Kerio Operator vs Asterisk

The company I work for is considering a VoIP system much like Asterisk, and my boss has taken a particular shine to the Kerio Operator platform. Since it runs Asterisk, I have a bit of a problem on my hands. I have looked everywhere I could, but unless I’m using the wrong search terms, I cannot find any sort of a comparison between the Asterisk used in the Kerio Operator product and the open-source Asterisk available for free.

For anyone who has used both, or knows both, I would love to have a curated list of features that are different between the two products.

I’ve never heard of that brand. There probably isn’t any difference in the Asterisk part of it. If you actually buy the software, you can insist on the source code of the product, and compare the two.

First time i heard of that brand. If you are not a programmer maybe you wont be able to compare the source code. But at least you can check the features that Asterisk provide and the stability against the Kerio. And that type of ANALOG and Digital connection with the PSTN they provide?

Unfortunately Kerio provides precious little documentation on Kerio Operator up-front. Their website is mostly marketingease. I will try contacting them directly for an answer.

Just talked with a Kerio engineer – turns out that there is no fundamental difference in terms of features between the underlying version of Asterisk in Kerio Operator and the open-source version of Asterisk. The main claim to Fame that Kerio has is their own custom GUI, the underlying hardware (if you buy the appliance) and the support that comes with the purchase. So essentially, a Red Hat software/service model. Nothing to be ashamed about, but I am a relatively decent tech and should be able to figure this all out on my own. :wink:

With that said, how has Asterisk performed under a virtual machine (say, VirtualBox) running on Windows Server 2012 R2? I am currently building a 16-core (2× 8-core Opteron 6128) machine with 32GB of RAM. I eventually want Lync 2013 to take over VoIP services and be the Unified Messaging bridge to Exchange 2013, but that is down the road – Asterisk will have to fill the gap between now and then.

If the host machine that is doing the virtualization is not under heavy load, Asterisk should work just fine under VM enviroment. You will have issues if you want to put it on a busy server. Asterisk needs direct access to the CPU every 20ms. If it does not have it, strange things start to happen (choppy audio).