Hi George, George Kumar wrote:
> When I mentioned CCIE VOIP, I did not mean to say that it would help > me in being an asterisk expert. > What i meant was whether to go in the direction of providing VOIP > solutions based on Asterisk or to take CCIE VOIP route and provide > VOIP consultancy in the area of Cisco VOIP products such as call > manager, unity etc... > Sorry for the confusion. It's really difficult to make an apples to apples comparison here or relate Cisco VoIP end-user stuff (i.e. CallManager/Unity) or infrastructure to Asterisk in a meaningful dichotomy. While these things have a fair bit in common on a technological level, they are irrevocably different on a business level. The Cisco side is very capital-intensive to achieve and a rather expensive and tedious market segment to sell into, especially if you're starting from scratch and without any sort of funding or some other kind of pile of capital/exposure/money that makes you someone even worth looking at to enterprise buyers. Though it can be high margin, the sales cycles are also frustratingly long and the overall barriers to entry very high. And if you really want to be taken seriously as a Cisco-oriented VAR, you probably could benefit from the certification. Asterisk, by contrast, is coming upward from the low end, although its ecosystem is maturing into an ever more sophisticated and business-class product and service space, at least in an optimistic appraisal. The thing about mass-market technology--even in the business market--is that in the overwhelming majority of cases, is that the low end ends up displacing the high end. The market segments you'd be dealing with as a Cisco VoIP consultant versus an Asterisk shop are profoundly different, although some overlap can be found. But in general, organisations looking at Asterisk aren't the same ones that are looking to drop half a million dollars on a black box, proprietary commercial IP telephony platform. But Asterisk is also far, far easier to sell, especially if you're coming up from the low end, and in the long run, whether because of Asterisk or something else, lumbering behemoths wanting to drop half a million dollars on Cisco are going to feel like idiots for having done so. The CAPEX formula for investing in something like an Asterisk-based solution is just so different--in a good way. It's highly disruptive. > I agree with with you in that on a philosophical level I hate having > to be certified by others...But as many things in life, people who you > deal with, sometimes put lots of emphasis on these things. It is like > when you go to job interview for networking consulting engineer or > technical marketing in networking area, and if you said you are a > CCIE, it puts people who are hiring you (at least if they work for > Cisco) at ease....If you don't deal with Cisco products or Cisco > company in any capacity ..CCIE is useless... Sure, but as with anything in business, you simply have to perform a cost-benefit analysis and find something that's Pareto-optimal. If you get involved with Cisco, you get all the drawbacks I described above, plus a tightly coupled fiduciary marriage to a particular vendor and a particular platform. If it turns out that Cisco's VoIP offering is moribund in five years, an enormous ball is tied around your ankles--you've just wasted your time on a huge and extremely time-consuming and capital-intensive investment. Asterisk, by contrast, simply by virtue of being an open-source technology with a large base of free support and community and a much, much, much larger installed base of all shapes and sizes, is easier to get into, learn and understand. Of course, there is a massive qualitative difference between merely playing with it on an entry level and the sort of expertise required to deploy it in a stable and robust way in a business environment of nontrivial size and complexity, but it's easier. And by virtue of receiving a parallel and concomitant education in an open and standards-based technology stack, you come away with skills, perspective and experience you can apply elsewhere to other types of VoIP services, applications and architectures. If you become an expert in Asterisk, you are not tethering yourself to Digium in that same way. Instead, you learn a lot about SIP in general and find that this knowledge capital will have a great deal of fluid applications elsewhere in that vertical. There's a lot more residual and transferable value there, in my opinion. So, back to our cost-benefit analysis: what is the marginal benefit of being able to put someone large "at ease" and perhaps market to them ever so slightly better with a massively expensive, time-consuming and proprietary certification track versus a leaner alternative with more features and participating in the open-source arena? A CCIE is not a trivial certification; most people trying to get one study for 2-5 years, and spend thousands of dollars on hardware and study materials. The exam itself consists of several days of written tests and a lab portion, and has an 80% failure rate. Oh, and that costs several thousand dollars, too. So, by the time you're done, you will have spent about 3 to 6% of your natural biological life, give or take, and a rather considerable amount of money ($10k or more). What kind of value can you extract from that if you're wanting to roll a VoIP consultancy, as opposed to getting individual employment contracts meant for CCIEs? All this just to make some folks "feel better?" "Feel?" Like, "feelings?" What about all the customers for whom working with you is a business decision based on other criteria, for whom you don't need a certification - like if you were to do Asterisk? If compare that potential to whatever voodoo numbers you can muster about the marginal economic benefit of being "certified" and attached to an extremely expensive and closed market space? I think you'd find the potential ROI (return on investment) astoundingly low. Also, remember something about the technology market: Technology changes faster than most other things. New technology now is more valuable than technology later. The VoIP adoption curve is still incipient and on the uptake, but by the time you get your CCIE all put together, a number of things will all but certainly have changed about the landscape. Asterisk and its accompanying technology stack is something you can get into quicker, faster and better, and be plugged into a shifting movement and ride with the wave without a great deal of expensive retooling or adaptation. I don't think most Asterisk experts on this list stand to be in any danger of utter irrelevance to the voice/convergent networking/multimedia/telecom/etc. business in five years if they just keep, as they say, "doing their thing." > In my opinion CCIE and other Cisco certifications are part of cisco's > marketing strategy and basically brainwash you in to thinking their > (cisco) way.... Certainly, that is an important strategic element. > Afterall what is marketing....it is just another name for business > propaganda ....Just 2 days back I talked to a friend who works for > Cisco and I was asking him about how many simultaneous calls his java > running call manager can do...and somehow in the conversation I > mentioned Asterisk....And like all good brainwashed people he > said...Oh linux is just a hobby...businesses cannot rely on that > ...etc etc.... Well, that's funny, considering how much of the stuff Cisco itself puts out is built on top of Linux. Sssh, don't tell that to any of Cisco's customers; they might stop doing business with this amateur "hobbyist" company! :-) > Anyways I like your out of box thinking....and have been finding your > emails quite interesting...I agreed with your opinions regarding > body-shop companies that like to charge 100% mark-up just to put your > employee on their payrole.... Yeah, but the thing is--if I may be so brash--it's not "out of the box" at all. Pretty much everyone who replied in this thread agreed with me, about half very strongly. It may be that what I'm actually saying something very trite, boring, and manifestly obvious to a lot of people more experienced in this space and in the IT business generally. -- Alex Balashov Evariste Systems Web : http://www.evaristesys.com/ Tel : (+1) (678) 954-0670 Direct : (+1) (678) 954-0671 Mobile : (+1) (678) 237-1775 _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
