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Nortel Strong-Arms Open Source Vendor Fonality
leecidivo alerts us to Tom Keating's blog, where he writes about how Nortel forced a former subsidiary to return its open source-based phone system (Fonality) after the subsidiary went public with how happy they are with the Fonality phone system compared to Nortel. Quoting: "What happens when a VoIP blog (yours truly) writes about the fact that a former Nortel subsidiary (Blade Network Technologies) went looking for a new phone system, chose an open-source Asterisk-based solution from Fonality instead of using Nortel's own PBX and then agreed to go on record on the VoIP & Gadgets blog about why they made such a shocking decision? A) Nothing — it's a VoIP blog — who cares? Nortel is an $11 billion dollar company that certainly doesn't read blogs for their news. B) Nortel reads the blog post, is a little peeved, but other than some emails sent internally, no one outside Nortel would ever know they were annoyed. C) A Nortel Board Member flips out over the article, contacts Blade and then pressures Blade to return the Fonality system and have Fonality print a retraction to the blog article (and the subsequent press release)."
so now instead of a few people reading about a company switching to asterisk, all of slashdot reads about how Nortel are a bunch of dicks.
nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Noone -.-
_Vishal www.squad9.com
Eat your own dogfood.
didn't RTFA, but how in the world can a company "force" you to return some other company's gear? I choose (d) Nortel a whimp they could push around.
It wasn't meant to be.
Just curious.
OK, I don't like it that a Nortel board member strong armed another company they have a minority interest in, but the article/blog entry on this is rather one sided. This excerpt for example:
What you want me to publish a document that we're more expensive than Nortel and harder to use? How the heck do you expect me to print a retraction for something that is a) true and b) out of my control now that it is in the blogosphere?"
I interrupted Chris's retelling of the conversation with Vikram and asked Chris, "How long have they had PBXtra for?"
Incredulously, Chris responds, "They haven't even installed it yet. It's still in the box."
So, if it is not even installed yet, how do they know it is easier to use?
What happens when an article is posted in the form of an overly long rhetorical question with confusing formatting and mutiple choice answers where the third option is presumed to be the correct answer? A) Slashdot readers, being generally fairly intelligent and thorough readers, react with good humor and are amused by the clever presentation. B) People reading the summary are somewhat confused and are forced to read it again to understand what is being said. C) A snarky post is made that light-heartedly mocks the original poster.
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Every company I have worked at has a formal PR policy that says you cannot go on the record with the press (which is any time you are talking to them, if you are smart about it), you must clear it through PR. In some cases, once PR realizes that you're savvy enough to not say stupid things, they will put you on the "OK to contact directly" list.
Violating the company's PR policy is a big deal, for the obvious reasons. I'm surprised that the IT Director is still employed there.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Just out of curiosity, do you think the government forcing them to use something in the first place would be better? Nobody thinks Free Market is perfect because people are not perfect. It is just the best way to consistently take advantage of peoples imperfections and greed. Until you find a way for everyone in the world to be nice then this is what we have.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
You might note that tens of thousands of nerds reading slashdot are going to find out about this today, and that the story will likely be picked up by an actual news outlet (as opposed to aggregator and discussion board, as is slashdot) soon enough, making Nortel look like precisely the big dipshits they are.
I don't actually know anyone who takes Nortel seriously any more anyway, though. I think the invisible hand of the free market is already giving Nortel what they so richly deserved, if their market share is continuing to drop at a rate similar to that of the three quarters beginning in '04 that cost them 8% not of their share, but of the market.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I wonder how long it will take for the community nature of the internet to sink thru the thick skulls of these dinosaurs and percolate into some grey cells.
The first trains were considered dangerous at any speed faster than a horse, on the grounds that man could not breathe at such high speeds.
The early automobiles had to be led by a man on foot waving a flag.
How long before corporate dinos seem as quaint?
Infuriate left and right
Unfortunately, too many slashdot submissions these days don't have what can really be called a summary. Instead they have a short excerpt from the article they are supposed to be summarizing, and the excerpt is as likely as not to have the most relevant points from the story in it.
