Asterisk is a mature new generation hybrid PBX that fulfills all the traditional PBX needs and satisfies all the VoIP requirements. Asterisk’s vast feature set has significant advantages over its peers. The pioneering work by the developer community has introduced Asterisk into all imaginable facets of communications over the last decade. Therefore it is unlikely that Asterisk lacks any significant mainstream feature and is the most dominant telephony platform in the communications domain.
This transformation of a hybrid PBX into a general purpose communications platform in the VoIP realm is nothing but phenomenal. During discussions on the merits of using Asterisk in conjunction with a Call Center ACD, scaling and number of concurrent channels are often mentioned as limiting factors. Asterisk has a powerful interface called the Asterisk Manager Interface (AMI) which offers a global view and control of an entire Asterisk instance. This allows a call center software to exercise control over multiple Asterisk instances and provide the necessary scaling for medium and large contact center installations. It is therefore possible to have extremely large concurrent channels in an Asterisk based setup, to offer multi-tenant hosted services.
Asterisk based contact centers have significant advantages over other platforms: the large install base, the versatility of the the communication platform, constant improvements by the developer community at large, and the significant cost advantage over any other communications platform. The broad acceptance of Asterisk in contact centers makes it a compelling phone platform while building out a contact center solution.