Hello Everyone! Touching base with all with regards to a successful presentation on VOIP & Asterisk at the career fair on the 27th and 28th of February. We were sponsored by Career Door where both Henry and I had the honour and privilege to present at the career fair, which had an attendance of over 800 I.T. professionals, exclusively with IT experience. Right now I'm recovering from a complete burn out :).
To my SHOCK only about 5% of the crowd knew of VOIP, and out of those 5%, only less than half had **some** exposure to VOIP servers. We had two, 1 Giga Byte Flash & two copies of "Asterisk, The Future of Telephony" as a give away, which received a warm enthusiasm and generated more interest in TAUG. Our presentation was scheduled for no more than 45 minutes - but on day 2 we had more time. Our Q/A period extended to another hour and half. The audience participation in the QA period was amazing. A lot of questions came up of what is possible and so on. I am still at a shock, that out of so many candidates, only a limited number had exposure to VOIP, needless to say Asterisk. I believe Henry and I played a key role, in attracting those individuals with little or no experience in VOIP. As more and more people, specially decision makers learn about Asterisk, I believe it will become a part and parcel of regular IT tasks within a small & medium size business. Sure TrixBox and other GUI's have a place - but more and more software developers are bridging their applications with IVRs where GUI would be a limiting factor. Asterisk & other Open Source VOIP servers are here to stay & will no doubt be an important part of IT, as it already has. Hope to see you all at the next TAUG meeting! Best, Reza.
