There is a lot of excitement in the telecommunications world regarding Asterisk, the leading hybrid telephony switching platform, and many businesses and application builders are viewing Asterisk as a potential game changer. It is well known how Asterisk on standard server hardware, can deliver full PBX functionality, do Voice over IP (VoIP), and interoperate with standards-based telephony equipment. What makes Asterisk uniquely beneficial as a telephony switch, or more importantly, why Asterisk is considered by mature business applications required contact center ACD (Automatic Call Distribution) to service their clients.
A Cost Effective Next-Generation Contact Center Technology Platform
It is an exciting time for the contact center industry with the non-stop innovation and evolution in technology and telecommunications. The economic shift from ‘bricks and mortars’ to ‘clicks and online’ over the last decade has tremendously increased the technological needs of modern day contact centers. Rapid changes in telecommunications technology have brought critical opportunities – opportunities to make significant improvements in productivity while greatly reducing operating costs. Cutting-edge Internet Protocol (IP) based contact center technology platforms have evolved to the point that highly reliable and full-featured systems are available to businesses of all sizes.
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Feature-rich call center ACD to go with Asterisk
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.
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Scalability of Asterisk for larger ACD deployments
Back in late 2002, when we looked at Asterisk as a possible alternative to CTI platforms based on boards from Dialogic and Pika, the very thought of working with open source telephony was exciting. The possibilities seemed endless and we had limited ability to analyse possible shortcomings moving forward. In mid 1990s the processor speeds in x86 systems made it impossible to conceive voice processing on anything without on-board DSP. The concept of using motherboard CPU for voice processing did cause apprehension but it was counter balanced by the cost savings. With the talk of SIP and IP telephony as the emerging protocol for voice communication, Asterisk offered a lot of promise. Today we see Asterisk deployments everywhere with limitless applications. With VoIP well entrenched, Asterisk and open source telephony has demonstrated the usefulness and versatility of this hybrid PBX with seamless handling of VoIP and TDM.
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Call center migration to Asterisk
Migration to Asterisk is an attractive proposition and resisting it is futile. Let us look at this more critically. TDM is gradually giving way to IP and VoIP is here to stay. Everyone will eventually look for a platform to migrate to VoIP. Call centers are no exceptions. Managing the risk of such a migration is critical. It is also important to grasp short comings of VoIP and Asterisk as they grow and manage it properly. In return, the rewards of such a migration can be disproportionately large. Asterisk makes it easy to move into IP telephony without giving up TDM. The richness of its PBX will amaze anyone. Cost savings are enormous.
Asterisk leadership in IP telephony for Call Centers
In 2003, Asterisk was emerging as a powerful open source PBX with VoIP capability. The availability of Zapata telephony TDM boards were critical to its deployment. Back then, high density CTI boards with on-board DSP were the norm. Linux had earned grudgingly acceptance in the server world but CTI was still dominated by Windows based board manufacturers. The boards were good but the overall cost of managing a development team to keep up with the PBX feature-set was getting prohibitive. VoIP was being mentioned and there was anxiety. Imagine having to maintain a software team to manage and enhance a PBX feature-set using the board manufacturer’s API and survive a paradigm shift. Having benefited from Linux greatly, when we heard of Asterisk, we were very eager to try it and adapt it for call center use.
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