This was no exception.
That Nortel people think Asterisk blows Nortel's equivalent products away.
Mr. Executive... Good call. I'm sure there will be a "bonus" winging it's way to your desk real soon now.
Deleted
D: Nortel takes the loss and redoubles its efforts to produce a VOIP system that is BETTER THAN THE OTHER OPTIONS! If companies would just shut up and stop trying to use lawyers and politics to keep customers and silence competitors maybe they could consentrate on making a product that is worthy of being used.
Ehm... How about... Not everyone is owned by Nortel?
Tada! Do I get a prize?
Deleted
well, i see a company doing the wrong thing and being called out for it, all without government interferance.
save the political BS for something relevant.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
I just found this on digg. they have the original press release too.
crazy...
http://digg.com/search?section=news&s=nortel
Just because the one they purchased hasn't been installed yet, doesn't mean they never tested out a demo unit. Its pretty common to try before you buy.
Kind of like the mighty hand of the nerd vote. The power of the blog did wonders in '04. Oh, wait... it didn't
What would require a comment, exactly?
Certainly, owners of property (Nortel owns a huge stake in Blade Network Technologies) can do stupid things. Doing so will bite them in the ass. That's how the "invisible hand" works -- reaction, not preemptive mind control.
Obviously, often the losses from stupid decisions aren't sufficient to prompt a correction; the Invisible Hand isn't infallible. But the problem is that non-market interventions in the economy are even more insulated from the consequences of failure.
Trying to fix market failures with regulation is the equivalent of noting that your house is flammable, and accordingly flooding the house with three feet of water. After your electronics short circuit due to the water, you then increase the water to six feet because of the fire hazard of short-circuiting electronics. Then, when anyone points out the water is making it hard to actually live in the house, you attack them as being pro-fire.
That is one terrible font. I kind of want to gouge my eyeballs out after reading that.
"Competitor" shows the relationship of Fonality to Nortel, while "open source" is just a blatant use of a popular term that does nothing for the article other than to misleadingly cry "look at me!!"
What's Open Source got to do with the story? The phrase appears twice to describe what kind of product Fonality sells, and then not again for the rest of the entire story. If it was a closed system, would it make any difference to the story? Or a bigger question, would the story have made
As if we needed any more proof of the power that the blogosphere holds... The only thing Tom Keating has shown about the blogosphere is that it has the power to distort.
There are two winners here:
(a) Fonality. That a big ape like Nortel sits up and notices what they did, is testament to how well they handled the job of installing a viable alternative to Nortel's own equipment. This simply proves that Fonality and its products are justfiable expenditure.
(b) Asterisk. That a big ape like Nortel is frightened enough of it brings another feather in Asterisk and Digium's hat.
Nortel has embarassed itself on two accounts:
(a) Its own subsidiary refuses to use its products
(b) It's trying to force-feed its product on others -- how bad does that make it look?
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In June or July, I had planned to have a new Nortel system installed. Now I'm very interested in what's going on here. I would like to get some answers regarding this issue before I commit to buy and install.
What's interesting about this is how Nortel's approach to Open Source competition is similar in ways to Microsoft's: Rather than compete based on true values of real innovation and service, they will put "strong-arm" pressure on customers and associates to get their way. Clearly such dinosaurs are unwilling to make the paradigm shift and running scared. I expect this sort of thing to go one with a number of Old-School industry giants, before they either buy into the OSS concept, or wither up and die.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I work for a fonality dealer http://www.a1firesec.com/ and have worked on nortel systems before. PBXtra absolutely stomps all over anything nortel has, even with symposium. This is a pretty stupid thing to do since it gives fonality a huge amount of free publicity.
The makeup of Nortel's BoD is public information. The person in questions is not a "Nortel board member." He is a Nortel employee who also sits on the board of Blade Network Technologies. His position within Nortel is as a mid-level marketing manager (or at least, was).
E) All the above? ... Hey its how I scored big time on my S.A.T.s!
This is the best Asterisk sales pitch I've ever seen. Nortel is afraid. The big equipment vendors can barely sell to their captive customers, and they know it.
