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.