As the cliche goes, "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM." Or in this case AT&T/Lucent/Avaya. You'll be sticking your neck out for sure; but you will also be making yourself that much more indispensible and scoring one for the company's bottom line if you succeed. You need to discuss the risks as well as the rewards to your management/partners. If you have an entrepreneural culture, it will be an easier sell. If they are timid and feel more secure with extra zeros on the price tag... start out with Asterisk as an adjunct to the system handling IVR or something, and then keep reaching to it to solve business problems with more agility than your old platform.
Remember that most of your investment (other than in time and consulting) is in brand name, standards based hardware. Asterisk isn't the only game in town; there are commercial PBX's that can use these phones, and emerging projects like Sipxecs/Freeswitch which might some day be more popular than Asterisk. So you will not be painting yourself into a corner (man I can't shake the cliches this morning).
My boss doesn't know Aastra from a hole in the ground, so I picked Polycom for my first couple phones because every CEO knows it from the conference phones, and nobody disputes their excellent sound quality.
If there is a way to use standard inexpensive T1 cards in a PC with Asterisk behind your current switch to fix your current problems, that might be a good trojan horse for moving over to Asterisk later, and save you from throwing more good money after bad.
Remember that most of your investment (other than in time and consulting) is in brand name, standards based hardware. Asterisk isn't the only game in town; there are commercial PBX's that can use these phones, and emerging projects like Sipxecs/Freeswitch which might some day be more popular than Asterisk. So you will not be painting yourself into a corner (man I can't shake the cliches this morning).
My boss doesn't know Aastra from a hole in the ground, so I picked Polycom for my first couple phones because every CEO knows it from the conference phones, and nobody disputes their excellent sound quality.
If there is a way to use standard inexpensive T1 cards in a PC with Asterisk behind your current switch to fix your current problems, that might be a good trojan horse for moving over to Asterisk later, and save you from throwing more good money after bad.
Phone System 