[Asterisk-Users] Large Enterprises using asterisk

[Sunrise Ltd]

Varun Gupta wrote:

>I want to know
>
>Why large enterprises (F500) are not shifting to
>asterisk as it is going to save them a lot of
>investment.

The short answer is corporate innertia. Ever head of the
saying "Nobody has ever been fired for buying IBM"?

The long answer is that Asterisk has not taken any of the
corporate hurdles yet. In a nutshell some of those hurdles
are ...

1) Stable release

No enterprise will even want to schedule a 15 minutes
meeting on using a software for which there is no stable
release yet. That is precisely the reason why it is so
important to get Asterisk 1.0 out of the door. This will
be a very important milestone that we all hope to achieve
shortly now that the RC1 release is out.

2) Support for standards outside of the US

Most Fortune 500 companies may have their headquarters in
the US, but they are multi-nationals. Corporate
infrastructure must therefore be compliant with standards
and regulations outside of the US. For as long as Asterisk
PSTN technologies don't have required regulators' approval
in at least all the OECD countries, multi-nationals won't
even blink. In this field we have to do a lot more.

3) Vendor/Integrator support on an international scale

Although there are Asterisk integrators and consulting
companies in many countries, what multi-nationals are
looking for are turn-key solutions providers that can
support them in every location that is important to them.
They won't deal with piecemeal support. Unless companies
like Accenture or IBM start offering Asterisk integration
in their portfolio, there isn't really anybody
multi-nationals will want to turn to. They rather go an
buy Cisco, because Cisco are everywhere.

This could be addressed by Asterisk integrators organising
themselves in a way that would allow it to appear as a
single party when bidding for multi-nationals' business,
but this is easier said than done.

4) More visibility in the mainstream

Asterisk has only just started to show up on the radar
screen outside of  "geek circles". How many corporate IT
directors have heard of Asterisk? Now that there are two
books on Asterisk and that articles show up in the
mainstream media, the number is very likely increasing by
the day, but it is still early days.

I am confident that sooner or later there will be a
Gartner study that mentions Asterisk and when that
happens, you will see the Fortune 500s lining up in
droves.

rgds
benjk

--
Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd
9F Shibuya Daikyo Bldg., 1-13-5 Shibuya, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan

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