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

[Alex Balashov]

Hi George,

George Kumar wrote:

> When I mentioned CCIE VOIP, I did not mean to say that it would help
> me in being an asterisk expert.
> What i meant was whether to go in the direction of providing VOIP
> solutions based on Asterisk or to take CCIE VOIP route and provide
> VOIP consultancy in the area of Cisco VOIP products such as call
> manager, unity etc...
> Sorry for the confusion.

It's really difficult to make an apples to apples comparison here or 
relate Cisco VoIP end-user stuff (i.e. CallManager/Unity) or 
infrastructure to Asterisk in a meaningful dichotomy.  While these 
things have a fair bit in common on a technological level, they are 
irrevocably different on a business level.

The Cisco side is very capital-intensive to achieve and a rather 
expensive and tedious market segment to sell into, especially if you're 
starting from scratch and without any sort of funding or some other kind 
of pile of capital/exposure/money that makes you someone even worth 
looking at to enterprise buyers.  Though it can be high margin, the 
sales cycles are also frustratingly long and the overall barriers to 
entry very high.  And if you really want to be taken seriously as a 
Cisco-oriented VAR, you probably could benefit from the certification.

Asterisk, by contrast, is coming upward from the low end, although its 
ecosystem is maturing into an ever more sophisticated and business-class 
product and service space, at least in an optimistic appraisal.

The thing about mass-market technology--even in the business market--is 
that in the overwhelming majority of cases, is that the low end ends up 
displacing the high end.

The market segments you'd be dealing with as a Cisco VoIP consultant 
versus an Asterisk shop are profoundly different, although some overlap 
can be found.  But in general, organisations looking at Asterisk aren't 
the same ones that are looking to drop half a million dollars on a black 
box, proprietary commercial IP telephony platform.  But Asterisk is also 
far, far easier to sell, especially if you're coming up from the low 
end, and in the long run, whether because of Asterisk or something else, 
lumbering behemoths wanting to drop half a million dollars on Cisco are 
going to feel like idiots for having done so.  The CAPEX formula for 
investing in something like an Asterisk-based solution is just so 
different--in a good way.  It's highly disruptive.

> I agree with with you in that on a philosophical level I hate having
> to be certified by others...But as many things in life, people who you
> deal with, sometimes put lots of emphasis on these things. It is like
> when you go to job interview for networking consulting engineer or
> technical marketing in networking area, and if you said you are a
> CCIE, it puts people who are hiring you (at least if they work for
> Cisco) at ease....If you don't deal with Cisco products or Cisco
> company in any capacity ..CCIE is useless...

Sure, but as with anything in business, you simply have to perform a 
cost-benefit analysis and find something that's Pareto-optimal.

If you get involved with Cisco, you get all the drawbacks I described 
above, plus a tightly coupled fiduciary marriage to a particular vendor 
and a particular platform.  If it turns out that Cisco's VoIP offering 
is moribund in five years, an enormous ball is tied around your 
ankles--you've just wasted your time on a huge and extremely 
time-consuming and capital-intensive investment.

Asterisk, by contrast, simply by virtue of being an open-source 
technology with a large base of free support and community and a much, 
much, much larger installed base of all shapes and sizes, is easier to 
get into, learn and understand.  Of course, there is a massive 
qualitative difference between merely playing with it on an entry level 
and the sort of expertise required to deploy it in a stable and robust 
way in a business environment of nontrivial size and complexity, but 
it's easier.  And by virtue of receiving a parallel and concomitant 
education in an open and standards-based technology stack, you come away 
with skills, perspective and experience you can apply elsewhere to other 
types of VoIP services, applications and architectures.  If you become 
an expert in Asterisk, you are not tethering yourself to Digium in that 
same way.  Instead, you learn a lot about SIP in general and find that 
this knowledge capital will have a great deal of fluid applications 
elsewhere in that vertical.  There's a lot more residual and 
transferable value there, in my opinion.

So, back to our cost-benefit analysis:  what is the marginal benefit of 
being able to put someone large "at ease" and perhaps market to them 
ever so slightly better with a massively expensive, time-consuming and 
proprietary certification track versus a leaner alternative with more 
features and participating in the open-source arena?

A CCIE is not a trivial certification;  most people trying to get one 
study for 2-5 years, and spend thousands of dollars on hardware and 
study materials.  The exam itself consists of several days of written 
tests and a lab portion, and has an 80% failure rate.  Oh, and that 
costs several thousand dollars, too.  So, by the time you're done, you 
will have spent about 3 to 6% of your natural biological life, give or 
take, and a rather considerable amount of money ($10k or more).  What 
kind of value can you extract from that if you're wanting to roll a VoIP 
consultancy, as opposed to getting individual employment contracts meant 
for CCIEs?

All this just to make some folks "feel better?"  "Feel?"  Like, 
"feelings?"  What about all the customers for whom working with you is a 
business decision based on other criteria, for whom you don't need a 
certification - like if you were to do Asterisk?  If compare that 
potential to whatever voodoo numbers you can muster about the marginal 
economic benefit of being "certified" and attached to an extremely 
expensive and closed market space?  I think you'd find the potential ROI 
(return on investment) astoundingly low.

Also, remember something about the technology market:  Technology 
changes faster than most other things.  New technology now is more 
valuable than technology later.  The VoIP adoption curve is still 
incipient and on the uptake, but by the time you get your CCIE all put 
together, a number of things will all but certainly have changed about 
the landscape.  Asterisk and its accompanying technology stack is 
something you can get into quicker, faster and better, and be plugged 
into a shifting movement and ride with the wave without a great deal of 
expensive retooling or adaptation.  I don't think most Asterisk experts 
on this list stand to be in any danger of utter irrelevance to the 
voice/convergent networking/multimedia/telecom/etc. business in five 
years if they just keep, as they say, "doing their thing."

> In my opinion CCIE and other Cisco certifications are part of cisco's
> marketing strategy and basically brainwash you in to thinking their
> (cisco) way....

Certainly, that is an important strategic element.

> Afterall what is marketing....it is just another name for business
> propaganda ....Just 2 days back I talked to a friend who works for
> Cisco and I was asking him about how many simultaneous calls his java
> running call manager can do...and somehow in the conversation I
> mentioned Asterisk....And like all good brainwashed people he
> said...Oh linux is just a hobby...businesses cannot rely on that
> ...etc etc....

Well, that's funny, considering how much of the stuff Cisco itself puts 
out is built on top of Linux.   Sssh, don't tell that to any of Cisco's 
customers;  they might stop doing business with this amateur "hobbyist" 
company!   :-)

> Anyways I like your out of box thinking....and have been finding your
> emails quite interesting...I agreed with your opinions regarding
> body-shop companies that like to charge 100% mark-up just to put your
> employee on their payrole....

Yeah, but the thing is--if I may be so brash--it's not "out of the box" 
at all.  Pretty much everyone who replied in this thread agreed with me, 
about half very strongly.  It may be that what I'm actually saying 
something very trite, boring, and manifestly obvious to a lot of people 
more experienced in this space and in the IT business generally.

-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
Web    : http://www.evaristesys.com/
Tel    : (+1) (678) 954-0670
Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671
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