On Monday 19 June 2006 10:42, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > You guys have been great, but it looks like I've still got a fight on my > hands here trying to get an Asterisk solution for our call centres. Anyone > out there considering or using Aheeva CCS? If so, what are your > experiences?
Ask for a customer list, and do some calling. We are in the middle of doing that for an ERP/MRP system. The results are... interesting. > We still get the salesman for the other switch kicking Asterisk and Linux > as a solution. I don't understand why there would be so much trouble > trying to get a T1 to work. Supposedly there is a company in Halifax > trying to do a PO with Asterisk but not having much success. T1 and PRI with Asterisk in Canada with a standard LEC is trivial. You might run into some backwater RBOC who are playing silly bugger with their T1s and making life difficult for its custmers but if you're going with Bell/Telus/Sprint/GT/etc. you have *absolutely* nothing to worry about. It's a scare tactic, so call him on it. Ask for their phone number. > This is also a bit of a rant so some positive reinforcement would be > appreciated. I now have a list of eight reasons why we need two switches > and seven of why this should be Asterisk. I can't really post those unless > I make them more generic. My biggest points for Asterisk are as follows: - Open Source. If shit breaks (and it always does) I can either dig in or find someone to do it. Commercial solutions are locked in and the support contracts are EXPENSIVE. Stability would be the same as the proprietary vendors if I were sane and ran Asterisk 1.2.x instead of svn trunk, but trunk is pretty damn stable in my experiences and I can quickly roll back to a known working system in the even that trunk went tits-up for some reason. And I can still get a bug fixed in the stable version of Asterisk, which you can't do with a proprietary vendor. - Open Source. No forced upgrade treadmill or forced obsolescence, BOTH of which I've run into with proprietary vendors (Nortel Flash, anyone?) - Open Source. If I want a feature I can do it myself or pay someone to do it. I don't have to accept "almost" solutions from a commercial vendor that sort of do what I want, and if I want something that doesn't exist, I don't have to take "no" for an answer, especially if I'm trying to integrate my systems with something they see as a competitive system. (I'm looking again at you, Nortel!) - Open Source. My userbase and technical base are many times larger than Aheeva can ever hope to achieve for the same price. I can draw on the experiences and knowledge (and put up with the attitudes of) a VERY diverse crowd of people, including those who have 25+ years of telcom experience. I can access some cross section of these people 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I can cultivate business relationships with a number of these and achieve a level of service that Aheeva would charge a fortune for. - Open Protocols, Open Hardware. My T1 card doesn't cost $1400 and come with a $750 (I think) software key to let me use PRI, and STILL limit me from using Q.Sig because it's considered a threat. I can pay another $750 for a key to get me proprietary, bastardized Q.Sig which will ONLY let me interoperate with other Nortel KSUs. So for a sweet-ass deal of $2900+tax I get a one-time install of a shitty T1 card with limited CCS signaling capability. Or I could spend $500 and get a truly useful card. My phones cost about the same as a proprietary solution, but I have far more flexibility and can target specific users with better-suited phones, use softphones, remote phones, etc. I can tie in my contact database and CRM applications without playing silly bugger with my data or having to try and make MY solution fit THEIR way of thinking, or with a limited, Win32-only TAPI interface that doesn't quite suit my needs but I have to put up with. So what you are picking out of my rant (besides my vitriol for proprietary systems, Nortel and NEC in particular) is that with proprietary vendors you are at their mercy, and they know it. They aren't as flexible, and they try and buy your loyalty by carrying on about how long they've been in business, how many engineers they have on staff (how many are available at 3am?), how big some of their customers are, how slick their limited management and reporting interfaces are, etc. It's all smoke and mirrors because the second you need something they don't have, it's "too bad." I can see farther because I stand on the shoulders of giants. That is simply not possible with proprietary systems. They gain when they keep me tied to them and not knowing how the internals work. (Why would I ever want that? Can't you see our system does everything? Just sit back, let me show you this awesome presentation!) It is difficult to sell flexibility, especially when the bean-counters don't see a need for it. I have been *VERY* fortunate in that the president here sees potential and while it's not needed right now, he can see that the way businesses communicate is changing, and changing fast. He sees that we have to wait for the proprietary vendors to a) see the trend, b) wake up and recognize it as a potential revenue stream, c) determine that it's a big