Asterisk has set a very high benchmark for VoIP PBX systems. Its powerful and flexible structure has enabled enterprises all over the world to migrate to IP while keeping conventional TDM interface wherever necessary. It is a common knowledge that Asterisk is used as a VoIP engine in many commercial products. It does not make economic sense to have an in-house development team to develop, manage and keep up with the prolific pace of open source VoIP PBX switches like Asterisk or FreeSWITCH. Therefore, many organizations are looking at Asterisk as a platform to migrate their legacy products to IP telephony. Digium offers Asterisk support through commercial licensing agreements. This provides organization with considerable flexibility without the cost of maintaining large development teams.
Asterisk supports a wide array of technologies in the communication world and is incredibly more flexible than most PBX systems, VoIP or otherwise. It offers an extremely rich telephony platform to build different kinds of sophisticated applications and interface functions for VoIP. Automatic Call Distribution (ACD) is one such function that enables highly developed call routing, call management and customer interaction capability.
ACD can be abstracted as a layer on top of a PBX and exposes CTI (Computer Telephony Interface) through a set of API. The CTI functionality thus accessed, is more functional and directed towards services provided for inbound calling and outbound dialing. The ACD API should have the capability to deliver all functionality expected from a modern day inbound call taking telephony system or an outbound dialing system. IVR (Interactive Voice Response) is also an integral part of ACD and provides opportunity to automate call handling as well as interaction with back-end systems. Additionally, a call center ACD provides session management, queue management, skills based routing and trunk management. Call center is an integral part of modern day business and its requirements demand features advanced features from an ACD. It is therefore essential to select and deploy an advanced and complete call center ACD when you deploy Asterisk PBX as the underlying CTI switch.