I'm currently working on my third successful open source based company. We use 
Asterisk and haven't needed support in years. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On Jun 20, 2015, at 12:57 PM, Zak Rupas <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I agree with Peter. The company's I worked for in the past that deployed open 
> source never made it as they encountered serious issues and bugs and did not 
> have a solid in house talent that could resolve the issues. There is only a 
> hand full of large carriers left with open source cores and they spend more 
> money retaining talent to manage and solve issues vs going with a known 
> canned system that will do the support etc
> 
> Just my 2 cents for what it's worth
> 
> 
> Thanks
> Zak Rupas
> Tier 3 Voice
> Vonage
> 
>> On Jun 20, 2015, at 12:47 PM, Peter E <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Well said Alex. Service providers require support for the *whole* product 
>> and that is where open source solutions may falter.
>> 
>> I don't necessarily agree with the notion that the big-brands don't 
>> integrate. We do a ton of integration with Broadsoft, both with software 
>> that we've written and 3rd party software. While they're not perfect (who 
>> among us is), and they're not cheap, they are highly scalable, reliable, and 
>> yes, extensible.
>> 
>> I am also a big fan of open source where it makes sense, but for our core 
>> soft switch, no.
>> 
>> 
>> On Jun 20, 2015, at 11:34, Alex Balashov <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> Indeed, it doesn't seem to me that open-source systems are the thing to be 
>> avoided, nor that it's necessarily possible to do so. Moreover, the value 
>> proposition and trade-offs of open-source systems are quite clear. It seems 
>> to me the largest long-term value is in integration paths and connectors; 
>> most proprietary, "big iron" boxes just do what they do, and that's all they 
>> do, more or less. They may have a lot of features, but that's the feature 
>> set, and tying it together into novel, innovative and commercially 
>> differentiated third-party services is hard.
>> 
>> That said, I think we all know the sort of open source-based system to which 
>> the OP was referring. Asterisk and FreeSWITCH are low-hanging fruit, and 
>> have invited a lot of bad implementations and poor architectures. There's 
>> nothing wrong with using these systems foundationally within a carrier-grade 
>> product, as long as the system is architected correctly, in a horizontally 
>> scalable, distributed and fault-tolerant way, and that's a fairly complex 
>> undertaking of software engineering.
>> 
>> Vendors of these kinds of solutions also often do not provide a level of 
>> support that comports with telco sensibilities; their reasoning is either 
>> that the customer should largely support it themselves, since it's all built 
>> on open-source components, or their scope of support is narrow. Consistency 
>> and commitment can be an issue.
>> 
>> I can only speak firsthand, but in our case it has been very clear to me 
>> since the early life of our open source-based, commercial ITSP product that 
>> customers expect a high level of service value, and that the vendor 
>> relationship, along with the institutional domain knowledge and expertise 
>> provided, is as much a part of the value proposition as software itself. 
>> It's also been very clear that they expect support for the _entire_ 
>> technology stack of which the product consists, much as they would receive 
>> from Acme Packet or Sonus. Our customers don't care that our product ties 
>> together Kamailio, SEMS, PostgreSQL, Node.js, Redis and, ultimately, Linux, 
>> nor do they care about the degree to which we can or cannot exert direct 
>> control over bugs in these third-party GPL components. They expect us to 
>> configure the installations, maintain them, and troubleshoot, debug and fix 
>> as necessary.
>> 
>> I don't think this insight is necessarily common among vendors of open 
>> source-founded products. I've heard a lot of things like, "Oh, well, that's 
>> a bug in Asterisk, that's not a problem with our application." If the vendor 
>> sells and supports an Asterisk-based platform, to a large extent, it should 
>> be the vendor's problem. They may not be able to resolve it themselves, but 
>> they should own it, communicate it efficiently to the appropriate parties 
>> through expedient channels, and marshal the appropriate resources in support 
>> of fixing it. Not everything is always possible, of course, but many things 
>> should be possible most of the time.
>> 
>> -- Alex
>> 
>> -- 
>> Alex Balashov | Principal | Evariste Systems LLC
>> 303 Perimeter Center North, Suite 300
>> Atlanta, GA 30346
>> United States
>> 
>> Tel: +1-800-250-5920 (toll-free) / +1-678-954-0671 (direct)
>> Web: http://www.evaristesys.com/, http://www.csrpswitch.com/
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