This morning, four of my colleagues and I met with three IT professionals from the University of Oslo who are on a five-day tour of US east-coast universities and companies with large VoIP installations. They’re planning an upgrade of their 11,000-telephone deployment to voice-over-IP and we offered some insight, tips, warnings, and random thoughts on deploying VoIP at a large university.
They, like many current entrants into VoIP, are interested not just in open standards (SIP) but also in open source.
Is it true that a large institution like Penn State needs a large company like Cisco to provide and support a voice solution? It’s hard to argue against. Cisco provides excellent support. But what we don’t get is the opportunity to dig into the software code, make our own customizations and hack. From a support standpoint, this is a good thing. If we want to hack at the system, as we could with Asterisk, we lose a great deal of support. Significant tradeoff.
What’s out there right now for open-source VoIP PBX? I know only of Asterisk, sipX, Pingtel’s SIPxchange, and maybe SER/OpenSER (but these are just SIP proxies and don’t offer full PBX functionality on their own). I don’t believe any of these products or the companies behind them will be of significant interest to large VoIP customers until they look more like RedHat, for example–based on open-source but structured like a real enterprise solutions provider.
As a academic institution, it would be interesting to see Penn State get behind one of these projects and perhaps help it grow into something bigger. Depending on cost versus features, I agree that supportability is the most important component. Perhaps augmenting an existing solution could be one approach to getting the best of both worlds. It would be kind of like dipping a toe in the water. Successfully dipping toes, could lead to actually diving in. Of course, it could lead to aquaphobia too. 😉