On average, how much would it cost to purchase a proprietary commercial PBX system that will do that Asterisk can do (to the extent that any proprietary commercial system can do what Asterisk can do) and support 10 local users and 30 remote (SIP) users?
I’ve gotten some feedback from the pro bono proposal I submitted to a non-profit, quoting hardware costs only (software, installation, maintenance, etc. to be free) and got a note back from one of their IT people (who really knows ZERO about PBXs) characterizing my quote as “expensive”. (???)
40 extensions… I would say with BASIC asterisk features, around 10-15,000.00 before licensing! Most commerical PBX system have licensing, like if you want to use more extensions that one on a phone it costs extra for a license.
If you were to get a commerical system that does everything asterisk does it could be in the 100,000-500,000 price range.
heres the thing
As soon as you get beyond basic PBX capabilities (extens/xfer/voicemail/etc) and about 30 extensions, things get very expensive very fast.
Below that point, there is a lot of cheap commodity stuff that can often do it cheaper than *. They are not going to have anywhere near the same flexibility or features however.
I think its because of the demand for systems- there is a relatively large volume production of small analog key/hybrid type systems for homes and small businesses. Such systems are mass produced and also due to the type of consumer (price-conscious, not feature-demanding) aren’t expensive. People get used to the idea that a 10 extension pbx costs $1500, but dont realize that if you try to grow that beyond 20 or so extensions you are going to hit a brick wall, or that it isn’t capable of many things * can do. Most such customers don’t care either, they ‘don’t see any reason why it should cost so much’.
OTOH once you go beyond basic capability and a certain size, you are targeting the medium size business / small enterprise market… if the customer has grown that big they usually can afford more and are willing to pay for the right product even if it costs a bit more (as they know being stuck with something inadequate will be more expensive in the long run). They are also used to paying high prices, which is why wes is quoted 3mil for a call center and companies get away charging that.
Also chances are your IT guy has never actually dealt with VoIP before. When I first got started (back before * even had version numbers) I couldn’t believe that decent phones (snom) cost $350+, and was amazed that a Grandstream BT100 was so expensive ($90 at the time). Prior to that I hadn’t done any phone work (at all really), I was IT only. Oh how things have changed since then…
I was able to put in 90 Polycom phones, dell server, pri card and UPSs for all our network equipment/servers (to give 2.5 hours of run time) for about $29K.
The battery backups alone cost nearly $12K
We had quotes from Mitel and Cisco not including UPS system:
90 phones
1 conference
1 phone queue
Vmail to Email (unified messaging)
$50k - $65k
and with the cisco we had anual support contracts for everyphone and they charge based on the #lines each phone was capable of - IE :
2 Line phone = 2 Licenses
6 Line phone = 6 Licenses
