John Linton ......though perhaps that just means I haven't kept up with the speed of VoIP development recently - at least in the corporate sense.
I say this because I am just so impressed with the ease of cutting over to our own in house developed Asterisk PABX system from the 'proprietary hardware' VoIP PABX we have been using for the past three plus years to run our business. Not only did the transition go without a hitch but I have access to statistics and 'views' that I have been unable to get before and that we really need to better run our call centre. I'm aware that VoIP for business users is still a small percentage of Australian usage and as far as small/medium business is concerned it is a very, very low priority; which is a pity.
After three years of Exetel using VoIP I have forgotten about "VoIP quality" issue that I hear as the first thing said by some business decision maker as a defence for paying 5 times more for a telephone PABX and up to ten times more for the call charges. I have also forgotten about "reliability" - not having had any hardware or connectivity problems in the time we've used VoIP. And having forgotten about those 'objections' I had also forgotten about the phenomenal extension of the reporting and data base integration that is possible with VoIP based telephony that is simply unheard of with 'conventional' telephony. From my direct experience (which may well not be representative) most of the 'non-VoIP' telephone users seem to think a business telephone system is for picking up a handset and either taking or making a call and that paying too much for that simple service is "OK - for safety reasons". Fair enough - I wonder whether they drive to and from work in a horse and cart?
Perhaps that is harsh but, if the two 'breakfast seminars' I have been invited to talk at over the past few months are representative of business attitudes to VoIP telephony, it's more likely to be accurate because the views expressed at those 'events' unanimously belonged to 1995 not to 2009 (and I can say that because I have been involved in business VoIP for that time period). Reliability and call quality WAS an issue in 1995, quite possibly it was still an issue in 2004 but from 2005 onwards it has been a total non-issue - as our own 'corporate user' experience has proven. So today, Exetel now has NO conventional telephone lines in our new office nor in our office in Colombo and the five Exetel personnel who work from their homes only have a conventional telephone line because they need ADSL. While Exetel, hopefully, will continue to grow and add personnel in different ares of Australia as well as in Sri Lanka and possibly other countries we have no plans to ever install or use another conventional telephone line.
Our 'old' Mitel VoIP PBX was/is a good box but we always had to use Asterisk to provide the integration to our data base and the, now, many dozens of functions we have integrated into the telephony interfaces between Exetel and our customers:
The ability to use DTMF to log faults direct to the fault logging systems and update the customer data base records
Auto call back confirming fault logging with the ticket number
SMS and email updates on the progress of the fault
Auto messaging with alerts and planned outages
Confirmation of receipt of on line orders
Advise of subsequent provisioning status and developments
Advice of service activation and user passwords
The ability to send all advice by any combination of SMS, email or voice
....and, literally, many dozens of other functions.
One of the annoying factors was our inability to take the reporting from the Mitel and integrate it with our GURUS personnel and function management and reporting system. We could go part way, with a lot of fiddly programming, but we couldn't tightly integrate the phone statistics into our 'second by second' management systems as easily as we needed to do - and we certainly couldn't make changes to the code we wrote very easily.
The new, in house developed and written, system based on Asterisk, has solved all of those problems and we can now see detailed information that was never available to us before as well as providing the interfaces to GURUS to currently and historically report on the various scenarios in which we are vitally interested. As I said - I am very, very impressed. Of course, one day doesn't make a reliably bullet proof corporate telephone system but only time can deliver that 'verdict' - so far so good.
The other good news is that the cost of an Asterisk based system (apart from its vast reporting superiority) is that it costs less than $A10,000 (everything included) and can use any SIP handset (in our case replacing the 50 plus Mitels we currently use would have been an additional $A25,000 which would have been a pointless waste of money. Even the very cost competitive Mitel box capable of doing what we wanted done would have cost us the best part of $A70,000 and a 'similar' NEC, Ericsson box was well over $A100,000.
So, modern Asterisk business VoIP, a tenth of the cost of any proprietary solution plus the ability to seamlessly integrate any company's data base records and provide functionality undreamed of outside many, many hundreds of thousands of dollars (and then huge amounts of money every year for 'licenses' and 'support' and 'maintenance') plus avoiding the need to only buy hand sets at exhorbitant prices from the particular manufacturer selected. Would any sensible business decision maker really choose a service that costs ten times more with a fraction of the usability?
It appears to me that we have/the VoIP industry has moved to a new level where the use of 'conventional' telephone lines and controllers will truly be as bewildering as someone driving down the Pacific highway in a 'carriage and pair'.