Asterisk vs Big Boys Support

[crobusa]

Hi everyone,

While I've been in IT for a couple years, I've only recently been responsible for a PBX, and work for a company with that will eventually look to Asterisk to providefor something better then our current 50 handset Avaya IP Office 401. (At this time, we're looking at feasability, and won't be prepared to jump for several months/year)

I've been lurking here for quite a while, but I haven't seen many posts about Avaya or systems our size, and I was hoping to change that.

With all the FUD about open source, our experence with Avaya has been at best, mediocre. One previous consultant told us how the vendor before him left a defective T1 card in the system, and we've been rebooting the system when the lines get static. The reporting system is strewn between 2 WS2003 boxes and voicemail is installed on an XP Pro box, and I'm told we need to "invest" several thousand more so more then 8 people can leave messages at a time. I also want to develop dial plan applications that will query our CRM system, so asterisk is really attractive in that regard.

I've agree with WM's comments on how Asterisk will be the next killer app for SMBs, especially in this economy, but I'm hesitant to risk my career on Asterisk because there seems a lot fewer people who can support it.

After some googling, I've seen Citel's digital telephone adapter, and was wondering if anyone has figured out a cheap way of using IP Office digital phones with asterisk.

Is there any OSS call center reporting packages out there?

Are 50 handset companies with 2 T1 PRIs common in the Asterisk world? If the T1s are overloaded, is it easy to redirect the traffic to SIP?

Are our experiences with Avaya resellers the norm?

From what I've seen and read, Asterisk and PIAF sound like like they are mature and stable, and I sure as people who are familiar with OSS enter the workforce, managers will realize the value you offer over the more common PBXes. As a Windows person, I'm hoping the "Asterisk appliance" market offers support and polish business like ours will need.

Thanks,

crobusa

 

[jroper]

but I'm hesitant to risk my career on Asterisk because there seems a lot fewer people who can support it.

This is the big issue.

I believe that some stuff has to happen first to bring this into the mainstream - I made some comments a few months ago here http://pbxinaflash.com/forum/showpost.php?p=10797&postcount=18

To approach some of your other questions: -

...cheap way of using IP Office digital phones with asterisk.

Don't do it - there will always be some buttons and features that do not work properly, and will create annoyances to the end user out of all proportion to the scale of the problem. Buy new handsets.

Is there any OSS call center reporting packages out there?

Vicidial is one, but you may be able to get the reporting you need with the aid of an Access database and the CDR reports - the ones in the text file, not the database are far more verbose. (/var/log/asterisk/cdr-csv)

Are 50 handset companies with 2 T1 PRIs common in the Asterisk world? If the T1s are overloaded, is it easy to redirect the traffic to SIP?

Yes, and yes. Redireting traffic to VoIP carriers is easy, and you may wish to consider routing traffic via VoIP first and your T1's second. FreePBX can do this right out of the box.

I'm hoping the "Asterisk appliance" market offers support and polish business like ours will need.

Believe me, We are working on it.

Joe

 

[wardmundy]

For Call Center stats, nothing holds a candle to Asternic IMHO. There's even a very nice, free version.

As for support, the question becomes "What do you pay for support now?" Would you be willing to pay an equivalent amount for Asterisk support at least for the first couple of years to get you started. If the answer to both questions is YES, we can find you someone to provide support that meets your requirements.

 

[kenn10]

Just Say "NO" To IP Office!

The IP Office came to Avaya when a European company was purchased. It had serious issues and growing pains from the time it was first deployed. In my opinion, it was positioned to try to kill off closed systems like the Cisco CM and the open source systems like Asterisk. It failed miserably in those goals as people found they liked the older Merlins much better or went with very small Avaya CM systems instead. Avaya did not have the staff to trouble shoot and do adequate development on the product as they have continued massive layoffs and continuing disolution of their Services division.

Secondly, since the IP office was sold primarily through resellers, support is very spotty, depending on the quality of the business partner.