We had millions in Avaya equipment. My migration plan was to introduce Asterisk servers to perform a few specialized functions, interfacing with our existing dozen Definity switches and use that to leverage our way towards Asterisk. We'd keep the Definity PBXs for running large offices, but use the Asterisk systems for VoIP integration and offload more & more functionality to Asterisk. The Lucent/Definity stuff is great but almost twice as much as Nortel.
I pissed off the new CIO though, so I was replaced by someone who wanted to buy a thousand VoIP adapters to use with consumer VoIP accounts. It all works out though. He's smart so he'll learn (at the company's expense) and I don't have to deal with that CIO anymore. Everybody gets what they deserve.
Need a telecom manager in the IE? Try me.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
Well, as the unfortunate user of a new Nortel telephone system (a choice in which I had no say whatsoever) I can only say that 'customer oriented' is not a term I would associate with Nortel. Not remotely so.
I found both the telephone hardware and the PBX voice interface quite poorly designed. Perhaps it is pretty on the IT integration end, I can't judge that; and the sound quality is good. But whoever designed it forgot to consider human factor. Too many superfluous (and blinking) messages on the display, too long button sequences, an unfriendly and laborious voice mail system, and generally an too complicated interface. Lots of features, but poorly tuned to actual user needs. I think that I am quite good at figuring out how things work, but this telephone system had me seriously puzzled, and the 90-odd page manual wasn't even up to date. I have known lock-in amplifiers that were far more intuitive and easier to use...
If Nortel gets in a panic about the competition getting some publicity, the most logical explanation is that they are all too aware of the weaknesses of their own systems. It shouldn't be too hard for a good competitor to take a substantial market share.
The market's hand is quite visible in this case, and the results speak for themselves. Did a government agency step in and punish Nortel for this? No, it was many privately owned web sites (eg, slashdot) that did so.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
You don't talk smack about your own product. Even if they followed the rules there is always going to be at least one hot-head that won't stand for it.
*shrug*
It's usually best to keep your opinions on your companies short comings to yourself or in a more productive setting.
Quack, quack.
the force is especially strong with this one!
Nortel may or may not have strong-armed Fonality. The Fonality guy, Chris, said that Blade's Vikram Mehta (sounds Indian, is he?) tried to strong-arm Fonality and Fonality reminded Blade about the contract that was signed about using their system.
/. story yells out: "Nortel Strong-Arms Open Source Vendor".
When the author of the blog called Vikram, this guy basically admitted to nothing:
We spoke a little more, but as you can tell, I was getting nowhere with Vikram. However what "wasn't said" spoke volumes -- both from his demeanor and his avoiding answering my questions, in my mind confirmed what Chris said was accurate. I then contacted Nortel to get their perspective. I spoke with a Nortel employee who wishes to remain anonymous. He stated that Eric Schoch, the Nortel board member was travelling and therefore wasn't able to get him to respond. - so the author has believed what Fonality was saying but couldn't really get Blade to confirm this. The author has got a 'gut feeling' that Chris from Fonality was telling the truth and that Vikram from Blade didn't.
Then the author called Nortel:
The employee did however admit that he was aware that Eric sent Vikram (CEO of Blade) a note about the Fonality press release where it simply stated "I would appreciate seeing copies of any news releases that have our name 'Nortel' in it before they go out." The Nortel official explained, "Anything that uses our trademark name we like to take a look at it." The employee added that he was not aware of any pressure applied by Nortel to have Blade reverse their decision on selecting Fonality or forcing a retraction. - so this is the best that we have here and yet the
Oh, don't forget that the author then brings up the fact that Nortel is loosing market share. Well, duh.
This whole thing may or may not be true actually.
You can't handle the truth.
It's the product of someone who used to own them. And apparently still has some influnce.
Nortel and other telecom suppliers are scared and recognize that widespread Asterisk adoption is pulling an end to their PBX business, DSM-1000s and MSL-100s. A few years ago, I was pricing a PBX for a 30 person company and the Nortel solution was $20k. Then I found Asterisk - 2 old PCs and a 2 Dialogic cards. Bam, instant PBX for just my consulting fee with worldwide SIP extensions for their sales force over a SIP client.
