Tom Keating posted the sentiment that Asterisk ought to be impacting sales of traditional IP PBX vendors such as Avaya and Cisco, but I’m not sure I agree. Here are six reasons why Asterisk has failed to cut into Avaya/Cisco/Nortel’s share of the market:
1. Digium and its channel can’t sell against blue chippers. Avaya has a huge distributor channel filled with high-paid salespeople that get the job done. Asterisk, not so much. So there’s a polish Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel offer that Asterisk doesn’t. Some of the people running around calling themselves Asterisk consultants are just plain shabby. Then again, this is not uncommon in the open source world, I’m sorry to say.
2. Avaya has well-defined hardware products that are tangible and capital-oriented. Digium does not.
3. Asterisk is open source and there’s no comfort level with open source among board room buyers.
4. It’s still too hard to get immediate support for Asterisk-based products, and a Switchvox or a Fonality doesn’t have the same mobile support force that an Avaya does.
5. Asterisk is a solution developer’s product of choice, not an end-customer’s product of choice. When people hear ‘Asterisk’, they think ‘API’ instead of thinking ‘solution’.
6. The market is growing. Asterisk’s market share could increase steadily without the necessity for a decrease among its competitors.
Did you forget the 1000lb gorilla? Microsoft is about 100X avaya\’s size. With its Office Communications Server 2007 it poses a far greater threat to enterprise asterisk and avaya since it has virtually a 100% foothold on business.
Yes , surely AVAYA has the sales force and service support . But it is not that it is only TRIXBOX and FONALITY working and providing solution .
WE in AVIS e Sol not only provides the complete Hardware , software , integration but also it is backed by 24*7 service support for all our customers which even AVAYA does not have .
I think there will be companies like us which will evolve over a period of time and will not only take the hardware and software costs down , but also raise the bar for services which are so essential for any corporate decision .
Well, being in the Asterisk community for over 4 years now, and being an Asterisk implementor for an identical time – I just have to comment on the above.
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Your wordpress is timing out too fast, I’ll comment on this later on today
Well, being in the Asterisk community for over 4 years now, and being an Asterisk implementor for an identical time – I just have to comment on the above.
“1. Digium and its channel can’t sell against blue chippers. Avaya has a huge distributor channel filled with high-paid salespeople that get the job done. Asterisk, not so much. So there’s a polish Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel offer that Asterisk doesn’t. Some of the people running around calling themselves Asterisk consultants are just plain shabby. Then again, this is not uncommon in the open source world, I’m sorry to say.” – Ok, I can’t say that you have it wrong, but I can’t also say that you have it right. I agree that some of the people running around in various locations of the world have no idea what Asterisk really is. I’m located in Israel, and even one of the distributors of Asterisk compatible hardware has no idea what he’s saying. In any case, we can’t help but also thank these people. I compare these “shabby” people, as you call them, to the old days software pirates. They would copy software, bootleg it, sell it, install it, support it, upgrade it – and in the end, become resellers of the real thing. I think that M$ thanks every day these people who are bootlegging it, and making sure that the M$ market grows a little every day.
“2. Avaya has well-defined hardware products that are tangible and capital-oriented. Digium does not.” – May have been correct for 2 years ago, but the past 2 years had seen a multitude of Asterisk based appliances, of different sizes and shapes. I’m located in Israel, and I know of at least 3 local vendors who distribute their own variant of an Asterisk appliance. Asterisk is becoming more tangible day by day, I won’t be surprized if we see established companies like Cisco, Jungo, D-Link, AudioCodes and even the great Avaya, come out with an Asterisk enabled appliance.
“3. Asterisk is open source and there’s no comfort level with open source among board room buyers.” – What a load of BS! I personally know boards that are not only comfortable with Open Source, they even try to adopt Open Source as much as possible – not relying on 3rd party software components. It is true that no one got fired for buying IBM, but I hadn’t heard of anyone getting sacked for choosing LAMP configurations over .NET configurations.
“4. It’s still too hard to get immediate support for Asterisk-based products, and a Switchvox or a Fonality doesn’t have the same mobile support force that an Avaya does.” – If the vendors can’t keep up with their support, two possibilities exist. A) Their product is shitty and requires too much support. B) Their product is ok, but their support strcuture is lacking. The answer to both question would be: Don’t buy anything from these companies. I’m confident that SwitchVox and Fonality do their best, but I’m also confident that you can find a local Asterisk vendor in your area, to install, support and maintain your Asterisk needs.
“5. Asterisk is a solution developer’s product of choice, not an end-customer’s product of choice. When people hear ‘Asterisk’, they think ‘API’ instead of thinking ’solution’.” – Hmmm…. well, you have a point, but I can’t agree with you completely. I think that what we need now are the savvy sales people that we talked about in item 1, so that they can wrap up Asterisk and Asterisk appliances into a nicely wrapped, non-techy, product that people would like to purchase.
“6. The market is growing. Asterisk’s market share could increase steadily without the necessity for a decrease among its competitors.” – I couldn’t agree more! Asterisk had simply filled a gap in the market, one that was uncatered by the various vendors, thus, actually enlarging the market. I admit that currently Asterisk doesn’t have a negative impact over Avaya/Nortel sales, but I believe that over the next 18 months, we’re surely to see a better adoptation rate of Asterisk, not only as a PBX, but also as a rich application environment, which will soon tackle other established companies like SigValue, Sylantro and Envox.
These are just my 2c on the matter.
Regards,
Nir S
I agree with Nir Simionovich, oh btw we have already replaced Nortel at several call centers here in India and so is the case with Avaya, so I think this blog needs to be REWRITTEN
So in few months from now, you shall see that we have replaced all the proprietary hardware / software PBX / telephony application ATLEAST at one sufficiently large organization.
If you feel that you require Asterisk Support and that you are not finding someone really excellent, please do write me an email or post on http://asterisk.pbx.in/ I am sure that someone would respond to you FOR SURE.
Mitul Limbani,
Founder & CEO,
Enterux Solutions,
The Enterprise Linux Company (R),
http://www.enterux.com/
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