Is there any competiters to the asterisk product

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi all,

I am new to the soft pbx world and i am doing some research on these things . The only product that i have come accross is aterisk. I am trying to replace our old “Traditional PBX” and trying to move towards a software server style pbx. i would like to know if the re are any other products out there besides asterisk. If so then i would like to know if and what the advantages are of chossing asterisk as apposed to any copettitors that might be out there?

Thanks

2

If evaluating Asterisk than this book (just released last week) may be of interest to you:

Asterisk - The Future of Telephony

Of course there are many commericial apps on the marketplace for softswitching purposes. One example is Interactive Intelligence which runs on Windows and has commercial support and maintenance.

Another example of an opensource effort is the SipX PBX that is a commercial application that was opensourced.

Many other examples may be found here:

voip-info.org/wiki/
voip-info.org/wiki/index.php … nd+Servers

In my experience Asterisk has a very active developer and user community that creates an active ecosystem with evolving features in the core and many add-ons. You may even obtain commericial support of Asterisk via Digium’s Asterisk Business Edition.

What you need to do is determine what the needs of your company is to begin a real evaluation as to whether Asterisk makes sense for your organization or not. Things to consider are:

  • How many sites do you have?
  • What is your LAN/WAN infrastructure like, is it ready for VoIP?
  • What types of functions do you have in place with your current PBX provider that you need to maintain in a softswitch solution?
  • What additional functions are you looking to have with a softswitch solution?
  • What is the future growth projection of your environment?
  • Do you want to be able to reuse any of the existing desktop phone sets?
  • Do you need to run an internal helpdesk/external call center application with the platform?
  • Do you want the ability to use TAPI apps from the desktop?
  • Do you have Linux and/or Windows skills in house?
  • Are you looking for VoIP and TDM for PSTN interconnection?
  • etc, etc

Good luck!