enough revenue stream to do something about it, d) learn how to take advantage of it, e) design it and test it, f) market it and g) get distribution to recognize it so h) we can actually buy the shit. By the time that's done it's too late. With Open Source and Asterisk I can jump directly to e) and have a pass/fail before the proprietary vendor even knows it exists. I work for a manufacturer, so I know the costs involved in bringing proprietary systems to market and also how much real support costs. I can see how to leverage open source in a proprietary marketplace and how to use it to help us make more money and provide better service at the same time. I can see how to not only USE open source, but how to also give back and help the next guy see a little farther. I spend a lot of time on IRC and the lists helping out people that won't ever directly pay us back, but that's not how open source and community efforts work. We're saving a lot on our communications infrastructure, and we take some of those savings and give back to those who have helped us save it. Another perfect example here: This past Saturday Bell introduced 10-digit dialing. Instead of staying at work late to reprogram everything so the faxes and service pagers would work, I modified my Asterisk dialplan in 10 minutes from my home computer over the VPN to automatically add the area code to any 7-digit number. I then went a step further and configured it so as long as the system saw 10 digits, it would automatically add the '1' for long distance. If it saw 11 it would strip the '1' if it wasn't LD. The system automatically does the right thing and our relative quality of office happiness is up because there aren't 30 people cursing the change. The faxes go through, the calls go through, and everything "just works." I don't know Aheeva's system well enough to comment authoritatively, but I'm willing to bet that it'd take longer than 10 minutes to do, and that unless you bought the equivalent of a FastRAD or remote management option (and then bought the proprietary software to use it as well!), you wouldn't be able to do it from remote. You'd be sitting at your desk (or the attendant desk) screwing about with the phone on a 2x16 display and a user manual full of arcane procedures after-hours when the weather was beautiful and you should have been in a hammock with a beer watching your son mow the lawn. Another example with our customer service guys: There are 6 guys who share the responsibilities of the 24h service line. They keep who's on duty in a shared Outlook calendar. We run Exchange4Linux, which replaces Exchange Server with a lot of Python and PostgreSQL. The Asterisk box checks for new voicemail to the service phone every 10 minutes and if any are found, sends out a page to whoever's on duty. It checks the service calendar and grabs their pager/phone number. How flexible is the Aheeva system, or any other proprietary system? Can they integrate how YOU want it to integrate? We poll instead of firing off on hangup of new voicemail so that if they sleep through the page it will keep nagging them. We did this because we actually had that problem occasionally and this was a better solution. Can the Aheeva (or any other proprietary system) make that kind of a subtle change to better serve your needs, or does it simply have a "notification feature" that is fixed? Can you tie into your CRM or do you have to piss around with the system to change the pager # every time the person on call changes? (or do you have to play "pass the pager"?) Another example (in progress) is a customer I'm working with... his IVR and dialplan logic is very, very complex with time of day, holidays, bluetooth presence, remote extensions/home offices, click-to-call, callback queues, everything... it will be *sweet* when it's done, and likely a good meeting topic. The entire reason he went with Asterisk is because he is also someone who can see that his needs are going to be highly dynamic and that a proprietary system just doesn't have the flexibility or *ease* of flexibility. > It's a "dammed if we do/dammed if we don't" scenerio. If we go with the > Asterisk solution, then its more stress on me if something goes wrong. For > health reasons, I need to try to avoid that. Aheeva would be there for > backup though. They have a lot of engineers on staff. Find a few local Asterisk consultants and ask them what they'd charge to be on call. It's the exact same world, you just need to think in a more distributed fashion. Stop thinking "single source" and start thinking community -- develop some business relationships with the people on this list and on the Digium lists, forums and openprojects.net #asterisk IRC channel. And again... how many Aheeva engineers are on staff at 3am. Hell our Xerox support is still on MINIMUM 2h waiting period, and that's only if he's not already tied up serving others in the area. Why not pay a couple of Asterisk consultants a retainer and have them on-call? Hell, if they were smart they'd say "take this Nagios module and plug it into your Asterisk box. I'll get paged before you even know there's a problem." There's another trend that the big guys are still in stage b) about. Hell, Xerox doesn't even do that with their $30k copiers, and they're net-connected. -A.
