What's an Asterisk PBX and How Can Open Source Solutions Help Me?

Asterisk PBX systems and open source phone systems have entered the mainstream and are now recognized as a true business class IP PBX option for small businesses.

But, first, what the heck is Asterisk and what does open source PBX mean? Asterisk is the name of the open source PBX software that was originated by Mark Spencer, the founder of a company named Digium.

The term "open source" has a long history (if you're interested in some bedtime reading, read Wikipedia's history of open source here ) and originally stems from the term "free software," which is why many people still incorrectly assume any software product that's open source-based is free. Not true!

An Open Source PBX are Far From a Free PBX!

Open source is used in reference to any software code that is made available (yes, for free - made available through the General Public License [GPL] but we'll spare you details on that for now) to its respective community of software developers who choose to download, add to, rewrite, improve, and further develop either for their own commercial or hobbyist purposes and/or for the betterment of society in general (how altruistic!)

In a nutshell, Asterisk is to PBXs as Linux is to computer operating systems. Any person can download the core Asterisk PBX software code from Asterisk.org to begin building their own IP PBX phone system. But, unless your a techno-geek, Linux developer, and/or have A LOT of spare time to read LOTS of Asterisk PBX how-to tech guides, then its best to leave the Asterisk PBX manufacturing dirty work to the phone system professionals.

And professionals tend to expect to get paid for their time, labor, knowledge, training, and support. In fact, that's why a certain company named Red Hat, which boasts a multi-billion dollar market valuation has generated a profit-making business (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year) around providing development training, technical support, and professional-grade product solutions for open source software.

Asterisk PBX Solutions: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly for Small Businesses

The Good:

Customized features = need your phone system to do something sexy like read your voicemail to you over the phone? Asterisk allows you to build the code yourself (if you know how!)

Scaleability = have 5 employees in two offices now, but likely to have 50 employees in five offices next month? Asterisk scales better than traditional propriety PBX solutions.

Lowered upfront capital costs = large enterprise-class sophistication at a small business price! You don't have to pay the salaries of Cisco's high-priced engineers

The Bad:

Increased maintenance costs = it costs time and money (usually at $100+ per hour) to hire an experienced Asterisk technician to build and manage a customized solution.

Security Threats and Software Bugs = Asterisk is still in its infancy and like any open source, community-developed software, security threats, bugs, and glitches must be expected.

The Ugly:

Increased downtime = complex solutions that are "home made," unproven not properly tested can lead to much more downtime resulting in thousands of dollars of lost business revenue.

Do-it-Yourself (DIY) Syndrome = "Hey, I'm a small business owner, I hear I can build my own phone system nearly for free! Even though I'm just an accountant, let's give it a try!" It rarely ever works that way. Usually the DIYs end up spending endless late nights reinventing the wheel and suffer hundreds of hours in lost company productivity.