Nortel is afraid and although some of their moves appear ill advised, they don't always see the bonehead move until it is too late.
The summary and article are both incorrect.
The person in question is NOT a "Nortel board member." He is on the Board of Directors of Blade Network Technologies, the company which issued the press release. It's perfectly reasonable for a member of a company's Board of Directors to call the CEO and tell them they disagree with a decision, it no doubt happens quite frequently, since that's part of what the BoD does.
Now, that particular board member is also an employee of Nortel (Vice President of Business Development, according the BoD bio), but that does not mean that he was speaking from that capacity.
It's really pretty stupid to issue a press release which disses a company with which one of your board members has an outside relationship. Whoever approved that press release (Director of IT?) should have known that 2 of 4 members of his own company's board, including the CEO, had strong ties to the company he was dissing. The reaction shouldn't be unexpected.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Yes, PBXtra is based on Asterisk, but it is a licensed closed-source derivative of the Asterisk code.
You can not have the source for PBXtra. They'll give you the Asterisk code before they apply their patches, but they won't give you the source for their interface or their changes.
They might if you buy their product --I don't know, I've never bought it, but you are certainly not allowed to distribute the product to someone else after you buy it.
Just sayin'.
Anyway, Trixbox is FOSS. But PBXtra -- no.
--J(K) DOS is like Unix in exactly the same way that a pinto is like an aircraft carrier.
Don't know if you've noticed, but nerds tend to have a lot more influence over phone systems than they do over Presidential elections. Funny thing, that.
Next thing we know, people'll be claiming that civil engineers have purchasing influence in the CAD/drafting industry, or that physicians influence prescription drugs.
"have Fonality print a retraction to the blog article (and the subsequent press release)."
:)
Nortel wants some other company to do a restatement?
That's rich.
Never play chicken with a passive aggressive.
My point was that nerds seems to have an over inflated sense of influence. It doesn't matter what the subject. Case in point - the idiots that jerked themselves into a frenzy thinking they were going to influence the outcome of American Idol. They might have a small effect here and there but be it elections, TV shows or corporate purchases of phone systems, the typical idiot that posts on Slashdot has little influence. Think Linux. Other than were it has been for the last 10 years, were has it advanced? Beyond the embedded and server market - nowhere. Yet, peruse Slashdot and you'd think that come next Monday, Microsoft will fold and Linux will rule the world.
In front of almost all the people working in the i.t.
/.
talk about what goes around, comes around, karma and stuff like that.
they should have stomached the annoyance rather than getting shamed like this in
Read radical news here
Was the answer A?
not to defend nortel or anything but lets be honest here, fonality is not an open source company anymore than avaya is. sure, they use asterisk but everything they add is proprietary on top of that (including hud and their GUI).
My office (of 50 people) has been using Cisco phones for 4 years now, and they have been wonderful to us. Well, corporate (9000 people) decided that we are going to move to a full Nortel phone system. As the phones were being installed, we started complaining how much the new system sucks (our old phones were so much better). Well, the Nortel contractors that were installing our phones come over to us and proceeds to tell us how almost every single company they have helped move from Cisco to Nortel phones does nothing but complain how bad the Nortel system is.
Screw you Nortel, learn to make some phones that don't suck.
Its not what it is, its something else.
Having witnessed a huge chunk of my city's IT population get sloppily downsized by Nortel years ago, seeing them pull this sort of cry-baby move makes me wonder if the company is on the verge of extinction. So they lost one client to a competitor, who probably offered a better fit for price and features than Nortel's big archaic systems. The fact that this client was a former subsidiary of Nortel does not give the latter a license to publicly ream their former partners in a fit of jealousy. Sure, it's a big hit against the company's image, underlining the fact that Nortel hasn't been a leader in a very long time. Where I live, the word Nortel is a synonym for fraud, failure. They fucked over their staff, they fucked over their shareholders, and now they're trying to fuck over their own offspring. It's as though they want to make sure everyone knows they can't compete anymore.
