We're a dealer in Europe selling commercial phone & building management systems, some residential too. All the new office buildings have an EIB bus to manage the lights, clima, security access, etc. The big companies also have Crestron or AMX automation and media servers for the boardroom. Asterisk is an awesome phone solution, but if we could offer a solution that tied it all together it would be the first product of its kind. My colleague has been talking about another Linux-based open source project, plutohome.org, which is geared towards residential. However, we found that it includes Asterisk already, and it has automation modules including EIB, and a media server. So already this gives Asterisk and open source a huge advantage since we can run all 3 major systems on the same infrastructure: telephony, building automation/control, boardroom media/presentations.
What would be the total icing on the cake is that they have a GUI that controls everything and runs on mobile phones and pda's, and they say, could probably be ported to run on the Cisco IP Phone 7970G. Since their GUI code already runs on Symbian, Linux, Windows and Windows CE, it must be quite portable. With that 1 addition, then the SIP phone would become the total heart of the organization, handling the telephony, a built-in touch-screen to control building automation, as well as boardroom presentations. And the cost savings would be staggering. Asterisk is already a huge cost savings, but with this then a switch to an open source platform would also elimnate the costly, proprietary building automation and media servers. A Crestron boardroom control system is about 20,000 Euro--with this solution it would all be part of the existing phone system. No extra hardware, and a drastically lower TCO. Crestron & AMX do about US$ 250 million annually on that and they have virtually no competition in this area. It's a big business waiting to be tapped. The guts is already there and it works--we download plutohome.org and it's working great with Asterisk and the Cisco SIP phones, our EIB system. The only problem is their configuration tool is totally wrong since it only had the home market in mind, and we need a port for the Cisco phones. Anybody else agree on this? Is anybody else thinking the same way? __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
