For several varying quotes, one could go to www.buyerzone.com <http://www.buyerzone.com/> and put in exactly what you specified. You will get several vendors proposing different systems, prices, and most importantly, service contracts. It does cost each vendor about $25 dollars to buy your "lead" so be aware that you are costing them money by doing this. Whether or not that is ethical, is your decision. I am just pointing out that "one could do it". Make sure to include that you need a conference bridge that can handle unlimited callers, also unlimited voicemail ports, support SIP, and also consider scaling. That should freak them out.
Does "whatever" company have people on staff that know Linux and have time to learn and support Asterisk? What is the cost of taking them from what they usually would be doing to work on the Asterisk system? I would suggest going with SIP phones and a four port FXO board. You could run both systems side by side until you are ready to cut over and then just switch your four POTs lines. Most proprietary systems use digital sets so you cannot use a mutiport FXS board. I have used proprietary handset gateways such as Citel and my person experience was very very poor. How much ROI is going to depend on increased worker productivity which is fairly hard to figure out and also ongoing average costs of MACs (cost of Moves Adds Changes) as well as support contracts. Thanks, Steve Totaro http://www.asteriskhelpdesk.com KB3OPB _____ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Byron Pile Sent: Tuesday, March 20, 2007 5:28 PM To: [email protected] Subject: [asterisk-biz] case study on switching to Asterisk I thought the biz list was most appropriate for this. Hope I'm not wrong! I'm trying to write a term paper on adopting an open source solution over a commercial solution and comparing the cost. Specifically if a legacy system is in use already, when will the initial investment of hardware for an asterisk based system pay off against the licensing fees of a proprietary system. After reading a good chunk of the free Asterisk book "Asterisk:The Future of Telephony" I think that Asterisk is an excellent topic for the paper. I'm new to telephony stuff so bear with me if my questions are a bit dumb, I've tried to do quite a bit of research and reading before posting to the mail lists. So my idea was to use the fake company "whatever" and they have 15 telephones and are currently using a Norstar ICS with 4 incoming lines and 15 internal lines and I would like to switch this over to an asterisk based system. The reason for choosing the Norstar as this is a turnkey solution provided by a large local telecom so I will be able to get some pricing information for them fairly easily and I think it does what a 15 telephone small office might need...I'm open to a better suggestion if the Norstar is a poor choice. My quick questions are...is it possible that the handsets being used with a Norstar could be converted and used with the Asterisk system? (a bit of asset recovery) A system consisting of a suitable linux server running Asterisk and a Digium TDM2441B PCI Card 16FXS / 4FXO would be a suitable replacement and could deliver the same performance/functions as the Norstar system? I'm going to try and be as thorough as possible in assessing the costs in switching to this system. The most obvious being some new hardware, but also, downtime, training, support costs, contract penalties (if there are any) etc....But this is a term paper and a highly hypothetical situation. And I know my questions are a bit general, but the paper will probably be kept quite general. I hope I can learn more about this cool app! Thanks! _____ Live Search Maps - find all the local information you need, right when you need it. Find it! <http://maps.live.com/?icid=wlmtag2&FORM=MGAC01>
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