Asterisk in the Enterprise? Be Mindful About IT’s Skillset

Alec Saunders, a favourite blogger of mine, writes a good post about Asterisk titled: Nerdy, Geeky and Cheap.

In his article, Alec talks about VoIP Girl’s post on Canadian VoIP Providers and an important option he feels she missed on her list: free open source Asterisk PBX using Unlimitel’s SIP trunking service.

I think Alec was right on the money when he says:

“…when you’re done [with Asterisk and Unlimitel], you’ll have the cheapest service, and better features than any of the service providers out there deliver.”

I love Asterisk, and I don’t want this to be a post about why Asterisk is wrong for an enterprise.  I want this to be a post about why CEOs should be careful about the decision to deploy Asterisk in their business:

Our analysis showed that a reliable, high availability deployment on Asterisk has similar costs to that of a Hosted IP PBX service at a decent service provider;  IT departments generally lack the skill required to maintain an open source platform like Asterisk.

Here’s a common scenario our customers relay to us about Asterisk:

1. ACME Corp has a legacy PBX (5-15 years old) that’s showing its age.  A new PBX on prem is pricey and a contract would lock ACME Corp into a 5 year+ commitment with the phone company.
2. IT Manager mentions this cool Asterisk PBX thing he’s been typing with and ALL of the advantages/features it brings.  Plus it’s FREE!  CEO tasks IT Manager to look further into this “VoIP thing”.
3. IT staff begins work on a ‘test box’ running Asterisk, with SIP trunks for PSTN access.
4. CEO checks in on IT staff’s progress several times over several weeks.  Each time, they almost have it figured out, but there have been delays.
5. The list of requirements builds for the project (project creep for all you project managers out there).  The ‘test box’ needs IVRs and call-centre support to match their legacy features.
6. During a weekly update meeting, a member of the executive team cracks a joke about the resources and time spent on this whole ”VoIP project”.  CEO also wonders what’s taking so long… it’s just dialtone… how complicated can it be?
7. Demo day.  IT staff demonstrates the capability of Asterisk.  Demo is very impressive.  People applaud.

   Then the CEO queries the IT Manager with…

8. “What happens if the server fails?”, “What redundancy options are available?”, “How reliable is our SIP trunking vendor?  What if they fail?”, “What happens if our Internet access fails?”, “What about disaster recovery?”, “What changes are required on our network?  Do we have the skillset in-house to manage this?”, “How do we add new features and test them?  Do we need another server for testing?  How much will that cost?”, “How do we manage our long distance costs?”, “How do we monitor the PBX?  Who will monitor the PBX?”, “Are we going to backup voicemail and configs?”, “What if Head Office loses power, can we re-route calls to one of our other locations?”, “How do we protect ourselves from Internet DOS attacks?”, “What changes are required to our network infrastructure to keep Voice and Data separate?”
9. CEO realizes that although his IT staff worked hard on the project, cool features and dialtone are not the only piece of the puzzle.  Surely there are answers to each item above, but IT Manager acknowledges they do not have the skillset to manage an IP Telephony service in-house.
10. CEO calls Point of Presence Technologies and they lay out a solution that describes a plan to work with the IT team at ACME to produce an end to end management and implementation of ACME’s phone infrastructure.

An hour long delay on the corporate mailserver might be acceptable, but how about a 30 minute phone outage?

Although they may be willing, the IT team is probably not trained with the skillset required to ensure the availability of your business’ critical phone infrastructure.

If Asterisk is the path you’ve chosen, then send your staff for training, and speak with an Asterisk expert like Digium to see how they can help in the event you need some outside assistance.