During last week’s Internet Telephony Expo (ITEXPO) in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to speak with a number of vendors about open source software designed for internet telephony platforms. While implementing such telephony software solutions can often require programming knowledge, a variety of user-friendly solutions are now hitting the market, and it was evident from the conversations that the open source software movement is continuing to gain momentum in the telephony space.
To highlight emerging market trends, Dialogic sponsored an open source conference track:
- Introduction to Open Source Technology
- Open Source in the Customer Service and Contact Center Environment
- Open Source Telephony for Everything BUT an IP PBX
- I Didn’t Know You Could do That with Open Source: A Technology Focus
- Open Source IP PBX Roundtable/Shootout
Beyond IP PBX systems, open source telephony software is being targeted at critical applications such as Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Automated Call Distribution (ACD), and new open source solutions are hitting the market to address Interactive Voice and Video Response (IVVR).
PBX Market Share 2009
To date the open source telephony market has been aimed at small to medium size business customers who pay more attention to total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) while larger companies look for 99.999% up time, often referred to “five nines” availability, despite the higher cost.
Joining the ranks of well-known software products such as Linux, Apache and MySQL, the vast majority of open source IP PBX projects employ Asterisk, or a derivative thereof, as their foundation. An example of the mainstream adopting this new paradigm is Dialogic’s DiaStar Server (DSS). Developed as an open source project, DSS creates a bridge between such open source platforms and other Dialogic products.
If you’re building open source telephony solutions, Trenton’s line of standard servers, such as the TRC6000 rackmount computer or TRC6001 rackmount computer create ideal platforms when combined with telephony cards like the Dialogic Blue telephony board as part of an Asterisk-based PBX. The Aculab Prosody X media processing board is another alternative, as is their Prosody S Host Media Processing (HMP) software which performs IP-based media processing on a host CPU running Linux.
Trenton's TRC6001 CE-Compliant Rackmount Computer
