thanks.
> George...
> 
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-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775