On Nov 1, 2005, at 9:56 PM, Greg Boehnlein wrote:
On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Tom Rymes wrote:
[Deleted]
You should take another look at the time saver. Since that is
what it
really is.
Or I could just buy a commercial product that provides the same
features
and saves even more time. ;)
And costs more. It's all a tradeoff, and each business will arrive at
a different conclusion.
If you are truly looking out for the customer's best interest, you
will
take into account the amount of time and maintenance that a
solution will
take over the total life of the product. Do you have any concrete
information that can prove that the savings of $1,000 (Difference
between
SwitchVox Appliance w/ Asterisk vs. White Box w/ Digium Hardware w/
[EMAIL PROTECTED])
is going to save the customer money over a commercially developed
product?
This argument runs both ways. Can you prove it isn't cheaper in the
long run?
Where are the metrics?
Ditto.
This is an arguement that people bring up time and time again w/ Free
Software. Just because it is Free doesn't mean it doesn't cost
anything.
Beleive me.. I've developed and sold Open Source based solutions
for over
10 years at this point, and I can tell you honestly that there is no
universal truth. In most cases, with an appropriately educated IT
manager,
Open Source solutions (Asterisk, Linux, Apache, Samba, MySQL) can
provide
value to the organizations, but the single LARGEST expense in any
small
business is PEOPLE! How much time does it take to roll your own versus
buying a pre-packaged solution? When something breaks, who are you
going
to call for engineering support? Every minute that a small business
phone
system is offline is wasted opportunity and every minute that the IT
manager of a small business (who is often wearing 7 other hats as
well) is
working on their phone system affects every other area of the
business.
No doubt about it. It won't work for everyone, and just because the
purchase price is $0 doesn't mean it's cheaper or better. (that's why
we run CommiuGate Pro instead of postfix/qmail/sendmail...) But just
because it's commercial doesn't mean it's better either. You *DON'T*
always get what you pay for...
Let's get practical and look at things from a business perspective. In
many cases, Open Source, hand rolled solutions can be effective, but
taking it down to the "It costs more for commercial so OSS is
better" is
not an arguement that will fly. In the end, small business owners
want the
Ronko "Set it and forget it" approach. Technically savvy small
businesses
are the exception...
Sorry, I definitely wasn't trying to make that argument as a blanket
statement. I was trying to say that that has to be a factor in the
decision, and different businesses will arrive at different conclusions.
Tom
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