For most of us, the word “free” has very strong appeal: free sample… free trial… free lunch. How about free Asterisk?
“Free” has become more than a marketing gimmick and today scores of companies are being built around the notion of free. Consider Google. Virtually everything they do is free to consumers. Then there’s Yahoo, offering free email with unlimited storage. The list goes on and on. Clearly, the race to zero in the cost of bandwidth, processing and storage has made “free” a sound basis for business models for web-based businesses. What about the rest of us?
DOW Networks is an international VoIP services company that also provides Asterisk PBX and call center solutions built around Asterisk. Asterisk PBX is strong product for us. It has most of the features and functionality available in proprietary PBXs -- voice mail, conference calling, interactive voice response, automatic call distribution and much more – but at fraction of the cost. Asterisk PBX comes in two basic flavors: a free download available under the GNU General Public License (GPL) model and a proprietary version available from Digium.
Although initially intoxicated with free Asterisk, DOW Networks does not use it. In South Africa, Latin America and other markets, we compete with companies that do and their PBX solutions are often less expensive than ours. Does that place us at a competitive disadvantage? Absolutely not and here’s why:
- Free Asterisk is not as stable as Digium’s proprietary version – Asterisk Business Edition. If we have a problem with ABE, we call Digium and they’re on-the-case. If we needed support on free Asterisk, there’s been no easy way to get it (although Digium plans to offer support on certain versions of free Asterisk).
- Our technicians and engineers all have attended Asterisk boot camp and are highly skilled in configuring and installing Asterisk PBX and Asterisk-based call center solutions. They are not programmers and we don’t want them to be. That’s not our business model. We also don’t want them spending hours on Asterisk.org looking for answers, bug fixes or patches. And who would pay for that anyway. Do we eat the cost or pass it along to the customer.
- When a customer’s system goes down, we can't tell them we’re not sure what the problems is… or that we built their system on free software that’s sometimes buggy… or that we’re researching the problem with the Asterisk community and will get back to them.
For customers large or small, telecommunications is usually mission critical. If their PBX goes down, they’re usually out of business. Our decision to use Digium’s Asterisk (and licensed versions of Linux operating systems) actually provides us with competitive advantages:
- It reduces the margins for error. And because we operate in several developing countries, there are a host of other issues to contend with, including power infrastructure and bandwidth.
- It increases the stability and reliability of the customer’s IP PBX platform which increases customer satisfaction and in turn helps protect and strengthen our brand.
At Digium’s Astricon in September, one keynote speaker talked about how Asterisk has yet to leap the chasm where it will be widely accepted and recognized as rock-solid alternative to proprietary PBX. That leads to other reasons why we don’t use free Asterisk that are really about enlightened self interest:
We have hitched our wagon to Asterisk technology and made significant investments in Asterisk technical training. And we believe that by using Digium’s proprietary version of Asterisk we are helping build Asterisk credibility – especially among larger customers – and that will help Asterisk to leap that chasm.