Well, thanks for the warning. Oh, and SUE ME!
-Billco, Fnarg.com
All you proprietary PBX vendors out there: Be very afraid. Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
We switched to Asterisk about a year ago and haven't looked back. It integrates seamlessly with our CRM system, our trouble-ticketing system, etc., etc. It's amazingly liberating to be in control of your own PBX.
Maybe, but we're not talking about whether Microsoft rules the world. We're talking about whether Asterisk wins over Nortel.
You talk about Linux winning only in the server and embedded markets; PBXes are effectively an intersection of the two. Or, to take a different argument: While the VoIP geek crowd may be comparatively small portion of the slashdot crowd, slashdot readership makes up a great deal of the VoIP geek crowd. More to the point, CEOs tend to listed to VoIP geeks when we tell them we can build them a vastly more flexible phone system for 1/4 of what they'd spend on a big-budget vendor -- mine did.
No doubt, a great deal of the online community overestimates their influence -- but OSS-centric VoIP geeks (who are the folks with the really excellent value proposition behind them these days, and thus the ability to make an outstanding business case) are a remarkably poor example to pick when trying to make that point.
NORTEL bought Bay Networks that year - most of the new network infrastructure was barely a year old. And all of it was ripped out and replaced with Bay Networks gear in short order. The worst part was the gear they replaced it with wasn't up to the Fore level for the backbone - that took another year or two as I recall for the Bay stuff to equal it.
I can see the PR argument for it I guess, but geez, what a colossal waste of money. I can see migrating to your own stuff as part of the refresh cycle, but why waste so much money just to avoid having to explain that 'yes, we have a competitors network installed prior to the buyout and it helps our engineers compare our products to the competition' or something.
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Good fucking god. I want our old Nortel system back. At least then you didn't have to press 3-digit sequences for common functions.
And apparently no one in our corporate telecom office could figure out the email/voicemail integration or the web management interface. It's in a state of "hey I can see LDAP" but doesn't actually do shit. Very irritating.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
This little incident is proof that in so many businesses (e.g. big corporations), the ultimate decision making authorities do not use valid reasons for things like which product to purchase.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I thought the board job was to do the best for the company and its share holders
????
Wow! What just happened here? A company wanted to return a system which was not yet installed (for whatever be their reasons) and the Fonality guys basically blackmailed the Blade CEO that if he tried to return it they would use the press to make them look bad. Do you really think any company will ever again do business with Fonality? CEOs of customer companies dont like being given 60 sec ultimatums. The Fonality guys might have thought just because its an Indian CEO its Okay to browbeat him but boy was he wrong. Fonality employees better start brushing up their resumes as the company is looking at bankruptcy. Sure they may have a great product but guess what - its open source so the only differentiating factor they have is the quality of support and service but if they are going to be dickheads when dealing with customers they are done for. Havnt they heard the expression - " The customer is always right!" ?
**Life is too short to be serious**
Fonality uses a modified Asterisk kernel. They are not open source. Their system is as proprietary as Nortel's.
The Nortel BCM50 PBX is also based on Linux .... except they don't supply the source with the system.
Asterisk is quirky, has a crappy configuration language and seven bazillion configuration files.
And it's still better than all of your proprietary products.
Exactly. Asterisk is the new sendmail. Crap, but mostly reliable, and everything else is far worse. And just like sendmail what Asterisk proves is that there's a huge opportunity for someone to make one that works - OSS or no.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
More to the point, CEOs tend to listed to VoIP geeks when we tell them we can build them a vastly more flexible phone system for 1/4 of what they'd spend on a big-budget vendor -- mine did.
You might be right, but I really doubt it. I just entertained 5 offers from 5 vendors for VoIP systems. No OSS, yet every one was 80% cheaper than what was offered just 4 years ago. Am I missing something? If commercial solutions are 80% cheaper since 5 years ago shouldn't OSS solutions be, what, 95% cheaper? I'm sure you might be able to offer me a system that is 1/20 the price of what I could buy 4 years ago. The problem is, that it doesn't matter. For a few dollars more, I'm happy to pay for corporate support.
