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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."
...other than Asterisk, right? Or is this somehow much better?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Sorry.
Here's some articles with more information:
TMCnet
InformationWeek
TechNews
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.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
"3Com" tag gets filtered out..
Read the Information Week article. The system already runs on Linux. It's being ported to i5/OS.
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!
Only thing that concerns me concerning competetiveness, are the new fcc telco rules and related pending legislation, the stuff that will make it easy for monsters like IBM and 3com to pay premiums for better ISP service.
All people talk about is Asterisk. Meanwhile there's the OpenSource solution (even GPL) called Yate; which handles a magnitude larger number of calls than Asterisk on the same hardware, it has the (currently still unique) perfect NAT-proof algorithm for SIP, it has excellent support for H.323, and, last but not least, the company supporting it insists to do paid work only when it results in (new) GPLed code.
Yate handles business-logic integration just fine with predefined hooks (I used a PostgreSQL backend to integrate it with).
Check out Yate, it's open source, and scalable, and is in use in many callcenters in Europe without problems.
It is THEIR first telephony suite, perhaps, but not THE first. Reminds me of old AT&T claims about "firsts" things that had debuted elsewhere.
It did get me to RTFA, which is the purpose of a headline, but it was misleading. The actual article was not particularly interesting.