After some googling, I've seen Citel's digital telephone adapter, and was wondering if anyone has figured out a cheap way of using IP Office digital phones with asterisk.

As to the phones, don't bother. If you choose an Asterisk based system, I'd recommend the Aastra 9143 or 5x series of phones. They are affordable and of equivalent quality to the Avaya phones. You can get these for what one of the smaller Avaya phones costs. You'll never be able to adequately reuse an Avaya phone (closed system) with an open system. Believe me, I've tried.

I know you're just looking into this now, but for only 50 handsets and a couple of PRI's, I'd bail out from under the IP Office sooner than later. Avaya appears to be buckling under their new private investment leadership and perhaps selling the IP Office on EBay would allow you to get a small amount of your investment back.

The issue of support is a large one for Asterisk, but if the folks on this board can hook you up with a method to support a PBX In A Flash system, then you might be suprised at how easily and how quickly you can abandon the IP Office.

Keep in mind that one major limitation of Asterisk is that you cannot do bridged call appearances. All Avaya systems do that quite well so you can have boss/secretary/receptionist phones with multiple appearances of other people's lines/extensions. Asterisk will do call park, station busy indicators, and call pickup but cannot handle extension sharing across phones. This is often a show-stopper for people who want to come out of the proprietary world from Avaya, Nortel or Cisco.

Just be aware of the huge advantages of the open source world and understand the system and support limitations as you make a decision. Giving new features to users makes you a hero but if you take away an executive assistant's buttons for their boss's lines, there is often Hell to pay.

Good luck in your endeavor!

 

[TheShniz]

You know, we can go on and on about all the power and flexibility of Asterisk... but in the end, it has always come down to cost. The single largest difference between Avaya/Nortel/Cisco and Asterisk is licensing, seats, users, ports, and registrations. We are 'former' Avaya authorized distribution, and the quotes you're getting are quite normal for Avaya product. In the past, Avaya has had a very good reputation, and you were buying quality & reliability. These days we replace IP Offices, BCM's, and Call Managers... probably more often than we do older, more seasoned variety.

Not knowing your level of expertise, if you're looking to build this yourself, I must caution that you need to be prepared to support it yourself ("the buck stops here"). Paid support is available from a variety of places, but I'd recommend you to think of these as places to go for guidance, insight, and some debugging assistance. In the end, they won't 'own your problem' and only you will know your system inside and out. You should expect to be (or grow to be) intimately knowledgable with Linux and the 'command line'.

This is not a decision to be taken lightly... the rewards are profound, but so are the risks if you don't know what you're doing. This is both a commitment and an ambition. I would urge you to build yourself a system to test with only, and take things very slowly. If you do not feel comfortable but still want the benefits OSS provides, I'd direct you to buy a box from a company that specializes in this area with a long history... one that will support it for you (since 'they' built it).

 

[crobusa]

Before I started working for the business, our support agreement stopped when our reseller went under. We spent alot for advice that didn't offer any result, before we realized nothing was being accomplished.

I'm a power user who has volunteered in online forums to support CRM systems, so I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty.

Are these forums devoted to PIAF or do you mind related questions like if Cat3 cabling can be reused and using PIAF as a switch between our IPoffice Box; is this the best resource for learning about telephony from an IT perspective?

Thanks,

crobusa

 

[vespaman]

Crobusa, in a perfect world you may have come from a telco /comms background, like myself, and moved into IT then VOIP. Working with Avaya and Cisco has made the time and effort to try A@Home, PIF and the other one well worth it. You would be hard pressed to find a better forum for VOIP / Telephony than here - Nerd Vittles aside. Grab an old PC, get a Voip account and some free Softphones and get into it ! PIF is very stable and would do what you need - no sweat.

 

[jroper]

Are these forums devoted to PIAF or do you mind related questions like if Cat3 cabling can be reused and using PIAF as a switch between our IPoffice Box; is this the best resource for learning about telephony from an IT perspective?

