Asterisk has a twist on VOIP that puts the PC at the center of voice communications, and that spells opportunity for solution providers.The VOIP market is maturing for small businesses, especially those that are tired of paying big bucks for overpriced, proprietary PBX phone systems that lack the ability to scale as a customer's business grows. This is an excellent opportunity for VARs to get in on the ground floor and make margins in the high 20th to 30th percentile if they have the right combination of voice and data skills.
While many of you probably are familiar with how Vonage and other voice-over-IP solutions have enabled inexpensive telephony for individuals, a similar revolution is happening with business telephony and as a way to use the Internet to carry an entire company's voice traffic. The idea here is to take an ordinary PC, add specialized voice processing cards, and attach it to the Internet to handle both incoming and outgoing calls.
The biggest players in this market are Digium and an open-source product called Asterisk.
"Asterisk is far and away the leader in this space. It is difficult to find something that could match its feature set," said Tristan Degenhardt, vice president of operations at Four Loop Technologies, in San Diego, and the manager of the company's partner program for the Switchvox line of Asterisk enhancement products.
Digium has open-source licenses for its software and is at the center of a rich ecosystem of resellers, ISVs and other VARs. The software has numerous developers around the world that are constantly enhancing the code, and VARs like the software because it meets telephony's rock-solid-reliability requirements, particularly if businesses are going to run their phone systems on top of it.
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"We picked Asterisk because it was very stable and we could bring it up without any problems," said Ram Ayyakad, CEO of Ranch Networks, in Morganville, N.J., and a reseller of Asterisk enhancements.
Asterisk is appealing particularly to those VARs that can bring both telephony and data network skills to the table. "The best resellers have both skill sets; they have IT staff that can do the installation and [they] are comfortable with the network, but the guy at the head of the team is an old hand at selling phone systems," Degenhardt said.
You'll need both IT and telephony expertise to properly configure VOIP's many options, as well as understand how to target the right potential customers. While VOIP runs over standard IP networks, it requires some specialized knowledge to be able to tune and deliver the highest-quality connections. There are plenty of things that can influence voice quality, such as competing data network traffic.
"We have horror stories about VARs that were really good data guys, but they didn't understand latency issues and other things that affect voice quality," said Chad Agate, CEO and co-founder of SIPBox, in Tinley Park, Ill., another Asterisk reseller.
Digium's partner program has gotten high marks from VARs, too. "Digium is always ready to listen and entertain some of the ideas that we have, such as joint marketing with Webinars. We don't have to worry about meeting volume requirements; they are very flexible," Agate said.
One of the reasons for the high partner satisfaction is that there are many different kinds of add-on products that complement the basic Asterisk services. For example, Ranch Networks offers additional security to protect the Asterisk PBX from outside hackers and support clustered Asterisk servers for the highest availability, such as for call center applications.
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Other companies sell bundled hardware solutions expressly designed for Asterisk PBX uses. While Asterisk runs on standard PC hardware, the motherboards used in the systems running the Asterisk PBX can be problematic, which is where Four Loop Technologies comes in. "We test motherboards with superior voice quality and make recommendations on our Web site," Degenhardt said. The company also is willing to work with systems integrators and will put new motherboards through its test sequence to certify them for Asterisk.
Others enhance Asterisk's security. "We differentiate ourselves by doing end-to-end solutions, engineering their wireless and wired network, setting up QOS [quality of service], and implementing the Asterisk solution," Agate said. There is plenty more room for others to join them.
David Strom is a St. Louis-based writer, speaker and consultant. He can be reached at david@strom.com.
