Despite the tremendous cost-savings, business has been wary of open source-based telephony solutions because of reliability and support concerns.
Global Call Center Solutions (GCCS) says the latest generation of solutions has successfully addressed these limitations and has made the switch to open source-based IP telephony inevitable.
The company says despite resistance and presence, the private branch exchange (PBX) is finally losing its ascendancy and its demise heralds the end of expensive, proprietary business telephone systems.
GCCS says many argue that it's not before time either; businesses around the world have had to suffer arcane systems that are difficult to manage, and absurdly inflated telephony equipment prices because they have been 'locked in' by vendors.
"We've all suffered from vendor lock-in for a long time now," confirms Roland B"uhler, MD of GCCS, "but, thanks to the emergence of open source voice over IP (VOIP) technology, the industry is rapidly becoming vendor-independent and the realm of data VARs rather than the incumbent telecoms companies."
He says the inherent appeal of open source solutions is lower cost, but the telephone remains a critical tool for most organisations, so they are wary of any potential threat to the service's reliability.
"Organisations quickly realise the many benefits, but don't believe that open source alternatives can match expensive proprietary systems for reliability, scalability and support. They want to know how such telephony solutions are delivering in the real world and what happens if something goes wrong."
According to B"uhler, open source telephony has really come of age in the last couple of years and now offers business a viable, compelling alternative to incumbent telephony systems. Aside from the dramatic potential savings, the feature sets available are also typically richer than those offered by closed systems.
"This is good news all round," says B"uhler. "The telecom companies are going to have to produce even better products to compete and customers are going to have a wider and better choice."
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