PS I have made my living for the last 8 years using OSS, hell, I'm even posting via Gnome and my last windows box is running '98. I run a small shop and support in the low hundreds of customers and I am very happy doing it. But when I buy a phone system, a cell phone, a router, whatever, I can give two shits about philosophy. I just want it to work and when it breaks, I want to make a phone call and have it fixed.
I was a former customer (at my last company they had one). All the source files were in the /usr/src directory on our server. They are bound to the GPL just like anyone who distributes GPL-based software, modified or not.
Markets are always an abstraction for a collection of individual decisions and events, and sometimes the granularity of the process means that you end up caring more about an individual decision than about the statistical averages. And the concept that a market generates good feedback based on those individual decisions each being good from the perspective of the individuals involved is also an abstraction - sometimes the individuals involved are boneheads, and their perspective of "good" isn't very accurate.
Since this thread started out as some sort of an anti-Libertarian flame, it's potentially worth mentioning that Socialism, or at least its Marxist flavors, only considers "The Masses" to be important, and if the masses aren't doing what the elitists say they should, it's obviously time for them to step in and be a Vanguard of the Proletariat, Raising the Consciousness of the Masses. That's of course much different from what happens if the Market doesn't do what the elitists want, because Market Failures are a sign that markets don't work and need to be regulated. At least when Libertarians see individuals in the market doing things that aren't what we hoped they'd do, we get to call them boneheads and say they deserve to lose, as opposed to forcing them to have their consciousnesses raised
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
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I think I've put my finger on why this is so umseemly. Board members are supposed to oversee top management and not be involved in the day to day operations of a company. They aren't the management. They can replace the management if they'd like, but they aren't supposed to be managers themselves. They are supposed to be the watchdogs for the stockholders, making sure that managment is managing with the shareholders interests in mind instead of their own. So the Blade board member shouldn't have been involved in this level of decision making to begin with.
Secondly, even though Nortel is a minority share holder in Blade, Blade board members have a legal obligation to look out for the best interests of all Blade shareholders, not in the best interest of other companies that they are associated with. This screams for SEC investigation or a shareholder revolt from other Blade shareholders. In this case the Blade board member was acting on Nortel's best interest, not Blade's. This is a serious conflict of interest and an ethical violation. The fact that Nortel still has a partial stake muddies the waters a bit, but as they are not wholly owned by Nortel, Board members have an obligation to server the other shareholders as well.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
You wouldn't rather just fix it yourself? Or at least gain some understanding of why it was broken even if someone else eventually fixes it? What happens when AP forgets to pay the support contract bill and you call them and they tell you to stuff it?
You can pay corporations to support free software, BTW. Not sure if you've heard about that yet I know it's a recent development and all.
Also, free software is about more than "philosophy" it's really about the license. Good luck with all your commercial solutions when your company hits a cash flow problem, or forgets to pay the support bill, or uses an unsupported configuration, or allows support to lapse and they want to recertify. All of these are common problems with commercial software when you are dependent on someone else for support. It amazes me that people are still allowed to make purchasing decisions in companies without considering the implications of the license in question. It defines what you can do with the software! How is that not most practical aspect of the software in question?
You wouldn't rather just fix it yourself?
You seem to be equating free software with free employees. I'm not sure what business you are in, but I need to pay for my help.
What happens when AP forgets to pay the support contract bill?
They get fired, that's what.
Also, free software is about more than "philosophy" it's really about the license. Good luck with all your commercial solutions when your company hits a cash flow problem, or forgets to pay the support bill, or uses an unsupported configuration, or allows support to lapse and they want to recertify.
Again, I laugh at your confidence with OSS solutions over commercial solutions. 95% of OSS doesn' even offer what you are suggesting.
You might be right, but I really doubt it. I just entertained 5 offers from 5 vendors for VoIP systems. No OSS, yet every one was 80% cheaper than what was offered just 4 years ago. Am I missing something? If commercial solutions are 80% cheaper since 5 years ago shouldn't OSS solutions be, what, 95% cheaper?
