[Asterisk-Users] Re: [Asterisk-Dev] The killer app for Asterisk in corporate deployment

[John Todd]

At 6:31 AM -0700 on 8/4/05, peter webier wrote:
>We're a dealer in Europe selling commercial phone &
>building management systems, some residential too.
>All the new office buildings have an EIB bus to manage
>the lights, clima, security access, etc.  The big
>companies also have Crestron or AMX automation and
>media servers for the boardroom.  Asterisk is an
>awesome phone solution, but if we could offer a
>solution that tied it all together it would be the
>first product of its kind.  My colleague has been
>talking about another Linux-based open source project,
>plutohome.org, which is geared towards residential.
>However, we found that it includes Asterisk already,
>and it has automation modules including EIB, and a
>media server. So already this gives Asterisk and open
>source a huge advantage since we can run all 3 major
>systems on the same infrastructure: telephony,
>building automation/control, boardroom
>media/presentations.
>
>What would be the total icing on the cake is that they
>have a GUI that controls everything and runs on mobile
>phones and pda's, and they say, could probably be
>ported to run on the Cisco IP Phone 7970G.  Since
>their GUI code already runs on Symbian, Linux, Windows
>and Windows CE, it must be quite portable.  With that
>1 addition, then the SIP phone would become the total
>heart of the organization, handling the telephony, a
>built-in touch-screen to control building automation,
>as well as boardroom presentations.  And the cost
>savings would be staggering.  Asterisk is already a
>huge cost savings, but with this then a switch to an
>open source platform would also elimnate the costly,
>proprietary building automation and media servers.  A
>Crestron boardroom control system is about 20,000
>Euro--with this solution it would all be part of the
>existing phone system.  No extra hardware, and a
>drastically lower TCO.  Crestron & AMX do about US$
>250 million annually on that and they have virtually
>no competition in this area.  It's a big business
>waiting to be tapped.
>
>The guts is already there and it works--we download
>plutohome.org and it's working great with Asterisk and
>the Cisco SIP phones, our EIB system.  The only
>problem is their configuration tool is totally wrong
>since it only had the home market in mind, and we need
>a port for the Cisco phones.  Anybody else agree on
>this?  Is anybody else thinking the same way?

I am uncertain that this is -dev material, so I've moved this 
response to the -users list.

While I agree that there is "dev"elopment that needs to be done on 
something like this, I think the relative merits of such a system 
would be best discussed in the larger group, a set of requirements 
built, and then developers identified.  However, it sounds more like 
you need to talk to the people at Plutohome than you're interested in 
making some type of Asterisk development effort - what am I missing 
here?

As an interim measure, I'd suggest taking a look at this company: 
http://www.openpeak.com/   Specifically, I'd suggest reviewing this 
press release:  http://www.openpeak.com/news_release_94.html

While not being an open-source solution, it appears that they have 
some of the components you're looking for.

JT