Provocative title...
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| cubrewer Apr 03, 2006 9:12 AM EDT |
... but I read the article as pro-Asterisk and pro-FLOSS. The reality is that the entire tech industry exists to increase productivity and drive down costs and the only thing new (in this regard) about free software is the breath-taking, margin-busting pace of acceleration. JBOSS's Mark Fleury said something like this: "These people with commercial offerings with whom I compete have no idea how fast and how disruptive this is going to be." Same for Asterisk, perhaps more so. I just purchased my first Digum card without any clear need, just because it is so affordable (about $150 for the new 4-port card and an FXO module). Just imagine the innovations (some are described in this story) when you can have such cheap integration between the computer and the phone. Let's face it, the web is amazing and a rich medium for a lot of things... but *everyone* has a phone. Today. It will be years before everyone has constant web access and it's an open question how rich this access will be (I'm not reading my email on a 3" screen and I'm not sticking a 16" screen in my pocket... we're going to have to see radically new input/output technologies to make mobile web access as rich and ubiquitous). What really made me decide that I need to get my hands dirty with a working system was when I read about the AGI interface (think CGI for phones). It makes IVR as easy as those little Perl scripts we used to write to create dynamic web applications. Once IVR is cheap, every business is going to want this kind of technology. (And it will evolve the same way much dynamic web content has now moved beyond simple CGI.) And that's not even considering VIOP... The tipping point is going to be when your competition is doing some incredibly cool thing and you cannot stand to have them divert your customers' attention and mindshare. You ring Cisco and find out it will take tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep up with the Joneses... And then you find out that your competition is using Asterisk and it's only costing them hundreds of dollars... Pretty soon, IVR is like websites; everyone has them. And Asterisk is driving the lion's share, just like Apache. In fact, they have rooms full of servers hosting a series of applications because it's simple and cheap. Virtualizing the hardware becomes a Big Deal... As I see it, the only hopes left for proprietary companies are (1) to find a means to squash Digum (patents?) or (2) obey the writing on the wall and cannibalize their own sales to stay in the game. Cisco could start contributing "high-end" features to Asterisk and concentrate on selling "high-end" Asterisk-compatible hardware. I haven't heard that Cisco has a huge patent arsenel... but maybe they do. |
| DrDubious Apr 03, 2006 9:40 AM EDT |
By amazing coincidence, I've just started playing with Asterisk at home (not "Asterisk@home", I mean literally running it at my house). The features available in this thing is mind-boggling. There is definitely something of a learning curve initially, but I've already got it set up so that it can accept an incoming call on my regular line, try to forward the call to my computer if I've got KIAX running and connected, and send people to voicemail if not. Not to mention having a "conference" room running so I can talk to multiple people at once via VoIP (and up to one telephone caller - I've still only got the one POTS line in the house.) AGI is definitely on my list to play with as well. Aside from the "spare computer" that I hooked up to run it, it cost me all of $25 (+ a few dollars shipping) to get a brand new modem card that could take incoming calls. When I've stopped being a starving student I'll upgrade to the more expensive card... |
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