As we all know, this march of IP telephony is purely from my perspective and fairly narrow, reflecting how I think Indosoft migrated to IP Telephony. This started in early 2003
and the world of CTI (Computer Telephony Interface) was still very TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) and dominated by the likes of Dialogic, Pika Technologies and NMS Communications. We had entered into the CTI space by chance in 1999 and had a slim product line. As we grew, we realized that the closed, proprietary drivers from board manufacturers made our product evolution difficult and tedious. From a customer service perspective, the demands of the call center service industry were getting harder to handle. We were looking around for a more cost effective solution with greater flexibility and control. There was this buzz in the open source community about the Asterisk PBX. Pioneers like Asterisk creator Mark Spencer and Jim Dixon of the Zapata Telephony project had created the perfect opportunity for us to look at using Asterisk on the commercial realm. Jim Dixon’s T1 interface TDM board made it possible to use the Asterisk PBX without using VoIP terminations.
This scale of change was challenging to comprehend. A PC motherboard had to be capable of processing the load for voice, doing away with expensive DSP boards and handling both voice and data on Ethernet. With standards like H100 and MVIP working well, this was a major shift. By late 2003 we did manage to try Asterisk on a small scale in one of our products on commercial installations. Today we do everything using Asterisk. This has been quite a journey.
More to follow…