Is Asterisk the Future for Business VoIP
There has been a lot of publicity recently on Asterisk for your business telephony needs.
What is Asterisk?
Asterisk is known as the open source IP PBX. Basically, rather than using traditional PBX equipment or Cisco VoIP platform equipment, such as their Call Manager IP PBX, some businesses and universities are utilizing Linux based servers to handle their telephone calls using VoIP. No expensive PBX equipment needed and no Cisco license fees as part of their call manager network.
The linux servers are normally found in such environments anyway in order to handle the data network for a facility so adding voice is a case of installing asterisk and connecting your phones to the server. Analog phones will need some form of conversion to digital (e.g. using Cisco VGC gateway devices), but if you have IP phones, simple, just connect the Ethernet cables from the phone to the server. The voice traffic will simply follow the same path as the data does now over the T1 interfaces.
There is some downside of course. The technical support has gone, although so has the expense 
So long as you are comfortable running your voice and data network with Linux servers and have some expertise in this area so you can handle the administration, the cost savings are substantial. Recent University studies suggest that moving from a Cisco call manager license based system to Asterisk can reduce your telephone costs by over 65%.
Asterisk is definitely one for us all to watch.
http://www.asterisk.org/
Andy
