Three superstars of the open source telephony world came together on a luncheon keynote panel today at ITEXPO (News - Alert) to talk about the great leaps Asterisk and FreePBX have made over the years, and the benefits they continue to provide for businesses.
The panel included Philippe Lindheimer, vice president of Schmooze Com Inc.; Allison Smith, Owner, Professional Voice Talent, The IVR Voice; and Mark Spencer (News - Alert), chairman at CTO at Digium Inc., the creator and primary sponsor of Asterisk.
Asterisk is most commonly used to power traditional PBX and VoIP-only PBX (News - Alert) solutions, or hybrid PBX solutions that combine VoIP and traditional telephony. It can also be leveraged as a feature server, by connecting Asterisk to an existing phone switch and simply using Asterisk (News - Alert) for its features. Call center/contact center implementations sometimes also use it for automated call distribution; remote agent solution; call monitoring and recording; service on hold; skills-based routing; geographic distribution and routing; and failover and contingency solution; and more.
FreePBX takes the Asterisk telephony engine, adds PBX capabilities, dialplan logic, and extra features that turn it into a fully featured unified communications system, all managed from a web browser-based GUI. FreePBX can be installed on premises-based hardware, virtualized, distributed across multiple locations, or implemented in the cloud. FreePBX can also be utilized across multiple endpoints, ranging from hardware-based phones, software clients, mobile devices, and even fully supported WebRTC endpoints.
Many successful products and businesses have been built on Asterisk, from regular office PBX implementations to highly customized one-off applications. Open source communications platforms powered by FreePBX and Asterisk have been under development for more than a decade and now account for millions of installations worldwide, contributing billions of dollars in hardware, software, and services sales.
Smith mentioned that early in its life Asterisk was most commonly used in auto attendant solutions, especially to field calls after hours. Today, however, it’s employed in a wide variety of applications and use cases, including everything from maritime communications, to taxi dispatch, and to do call announcements to inform people of things such as extreme weather or that their prescriptions are ready at the pharmacy.
Indeed, part of the beauty of Asterisk and FreePBX, Lindheimer said, is their ability to enable custom solutions.
Lindheimer added that, like Asterisk, FreePBX has gone from small and SoHo implementations to also be used enterprise implementations. This shows that these solutions are now trusted for their stability, scalability, and robustness, he said.
Spencer said that even the more risk-averse types and the technology laggards among us now view Asterisk as a safe choice.
Ease of use by developers is also an important benefit of Asterisk, noted Spencer, who shared an anecdote about how a group of art students used the platform to create various services, which he said just goes to show that when you provide the right tools to people they can do something with them.
Edited by Maurice Nagle