I am in the Chicago area and would be interested in this.
Cheers,
/Zac
Zac Amsler
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Robert Roach wrote:
This letter is addressed to all the businesses like mine that are
developing, deploying and supporting Asterisk based PBX systems for
the small to medium size business market.
I believe that we are starting to see a need for a formal organization
that is focused exclusively on supporting our business model.
Our customers have specific needs, both from a product and business
perspective, that present unique challenges to us and differentiates
us from companies deploying Asterisk for call centers and independent
consultants.
IMO, it is our common focus and background that not only presents
challenges, but gives us an opportunity to leverage our common
interests to build a stronger product.
In addition, I'll suggest that the majority of us are, by virtue of
working in relative isolation from one another, on the whole
duplicating a lot of effort in terms of product development, sales and
marketing and human resources.
In short, there must be a way for us to combine our resources, apply
the virtues of Open Source Development to our business model and
thereby realize the common goals of lowering business costs, speeding
product development, increasing quality and last but not least,
providing a global support organization to provide a fall back to both
our customers and ourselves.
A bit of background: Last June I attended Astricon in Madrid and
floated the idea of an Asterisk Business Consortium - A group of like
minded companies across the globe, sharing a common business goal and
working together to share resources. At the time, I met with a
decidedly mixed response to the idea. Most people were choosing the
go-it-alone strategy. Speaking to Digium about it, they are focused –
rightly so – on growing their own business. However, based on what I
have read recently on this list – notably Michael's recent request for
a 24x7 help desk - it seems that the time has come to make a more
formal proposal to the community at large.
My proposal is to create an organization comprised of member companies
to address the following issues:
1. Business Related
a. Customer Support - Need for 24x7x365 support for Asterisk
installations.
b. Continuation 'Insurance'- Provide an umbrella organization to give
your customers the assurance that they are not necessarily relying on
you as the single source for future support/upgrade of the system.
c. Boiler plate contracts – In as much is practical – develop
'standard' contracts to offer customers.
d. Marketing – Sharing the development of marketing materials e.g.
data sheets, FAQs, etc
2. Technical
a. Standardization of 3^rd party application integration to the
Asterisk platform (Jive IM Server, AsterFAX, Sugar CRM integration,
etc). We would all benefit from having a coordinated effort in this
area reducing duplication of effort.
b. Internal development of Asterisk related applications – In order to
fill voids in functionality, we can again make a coordinated effort to
build the applications we need. IMO, relying on third party
proprietary applications for critical features introduces an element
of risk into our product based on the viability of the 3^rd party's
business. Additionally, you don't have direct control over the
development time line or features.
c. 'Standardized' extended functionality for dial plans – For example,
a speed dial implementation or password protected extensions – As this
is not supported natively in Asterisk – it is implemented in any of a
variety of ways by each of us. Difficult for a 3rd party to
troubleshoot and again working in silos duplicating effort.
Near Term Tangible Benefits.
I can think of several, but two specific examples spring to mind.
First, our business is based in South East Asia, but some of our
customers have offices in the US. We would like to have a reliable
partner to service the remote offices. As each new customer presents
their own unique scenario, building relationships with other Asterisk
support companies on the fly on a one-off basis is just too time
consuming and potentially risky.
Second, our company has developed a GUI for business users that is
specifically NOT a graphical representation of the Asterisk dial plan,
but is rather a user centric application giving them desktop SMS
features, call forwarding customization, extension password protection
etc in a format which does not require any knowledge of how a dial
plan is configured. I know that others out there have done the same.
If we had coordinated our efforts from the outset we would likely have
saved time, have a more robust and feature full application. It is
still early in the deployment cycle for Asterisk overall and we can
still capture some of these benefits.
How would this work?
I think most everyone would agree that the above goals are laudable,
but just how can you get everyone to agree on how it should be
implemented is the tough part. I have a rough draft of ideas on how to
execute this, but at this stage, I'd like to get some reactions from
all of you to see if this is something worth pursuing.
Regards,
Rob
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