I'd like to think that it's OSS solutions such as Asterisk (and its commercial derivatives) which have brought in the competition which has resulted in those dramatic reductions in price; there's certainly a temporal correlation. In any event -- here's a deal. You give me some general specs on the system you're creating, and I'll give you some numbers on what it would cost to build it with Asterisk -- either DIY in-house or through a vendor with a phone number to call when it breaks.
You give me some general specs on the system you're creating, and I'll give you some numbers on what it would cost to build it with Asterisk -- either DIY in-house or through a vendor with a phone number to call when it breaks
I'm paying (in the next three weeks), just under $2000 for a VoIP PRI with a support contract, fully installed. It will support 500 DIDs and has features up the ass compared to systems a few years back. If you have something less than what it costs me to pay a developer for less than two weeks (at $60K/year which is dirt cheap where I live), then call me skeptical because I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it.
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I support Asterisk systems, so there's someone to call when it breaks, or to get bugs fixed. For example, a client of mine was using the "email voicemails as a WAV file" feature, but the message it constructed was not being recognized properly by Outlook. In about 1 billable hour, I was able to fix the bug.
Check the voip-info.org Wiki for a listing of Asterisk consultants in your area.
"Just under $2000" is right about what most of the prepackaged Asterisk vendors will charge for a fully supported turnkey solution with a T1 card built in, so we're about even on price -- if you're going through a vendor. If you're paying someone in-house to do maintenance, there's certainly a man-hour cost -- but what that buys you is flexibility.
You're moving between offices, you want staff to be able to work from both locations, but your telco doesn't want to have PRIs at both ends live at once? Put an Asterisk server at each end and trunk them over IAX2 -- *without* plopping down another $2K, because the software's free. You want your tech support queue to include employees' cell phones after hours, but only for calls from anyone in the database as having bought a tier-2 or better support contract? Can do. You want to send your support staff an IM with a link into your CRM database ready to log the call whenever they pick up a phone with a customer? Or you want to transcribe any calls made to and from your support line into Speex format and archive them on an internal web server? You want to detect faxes incoming to your users' phone lines, and reroute them to email instead of ringing the phone? You want employees to be able to send outgoing faxes from any PC on your network just by hitting "print"? Just a simple matter of code. And because Asterisk is OSS, there's a massive community out there sharing recipes on how to implement features like the ones I just described. [Yes, every one of those is possible, and most of them I've already implemented... though doing fax detection before even ringing the phone means an extra delay between when an incoming number is dialed and when the internal line rings, which is one downside to using it].
Bought an ancient channel bank off eBay that uses the ancient, next-to-unheard-of TR-08 framing standard? It'll work. Pick up a lot of SCCP-only phones at an auction? They'll be fine. OTOH, if you're having echo on your PRI and you want carrier-grade hardware echo cancellation, Sangoma will gladly sell you that -- and their tech support is top notch. (They paid shipping both ways to get my ancient, TR-08 based channel bank up to their R&D group for analysis; I'm still rather impressed).
Buying a proprietary solution ties you to its vendor. They go out of business, you're hosed; you can buy a new system pretty cheap, but you'll need to reprogram all the phone trees, all the custom rules, all the queues... etc. If you were buying from an Asterisk-based vendor, all your customizations would be immediately portable to any other Asterisk-based vendor's product -- or you could look for a vendor who would support your preexisting installation, rather than needing to replace anything at all.
Having a limit on the number of DIDs supported is silly. That's not a technical limitation, it's a pricing one. (Having a limit on the number of simultaneous channels makes more sense as a technical limitation -- but if your hardware is limited to one PRI, I suppose that bottlenecks you right there). That said, Fonality is somewhat guilty of that kind of silliness too -- their $995 entry-level product has a bunch of Asterisk's core, built-in features turned off!
All that said, it sounds like you're right about commercial products having become price-competitive with Asterisk within the last few years. Even so, on features, flexibility or futureproofing, Asterisk is hard to beat.