Thousands of volunteer experts have worked on Asterisk since 1999. This has made it into a powerhouse platform for telephony that you can use in your own system. Today it is a proven technology used by millions of users. Call centers and major PBX users are abandoning their legacy proprietary telephone switches to get the benefits offered by this Open-Source system.
Can you switch your large call center over to Asterisk? Definitely. The fact that Asterisk can run on commodity servers is a plus from a cost basis, but can introduce challenges in scaling. It is possible if you choose call center ACD software that can scale itself and manage multiple Asterisk servers. Each Asterisk server handles the media for some of your voice traffic. Over a number of systems, it can scale to handle a lot of voice traffic.
In a federated model, your deployment covers several geographic locations. This allows for voice traffic that begins and ends in different locations. Your agents may be distributed in multiple locations, but they can be active in the same ACD queues.
This would be expensive in the legacy model, but is an ideal use-case for Asterisk.
Federated deployment offers the advantage of effective use of skills-based routing in the call center ACD environment. Offering 24×7 service is easier if you have a geographically diverse pool of agents able to interact with your callers.