[asterisk-biz] Digium certified asterisk professional or CCIE VOIP
Nir Simionovich
nir.simionovich at gmail.com
Fri Jan 9 15:19:41 CST 2009
Well,
My mom always said to me: If you have tomatoes, you'd better make a
salad or tomato soup - in either way, you won't be hungry. Putting my
Romanian home bringing aside, find my comments below :-)
John Todd wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2009, at 5:03 AM, Nir Simionovich wrote:
>
>> [snip]
>> For example, say that you would like to approach a company like
>> Verizon or Vonage, stating that you are an Asterisk consultant. The
>> immediate response from your target entry point would be: state your
>> certifications, experience and references. Now, as long as you are in
>> the first 9 months of your business, you won't have many references -
>> what you have is experience and possibly certifications. In this case,
>> the certifications can help you a little.
>>
>> Without being self promotional, let's take a look to my case. I've
>> founded the Israeli Asterisk community back in 2004, when basically
>> there was nothing to build upon - as I was more or less the only user
>> here. I started building the community, one by one, installation by
>> installation, and surely enough, almost 5 years later, there are over
>> 300 community members, over 3000 installations in Israel and as the
>> founder of the community, people no longer really care for my
>> certification - they know my experience and mileage. So, when I
>> started
>> my own business in 2007, I had already a few things working for me
>> and I
>> need to thank Google for that.
>> [snip]
>
>
> Risking tomatoes thrown at me, I'll put my $.02 in here as well.
>
> There are, I believe, three components to successful consulting with
> Asterisk:
>
> 1) Experience. There is no substitute for experience.
Absolutely - no disagreement there!
> 2) Involvement. If you don't know what is going on with the
> project, and you don't know who is doing new things, you will
> inevitably fall behind.
Well, that is very much dependant on what you are doing. There are
Asterisk PBX companies in Israel, still pushing Asterisk 1.2.17, and are
doing fairly well. Sometimes, it's not a question of how advanced you
are, but actually how stable you are.
> 3) Certification. Getting a dCAP certificate is proof of your
> ability to solve many problems with Asterisk, not just those you've
> seen before.
True, having done the dCAP myself, I can honestly say it's as tough (at
pointed even tougher) as any other certification I've done. Over the
course of the past 18 years, I've passed over 25 different
certifications, ranging from the entire M$ MC** bullshit certificates,
through Cisco, CheckPoint, Stonesoft, EMC, Sun/Solaris and some other
esoteric products that no longer exist (or soon to be none existent like
Nortel :-)).
In my view, the certification is like the icing on the cake, it's not
there to replace the cake - only provide some kind of closure for it. A
certification is good only when you have some solid experience to back
it up. If your experience with Asterisk is low, and you pass the
certification only by reading the book, going to the bootcamp and more
or less reciting by heart - you do a bad service to yourself, a bad
service to Asterisk and a horrible service to the rest of the dCAP's of
the world. If you become certified, have no experience, show up at a
customer with the CERT, do a rotten job the customer will end with:
"dCAP is a piece of ****, the dCAP that was here had no idea what he was
doing. A dCAP is just like an MSCE
> Experience:
> Experience teaches you a set of solutions for particular problems, and
> the process of experience is to move from "not knowing" to "knowing"
> via being presented with a problem that you have to solve via trial-
> and-error. Often these experiences are very deep, meaning that you
> spend a lot of time learning the intricate behaviors and methods of a
> certain set of solution components. This is great, in that it also
> has byproducts of teaching you what does NOT work along the way which
> is just as valuable. There is no substitute for experience.
>
> Involvement
> Being well-versed in Asterisk requires knowing how the project is
> proceeding. Optimally it would involve your contributions back to the
> project in the form of code, documentation, white papers, testing, bug
> work, or anything else that allows other people to benefit from your
> now-growing experiences. The most successful people using Asterisk,
> and the ones who get the big jobs handed to them, are the ones who are
> "community leaders" by virtue of their involvement.
> Knowing what is happening in the Asterisk community also implies
> knowledge of what solutions other people are building in the
> surrounding ecosystem. Who is doing what programs for Windows? Who
> has a decent log parsing tool? What is the best device to use for an
> attendant desk? All of these questions are asked and answered on a
> frequent basis on the mailing lists, IRC channels, and other forums.
> Getting involved gives you relevance, which is REQUIRED to continue in
> a consultancy business if you wish to be successful.
>
> Certification
> Getting a dCAP is 100% a good idea, and I'm not saying that just
> because I work for Digium. :-) The certifications get your foot in
> the door in many companies. Let's look at it this way, as well: as
> the number of Asterisk-capable installation and integration shops
> increases, the number of criteria necessary to compare them against
> each other becomes more important. Just like having a good grade
> point average gets you to the interview step of University
> applications, so might the dCAP certification get you to the next step
> of an evaluation process that allows your experience and community
> involvement to be considered as the next decision factors.
> The dCAP certification gives you a broad range of miniature
> experiences, and the instructor can tell you what does not work.
> Learn from THEIR experience. The classes are not expensive, and they
> are not long, but IMO they provide more than their time/money
> investment in the actual learning that you do. You end up not only
> with the piece of paper, but actual knowledge to go along with it.
>
> Summary:
> If you have a first step you want to take that gives you the most
> return in the shortest amount of time, get the certification. Then
> get involved - write code, author some white papers, put up some
> demonstration dialplans. Experience is the end result of involvement,
> and certification is the first big step you can take and is a bonus
> for those potential customer companies which deem it higher than some
> other things. The combination of these three elements is what will
> win you business.
>
>
> PS: Everyone who thinks they know a lot about Asterisk should talk to
> Jared about a few questions on the dCAP test. There is a lot you
> probably don't know, and that would take you a while to Google the
> answers to. I've talked to a few Asterisk experts who have taken the
> dCAP and they've all been somewhat surprised at how difficult some of
> the test questions were, and what they didn't know. This isn't
> because Asterisk is difficult; it's because Asterisk is a toolkit, and
> some methods of combining tools are not always obvious.
That is true - I agree with that.
> JT
>
>
> ---
> John Todd email:jtodd at digium.com
> Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
> 445 Jan Davis Drive NW - Huntsville AL 35806 - USA
> direct: +1-256-428-6083 http://www.digium.com/
>
>
>
>
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Kind Regards,
Nir Simionovich
Asterisk Community Founder and Maintainer - Israel
(e) nir.simionovich at gmail.com
(w) http://www.simionovich.com
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