Talking with Alistair Cunningham, Managing Director, Integrics

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

In 2004, Alistair Cunningham founded Integrics Ltd. (http://integrics.com), an independent company offering telecom software and services to businesses. A highly experienced software systems engineer, Cunningham has detailed knowledge of a wide range of business software products, particularly telephony (including VoIP), database, and network products, having installed over 100 VoIP, IVR, and voicemail systems in 17 countries. He holds a Bachelor’s Degree (with Honors) and Master’s of Engineering Degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from Cambridge University.

Integrics’ Enswitch is designed for telecom products and services companies that offer their customers integrated solutions for multi-tenant hosted PBXs, ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Provider) services, VoIP for WiFi (News - Alert) providers, toll-free and number translation services, calling cards, call shops, billing, resellers and affiliates. Enswitch provides integrated end user and telephone management, pre-paid and post-paid billing, invoicing, resellers and affiliates, and a wide range of telephony features. It’s compatible with many phone systems, including all common SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) telephones, all common SIP and IAX (Inter-Asterisk (News - Alert) eXchange) PBXs, traditional PBXs and PSTN providers supporting Primary Rate ISDN over E1 or T1, and many others. Enswitch can be used in pure VoIP environment, a pure traditional telephony environment, or a hybrid environment, making it suitable for transitioning legacy PBX (News - Alert) environments to VoIP.

Interestingly, as Alistair Cunningham tells us, open source plays a major part in Enswitch.

RG: Your Enswitch product provides quite a bit of functionality in a single integrated platform — PBX features, multiple levels of reseller, pre-paid billing, post-paid billing and invoicing, etc. How does open source fit into your environment?

AC: Open source provides the building blocks that our product is built on. Linux provides the operating system, MySQL the database, and Asterisk and OpenSER provide high-level access to telephony stacks. Asterisk is particularly important as it provides a very powerful platform for building telephony applications. It offers control of calls at an API level without needing to worry about the specifics of SIP, ISDN, or other protocols.

The Enswitch code then sits on top of all of these components and provides the billing, invoicing, multi-customer interface, SOAP API, etc. It also integrates all the lower level components into a highly scalable cluster architecture with failover and redundancy.

Had it not been for open source, Enswitch would not exist today.

RG: Is it more or less trouble dealing with the open source aspects of your system?

AC: Open source components are undoubtedly less trouble than proprietary. They allow us to conduct detailed troubleshooting ourselves as we have full access to the source code. They also allow us to be in control of our own destiny in that there’s no mandatory upgrade path and if need be we can add core functionality ourselves.

We extend the same principles to our own code. Although Enswitch is commercially licensed, we provide full source code to our customers. Customers are very welcome to customize the product to their own needs — indeed we provide facilities and documentation to make this as easy as possible. Most of our customers do at least some customization of the Enswitch web interface, and a few have completely re-written it to fit into their existing websites.

RG: In terms of the future, do you think open source will be limited to small deployments, or will it appear in larger enterprises and providers?

AC: It’s already there! We have one customer with over 100,000 users, and many fortune 500 companies have Asterisk systems in production today. Within larger enterprises, departments often have significant freedom to choose the technologies that work for them, which creates opportunities for engineers and technically-minded managers to introduce open source when it’s the best fit. It then tends to spread rapidly as other uses are found for it and other departments become aware of the flexibility and cost savings. In the long term, open source is a compelling option for larger providers because it gives them an enormous level of control over their own systems. IT

Richard Grigonis (News - Alert) is Executive Editor of TMC’s IP Communications Group.

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