At 6:31 AM -0700 on 8/4/05, peter webier wrote:
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?
I am uncertain that this is -dev material, so I've moved this
response to the -users list.
While I agree that there is "dev"elopment that needs to be done on
something like this, I think the relative merits of such a system
would be best discussed in the larger group, a set of requirements
built, and then developers identified. However, it sounds more like
you need to talk to the people at Plutohome than you're interested in
making some type of Asterisk development effort - what am I missing
here?
As an interim measure, I'd suggest taking a look at this company:
http://www.openpeak.com/ Specifically, I'd suggest reviewing this
press release: http://www.openpeak.com/news_release_94.html
While not being an open-source solution, it appears that they have
some of the components you're looking for.
JT
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