What’s IT all about?

In Telephony Pt 1 I discussed reasons why a company might want to take control of their telephony by installing their own PBX (Private Branch eXchange), and in Pt 2 I talked about VoIP (Voice over IP) and the options over running it in-house or not. In this article I want to explore a particular VoIP PBX, namely Asterisk.

As you may remember, the broad options for running a VoIP phone system are either to have the PBX hosted elsewhere (the IP Centrex model) or to run one yourself. In the commercial world, running your own PBX has only really been an option when you get to a particular size and can afford to spend tens of thousands of pounds on a shiny new phone system. For the majority of businesses classified as SME’s (Small to Medium Enterprises) this is not an attractive option. Therefore, many of those who have gone down the VoIP route have ended up using the IP Centrex model where they effectively share use of an enterprise-grade PBX with other SME’s. This reduces cost, which is attractive, but also reduces control, which is less so. Additionally, pricing models tend to be based around a monthly fee for each handset, with a standard fee covering basic functionality but other features only being available at extra cost.

Another option, perhaps less well know, is to use an Open Source system called Asterisk. If you don’t know what Open Source software is, this link explains the concept in some detail. What it means in practice, at least in the case of Asterisk, is that the software is available to download and use for free, i.e. there are no licences requiring payment, although there are restrictions over what you can do with the software. Asterisk is touted as an enterprise-grade PBX, and those in the know have been using Asterisk for telephony services for many years now (it was first released in 1999). In practice, Asterisk is capable of running phone services for very large installations, and has been used in large US universities for example.

However, for me the main strength of Asterisk is not how well it can compete with the Cisco’s and Ayaya’s of this world (their support organisations will always be more attractive to the corporations of this world) but rather in the advantages it has over hosted VoIP solutions for SMEs. Instead of paying a monthly fee to a VoIP services provider, you can have your own, full-featured PBX sitting in your comms room (or study or bedroom if appropriate) letting you add as many extensions and features as the hardware is capable of supporting.

Consider a summary of the features available as standard in Asterisk:

Extensions Support for SIP, IAX and analogue extensions. The number of extensions is only limited by the power of the hardware, and the capacity of the network

Voicemail Voicemail can be picked up off the phone, a web interface, and even emailed to you as an attachment

Ring Groups Make groups of phones ring at the same time

Call Queues Designed for call centres, “please hold until an agent becomes available, your custom is valuable to us.”

Conference Rooms Host your own conference with many people speaking at the same time

Inbound Calling Rules Route calls intelligently based on rules such as the number called and the time of day

Outbound Calling Rules route calls via multiple telecoms and VoIP providers based on who is giving the best value for money

IVR Menus Design interactive menus to act as a digital receptionist. “press 1 for this and 2 for that” Messages can be recorded via the phone and aimple web interface, or profeesional recordings can be uploaded to the PBX

Feature Codes Do not disturb, call forward, speaking clock and many more

Call Recording on demand or for every call

Global speed dial system. Short code access to favourite numbers

Follow Me where ever you are, we’ll find you, calls can be diverted to other extensions, or to any phone number in the world

Dictation Module Dictate into the phone, and the resulting wav file is emailed to you

Callback Save money when roaming abroad with the mobile

DISA Direct Inwards Systems Access, Dial into the PBX to hear your voicemail

Print Extensions this saves the receptionist a job

Web Interface Well documented web interface available in multiple languages for configuring the PBX

CDR Detailed and searcheable call reports

Operator Panel watch the PBX activity in realtime on a web page, including numbers of callers in a queue

Most SMEs will struggle to use all the features, instead of getting frustrated that the phone system will not do what they want.

I was so impressed by the power of the software, and the potential it has in the SME marketplace, that I have signed up as a reseller of a particular flavour of Asterisk that has been created by a company called Concordiax. This is a commercial venture, which you may think is at odds with the ethos of Open Source software, but I would (obviously !) argue otherwise. One of the issues an SME is likely to have with Asterisk after they have downloaded it, is what to do next. The base system does not have a nice GUI installer and a web-based configuration application (although these do exist in the OS community), but is very much a text-based, Linux application that requires a deep level of knowledge to configure and get working. One of the things Concordiax has done is to gather together a number of Asterisk utilities into a coherent package that can then be more easily installed on your donor hardware.

Once your PBX is in place, though, you still need to hook it up to the phone system, purchase and configure your desktop phones and/or softphones and configure all the Asterisk functionality mentioned above. Again, Concordiax has knowledge and experience to make this a relavitely straightforward task, whereasthe typical SME IT resource would potentially take days or weeks to figure it all out.

Say it quietly, but there are downsides to hosting your own PBX, and top amongst those is almost always Business Continuity. What happens if there is a problem with the PBX ? Well, you can certainly think ahead and mitigate some of the possible issues. This is something that Concordiax can assist with too. For a small monthly fee (much smaller than the typical hosted IP fee per phone), Concordiax will backup the configuration of your PBX to a secure central location. Then, in the event of any system issues, you only need to swap the faulty PBX hardware for a new donor machine (preferably with Asterisk already installed), the saved configuration is loaded onto the new box, and you are back up and running in minutes. For more critical environments you could have a hot-swap box up and running and just need to swap the cables over to get calls flowing again.

This has turned into a bit of a sales pitch, which I hope only goes to show the enthusiasm I have for Concordiax and Asterisk as a solution for VoIP telephony in the SME market. I would be happy to discuss the benefits of our solution to anyone who is interested, just drop me a line or call me on 0871 4082117 to hear how well an Asterisk PBX works.