I’m thinking about offering Asterisk PBX to my existing customers. I have experience with IT support, but do not have much experience with PBX systems.
Is there money to be made doing Asterisk PBX consulting and installations?
Thanks
yes. but get it wrong and you’ll not be popular.
not sure how much PBX experience you need, to start you just need to know what a phone is used for, listen to customers, be prepared to accept that sometimes Asterisk isn’t suitable, and know your configs/dialplans/etc pretty much inside out.
I didn’t know much about phones either, before I replaced our phone system. I had heard that users have different expectations when it comes to phones than they do when it comes to their PC’s, but I didn’t understand how different their expectations are. I had assumed that it mostly related to up-time. Many of their expectations are not related to technical problems at all, but how they interact with the system. Every person who uses the system already thinks that they know how it is supposed to operate, and if their expectations aren’t met, there may be trouble.
Here are some lessons that I learned:
1.) Any time a phone system does something that the user doesn’t expect, they always assume that it is broken, even if it is working how you designed it. Make sure that your users know what to expect. This can be quite a challenge in a complicated system.
2.) Don’t stop at a comfortable familiarity with Asterisk before you start setting it up for user. Become an expert. It is likely that users will have requests for strange features that you aren’t sure how to implement, or there will be a strange problem that you aren’t sure how to troubleshoot.
3.) Make sure that your users have told you very clearly what they want the phone system to do. Not everyone is very articulate about this sort of thing, and not everyone understands the number of choices that they have.
4.) If you are replacing an old phone system, make sure that the users understand very clearly how the new system will behave differently from the old one. If you are replacing a key-system, make sure that the users understand what a PBX is, and how it is different. Be ready for them to ask you repeatedly how they can tell which line is ringing.
Those are some great pointers.
What are the main factors that make businesses choose Asterisk for thier phone system? Cost? Features? VOIP?
Telephony system must be extremely reliable. Being that Asterisk is PC based how does it compare to other PBX systems?
@mismanccc- How many users do you have on your asterisk system? Are your offices centrally located? Why did you choose asterisk?
a business would want to choose asterisk mainly because of flexibility, expandability, and low cost.
Flexibility- Asterisk can do anything (literally) if you know how to program it and write the right dialplan/agi scripts. Asterisk is also very expandable- a decent server can handle at least a few hundred users (IP users). You will not run into “for more than XX users pay somebody $500 for a license key” type issues. You are only limited by your hardware and your network. And for all of this, you pay a lot less than the ‘big boys’ charge. Sometimes a LOT less. This gap widens as you expand the systems- often low-end PBXs or key systems can beat * and good phones on a cost only basis; but those systems will not be able to grow like * can, with the small systems grow beyond 50 extens or so or try to add certain features and you hit a brick wall. * never has a brick wall.
- can also save money because you can mix and match technologies. This becomes especially useful when integrating VoIP (either providers or site-to-site links) to lower telecom bills.
Asterisk is as reliable as you make it. If you use a fast, stable PC with a good network you can get excellent uptime figures.
[quote=“ejconcepcion”]Those are some great pointers.
What are the main factors that make businesses choose Asterisk for thier phone system? Cost? Features? VOIP?
Telephony system must be extremely reliable. Being that Asterisk is PC based how does it compare to other PBX systems?
@mismanccc- How many users do you have on your asterisk system? Are your offices centrally located? Why did you choose asterisk?[/quote]
There are a number of good reasons to go with Asterisk, but we chose it primarily because it was cheaper. We were comparing it to the Avaya IP Office system (which looks impressive, by the way), and we found that we could do way better on Price, but still get quite a few advanced PBX features.
As you may have guessed from my post above, there has been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that have gone into this system. I’m sure that a lot of the trouble could have been avoided with more careful testing, and with better communication between me and my users.
We have a Home office with about 36 users, and 4 branch offices, each with between 2-5 users. I have a PBX running Asterisk@Home in each branch, with a Digium card connecting the PBX to the PSTN. Each branch is then linked together over our WAN with IAX2 Trunks.
We have had pretty good reliability out of the system, except for a few outages caused by me fumbling with the system. We did have one server crash hard due to a faulty PCI card, but once we removed that card it worked fine. I’m using servers with Dual power-supplies and RAID-1 drives, and soon I’ll be putting backup machines in each branch (a Dell Optiplex is good enough for a safety net).
One real problem that we’re having is some very, very persistent echo problems in our main office. This is the only location that uses a T1 PRI, and we just can’t seem to shake the echo. I’ve actually posted a thread to the ‘Jobs’ board, in case anyone thinks that they can help us with it.
I sell asterisk on two main things.
- The options. Asterisk can virtually do almost anything.
- As IronHelix said price. A lot of people want to move away from per seat pricing. This is why we charge by the hour. We get paid for the work we do.
[quote=“ejconcepcion”]Those are some great pointers.
What are the main factors that make businesses choose Asterisk for thier phone system? Cost? Features? VOIP?[/quote]
Why did I choose to deploy asterisk into my org - largely bang for the buck…i.e. you can get everything you ever want in asterisk all one for the one sticker price…and you don’t have some rep from frigging avaya, nortel, siemens, panasonic or whatever going “call recoridng” - sure thats another 5,000 or “oH you want call stats - yep you need a license key and another couple of grand for our crappy stats application” that doesn’t do what you want it to do…
currently we use : -
Call Queues
Call Recording
Call Stats
OOH announcements
DID calling
Music on Hold
Meet-Me
Fax to email
LCR routing
all of which just worked once configured and no extra $$
[quote=“ejconcepcion”]
Telephony system must be extremely reliable. Being that Asterisk is PC based how does it compare to other PBX systems?[/quote]
we didn’t stint on the server at all…Supermicro based m’board. lots of memory, Quad Zeons, 2x200 HDD etc. Initially we had some teething problems and it would crash every month or so at particularly odd times. Since we upgraded to version 1.2.6 or thereabouts it’s been up 24x7x 180 days and counting…
At the end of the day you pays your money and takes your pick. if you want to be locked into manufacturer x’s roadmap to get 5x9999s reliability then go with mr big ticket. If you want to save lots of cash get more functionality and can accept a little more pain and perhaps more unreliabilty the go asterisk.
[quote=“ejconcepcion”]
@mismanccc- How many users do you have on your asterisk system? Are your offices centrally located? Why did you choose asterisk?[/quote]
we have around 20 workers in one office who take/make over 5000 calls per month, we’re a comms reseller (not PBX’s) so being able to make/receive calls is even more critical than for a company that makes widgets…
why did we choose it see above - oh and most changes I can do myself. I added a new hunt group and DDI number in about 10 minutes for a client demo on 30 minutes notice. Try that on big ticket systems and you wont even have had a call back from your maintainer…
Note:
You really need lots more experience than your post would suggest in order to make money consulting…if you don’t have expereince in integrating FreePBX or a call stats package or telecoms knowledge then I think you’ll find it tricky to deliver what clients would like.
and my other 2 cents… make sure you document a statement of requirements and get the client to sign pre-implementation. Therefore anything and end-user says “it doesn’t do x” you can mitigate against by going “not in the SOR”, and avoids continual feature creep whic costs you money…