At risk of repeating myself, this job is 80% networking and about 20% telephony, therefore anything surrounding the installation management and integration of PiaF is fair game.

'Fill yer boots'


Joe

 

[cosmicwombat]

Joe is spot on. As a member of the FreePBX support team, I find that in many support cases we have to sort the networking out as a 1st step to goodness.

Speaking of which, you know paid support is offered ( I think) by the PiaF team and ( I know) by the FreePBX project at www.freepbx.org.

Also, the forum at FreePBX is the another good forum to query when looking for solutions to issues.

 

[jmullinix]

Joe is right. 80% of the troubleshooting, if not more, is networking. However, I also find myself advising the client about call flow, IVR's etc so a portion of this is telephony and people. I find myself advising customers not to have 10 choices on their IVR's and things like that.

It is 80% networking and 20% something, but I think the 20% may not be telephony and would be people business.

 

[jroper]

Aaah well John, if we are talking about customer management, not just the techie stuff, I'd say 80% managing the customer and his expectations, with the remaining 20% split 80|20 between networks and telephony

Joe

 

[broncosis]

I wish

when I was in your position I wish
I had management that would have let me even consider
asterisk I would have put my whole career on it any day
but alas telrad was the choice they made before I started there and even though the system was hugely limited
they just could not see past the money they had already spent
and the cost for telrad handsets

and this was almost 4 years ago when we were playing with the first few releases of asterisk@home and when I found the guys here I have followed close but quietly

and I say your in a very good place to be if your the guy that is going to do the swap to asterisk with systems as mature as piaf and freepbx you would be able to do it with out to much hassle

on another note I too was a windows guy mcse a+ etc etc
made many great system but asterisk and particularly the community around this build and its history have been a huge part in my conversion to linux and I haven't been happyer

 

[wardmundy]

Aaah well John, if we are talking about customer management, not just the techie stuff, I'd say 80% managing the customer and his expectations, with the remaining 20% split 80|20 between networks and telephony

Don't underestimate the need to lay some real telephony groundwork before design and installation, i.e. a true requirements analysis of the phone needs of every user in the organization, top to bottom.

How do they use their current phone system? What features don't they use? What functions on a phone would make their job easier? Would integration with cellphones or corporate data be helpful as part of the telephony project?

Sometimes followup group meetings with a dozen or so employees from every department will uncover things that everyone missed in the individual interviews. Be prepared with a long list of functions to present. We've also had great success with a short questionnaire that defines functions in about one sentence each and then asks each user to rate (1-5 with room for comments) the importance of each function. Be sure to identify the type of user for every questionnaire. The needs may be very different in various departments or at different levels in the organization.

Show off some phones and get some feedback from users at all levels... AFTER you've nailed down the requirements and matched them up with available hardware. It may turn out the low folks on the totem pole could make better use of the Gee Whiz phone even though the boss will obviously "need" one.

 

[slickrock22]

I have been discussing with the company that provides our IT infrastructure support about starting another business reselling PBIAF. He is concerned about the supportability compared to Nortel or Avaya. Concerns are around ability to find replacement Techs for Asterisk/Linux vs Avaya for example. What to tell his existing clients about their ability to support the phone system if our joint venture dries up and blows away, so that he can recommend this solution in good conscious.

I have been using since A@H 2.5 and really love it! I would love to start a business, especially in this economy to take a bite out of closed systems. If someone has answered these concerns I would love the feedback. In an ideal world for me I would sell the systems and then just provide add/change/deletes and disaster recovery (hardware) and the technical aspects of Linux and Asterisk (outside of FreePBX) would be support by a third party NOC that I purchase a reseller support contract with fixed plus variable per client fee for technical troubleshooting. Any takers?

