IBM and 3Com Plan First Internet Telephony Suite

TechnoGuyRob writes "IBM and 3Com, a company best known for its computer network infrastructure products, are teaming up to provide the world's first IP telephony suite. From the article: 'IBM and 3Com intend to offer the 3Com VCX suite of IP telephony Relevant Products/Services from solutions on IBM's System i business-computing platform... This means clients will be able to run business and telephony applications simultaneously managed by the System i's tools.' The application is intended for the Linux-on-Power operating system; so yes, it will run Linux."

Comments

This is way better than asterisk

[jimmyhat3939]

Asterisk is a good platform if you don't mind building a whole bunch of business-intelligence tools alongside it in order to get what you need done. Asterisk takes care of what I would consider to be a key, but simple, element of the equation -- converting the audio signals into bits and sending them around.

For a business to really base itself on an internet telephony platform, they need it hooked into a set of software allowing reporting, processing, etc. In its current incarnation, Asterisk provides a very simple Call Data Record output to ODBC or MySql. That's about it. Beyond that, the programmer has to invoke Perl AGI scripts along the way or make SQL queries from inside Asterisk's clunky extensions.conf configuration language.

Bottom line is that your business intelligence platform winds up being a bunch of homebrew Perl scripts. Not my idea of a fun time.

What IBM will put together is a set of tools where you can build the business intelligence platform alongside the PBX functionality that Asterisk makes in a completely integrated fashion, using object oriented tools, etc. Anyone considering building a mission-critical system on Asterisk should read over the extensions.conf file format for a little bit. It uses line numbers and Goto as its major flow control mechanisms. I thought those went out with Commodore 64 BASIC programming.

It's true that a few big companies use Asterisk. In each case they've had to tweak and rework it dramatically to make it useful. I predict this new system will blow Asterisk away.

Re:This is way better than asterisk

[Spy der Mann]

Exactly. Businesses find it very hard to use a bunch of half-baked or half-tested open source add-ons. What they want is a nice shiny package that will do what they need.

In other words, Asterisk is more like a framework, not a solution. The article summmary says it all: "IBM and 3com Plan First Internet Telephony SUITE".

Re:This is way better than asterisk

[matth]

Uhh.. there is really nothing wrong with line numbers and gotos. If, XYZ, then goto blah@macro-do_this.

If you can't program Asterisk, you are just a stupid moron who can't read and learn, I'm sorry. Asterisk is a PBX. If you want accounting, load an accounting module. If you are looking to sell PBX systems, presumably once you've built a system or two, you'll know what you need! If you are looking for something for work.. the 'clunky' interface is what makes Asterisk so great! PERL is not clunky. If I want Asterisk to do XYZ, I can literally make it do that in my LANGUAGE OF CHOICE!

Tags

[MeanMF]

"3Com" tag gets filtered out..

Ahhh 3com

[matth]

This remind me of a story a friend of mine told me. He told his company NOT to purchase a 3com VoIP system, but they didn't listen. They had nothing but grief thereafter. The 3com VoIP system would not read line voltages correctly from a Vonage ATA (they were using Vonage for phone lines for some reason). Further, it would not work with 'SIP', as 3com had their own proprietary protocol. It was later found out that 3com firmware had a bug in it that prevented the Vonage line from hanging up. SO they downgraded... then other things broke.

This is exactly why we are dumping our Nortel phone system for Asterisk. Proprietary stuff is junk! The Nortel crashes, drops calls, is clunky. The ACD monitoring software (Cinphony) REQUIRES that it be run on an IIS server as 'Administrator' rather then the Internet account. When questioned the company said "yeah don't put that server on the outside of your firewall". I said what?! That's not acceptable, you can't run an application as 'administrator'. They said 'well that is how it runs, sorry'.

Problem is, once you have a large system like that put in for a call center, you can't exactly "just return it". We spent the good part of 2 years fighting the company that put in the Nortel and Cintech (Makers of Cinphony) to get it to work right. To this day it only transfers a call out of a queue to a land-line when it feels like it.

Oh and don't even get me started about "The routing resources needed for this call are not available" if you have a transfer to an external number from one of the menu trees on the Nortel.... apparently you can only have 1 outbound transfer from a CCR tree?!?!

This is why I hate proprietary software.... it doesn't work, and they don't support it!