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Cisco VoIP Ditched for Open-Source Asterisk

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the more-power-to-ya dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sam Houston State University (SHSU) is moving 6,000 users off a Cisco VoIP platform to an open-source VoIP network based on Asterisk. One big driver, of course, is cost. From the article: 'We thought that it will be more cost effective in the long run to go with an open source solution, because of the massive amounts of licensing fees required to keep the Cisco CallManager network up and running,' says Aaron Daniel, senior voice analyst at SHSU."

1 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Asterisk versus CCM features by Alistair+Cunningham · · Score: 5, Insightful

    From the article:

    "While Asterisk and the SIP protocol lack some of the more extensive features on the Cisco CallManager..."

    This may be true for vanilla Asterisk, but there is an extensive community adding a wide range of additional features and services to Asterisk. For example, <plug>our Enswitch product</plug> provides a layer of billing and commercial services on top of Asterisk and SIP Express Router. Having work extensively with both Asterisk and CCM, I would claim that with Asterisk plus all the applications that work with it already surpasses the features of CCM, and Asterisk has the momentum behind it. Over the next few years, CCM will fall further behind, and before long Asterisk will be the dominant telephony platform in the same way Apache is the dominant web server platform now.