 

[jmullinix]

Ryan,

I think in the major cities you will find several decent Asterisk/FreePBX folks. You may have to dig around to find them, but they are there. I live 90 miles north of Atlanta and Asterisk Geeks are few and far between up here. When I run into that objection, I talk about the Atlanta Asterisk Users Group and get a couple of letters from my friends in that group committing to help my customers if I became unable to.

When your potential client sees the size of the Asterisk community, that should resolve the objection.

 

[crobusa]

Thanks for all the awesome advice...

I do have some influence, we just finished writing a ASP web app, rescuing a botched CRM deployment. (I'm hoping to extend that worth through FastAGI (and .NET), and have a few architecture questions).

I called Rhino and asked some basic questions, they suggested getting a Quad T1 card and to use PIAF as a switch. PIAF would do both T1 PRI and SIP trunking while passing the calls to the old IP Office. I understand that this limits the office's capacity to the legacy PBX's T1 capacity, and work around this by overflowing to PIAF voicemail.

If I understand correctly, that's an attractive option to use PIAF as an application and call recording server, and defer the trauma and expense of ripping out the phones. We could even use the legacy PBXs capacity limitation as a bullet-point as the business needs increase.

Is there any documentation or resources on this? Would PIAF be able to control the DID and route the call to a legacy system extension? Would Caller ID be lost?


Thanks,

crobusa

 

[wardmundy]

Documentation

 

[jroper]

What you are trying to do is fairly advanced stuff, and you will need some help to put this together.

You can put asterisk behind, in front of, and by the side of most other PBX systems.

One architecture that you appear to be considering is to put asterisk in front of your PBX. In effect, you use 2 of your T1's to bring in the calls, and the other 2 T1's are configured to make on as if they were the Outside telephone lines, and calls will be passed through seamessly, but you are going to need some help from the supplier of your PRI card (or some one who knows them intimately) and possibly some support on original PBX to get it all working.

I would suggest that you build a couple of systems if you are going to do it yourself to get the basics learned, or attend a OTTS course - I think there is one coming up soon, or employ a consultant to help you out with this. Someone not too far away from you would be best who can at least do a site visit, and preferebly knows something about your legacy system.

Given the budget, my approach would be to do the big bang approach, (with consultancy) with new phones all round, secure in the knowledge that you can always go back to the old system by swapping over the T1's if it goes pear shaped.

You said that your current PBX supplier was suggesting "several thousand more", that pays for a lot of handsets, and you get a new system as well.

Joe

 

[slickrock22]

I am not sure if this is a possibility but I have used an Adtran Atlas 550 (Multiplexer) for termination of all telco copper (PRI and POTS) and then dynamically distributed the lines out based on need. I used to have 1 Nortel system and 2 Asterisk based systems behind it sharing 1 common PRI and a few POTS. To each phone system they perceived a full PRI. I believe you can also setup routing in the 550 to route between the systems. It has been a very very cool solution for allowing me to test additional solutions without having to have a dedicated testing PRI.

Ryan

 

[foneman]

Just did this as well

I just did this in a lab and had a PIAF box acting as the network provider (PRI) and another PIAF as the PBX and an old Panasonic as a dialer using T1. i have a quad T1 in the PBX and connected to the panasonic using e&m wink trunks and to the network as NI2 PRi. Works great, after a small learning curve.
like John, and many other on here, I make a living selling and supporting these systems and even in this economy, find my customers replacing their 1 yr old systems with the features PiAF offers. Also, resellers like that they do not have to "learn" everything about them as we help with the initial install and with every system sold there is an option of a full support package.
We have ramped up just recently and started a full force rollout.
I have 15 yrs telephony which 6 of those as a network sales engineer with a large CLEC. I agree with John and Joe both about the 80/20 rule. definately do the homework and learn any customers site and usage. I have been burned on a couple of early installs not doing the due diligence.
PAGING>>>>>
Anyway....This is the best time for me to be doing this. Never let a good crisis get away...crisis means opportunity for sure.