Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Contact Centers Embracing Asterisk

April 16, 2014

The VoIP PBX Asterisk has long been touted, along with Linux, as one of the open source movement’s biggest success stories, but how does the open source PBX fare under real-world contact center use? Very well, according to a guest post on Asterisk developer Digium’s blog by Loway founder Lorenzo Emilitri.


“Loway has been developing the QueueMetrics Call-Center Suite for almost 10 years now,” he wrote. “We had a feeling that our clients seemed to be quite happy – in particular the ones moving away from traditional telephony. But, until recently, we haven’t been able to quantify this with reliable metrics. My own experience, in running a company that prides itself on its high level of technical detail, is that often, time is invested in solving one issue after the other. It is hard to step back, take a deep breath, and look at the landscape around you.”

The metrics developer was an early adopter of Asterisk, using it since 2003. Loway has measured the success its customers--some of them running call centers with more than 100 seats--have had using Asterisk. Most of these customers used either custom Asterisk dialplans or the FreePBX GUI.

Loway surveyed more than 150 clients. Over 80 percent of them were satisfied, giving an eight or more on a 10-point scale. With that number of people running Asterisk under heavy demands, it’s clear that Asterisk has gotten a lot of acceptance.

Loway also found that its clients were fiercely loyal to Asterisk. Although only a few of them were interested in cloud-based solutions, citing privacy concerns, none of them wanted to move away from Asterisk, wanting better on-premises deployments.

It’s not the first time an open source project has been so widely embraced by enterprise users. In the ‘90s, they couldn’t install Apache Web servers running on Linux fast enough, and the combination is still the go-to choice for anyone wanting to serve up websites today. The Oracle-owned MySQL database has also become ubiquitous for deploying modern Web apps.




Edited by Alisen Downey



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