Very good post from Angie Reed, Product Marketing Manager at Digium talking about how users and entreprises are always looking for better Communication Solutions. Smart Phones are user-centric devices but Businesses require better Phone Systems.
That’s right, that most technology users want immediate access to information – a single device for my camera, music (MP3 Player), GPS, email and, of course a phone. A smart phone is that powerfully useful tool that makes life easier. So, for better or worse, they are willing to incur the sunk cost associated with changing cell phones frequently just to gain the latest features and capabilities. Then, is it really a surprise that businesses want to improve their communications too? Like the mobile phone, users want a single interface to access their phone calls, their associated emails, presence, chat, CRM systems, caller location services and so much more. Phone systems need to be more intuitive for business processes by optimizing IVR capabilities, integrating call queues, generating reports and even facilitating video calling. These too need to be powerfully useful tools to make businesses more productive.
So, before you look for gold in refurbishing cell phones, consider first how your office communications can improve and how you can actually save money with a smarter phone system. Some key benefits of advanced IVR / IVVR apps are:
- Extend your office automation to your caller/customer
- Attending the call at the first ring, it will be never overloaded
- Multilingual and personalized greetings to the caller as per caller ID
- Provide advanced voice interaction self-service and ability to check balances
- IVR works 24 hours a day and it never greets a caller with tired voice!
Source: Digium Blog – Cell Phones Stashed in Your Closet? Digesting the Dreaded Total Cost of Ownership
Around the world, organizations are conscious about IT spending and are continually evaluating ways to slash their operating expenses while keeping up with the latest technological trends. The City of Schoten, a city of 33,000 inhabitants located in the heart of Belgium, recently migrated from 15 disparate telephone systems to an open-source PBX solution to reduce operating and maintenance costs and gain greater functionality to meet their telephony needs. Moving to Digium’s Asterisk, the organization expects to save nearly $50,000* annually while reaping the rewards of a robust IP-based telephony solution.
According to our partner Avanzada7, the City of Amsterdam is following Schoten, implementing Asterisk for their telephony too… Here in Spain, we are devilvering many projects for Cities like the City of Avila over Asterisk and VXI* for IVR voice portal services…
A Wind of Change is Blowing Through the Cities and Public Administrations.
Sources:
Something in changing the Future of Telephony, a Revolution is coming…
Asterisk, The Open Source PBX created by Mark Spencer from Digium has enjoyed rapid growth over the past 10 years. As a result, the company has been able to challenge larger, more established competitors to claim more of the market. With Asterisk software, companies can adopt corporate phone systems that are designed to be easier to customize and cost a fraction of traditional proprietary systems.
This is only the beginning of the change and it’s first time that Digium is reported by Gartner. All Asterisk’s ecosystem members know that Asterisk is growing fast in the market, like other open source projects (firefox, apache, linux…) have already done.
Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/microsoft/vol6/article15/article15.html
Evolution of Telephony goes Software, times of specific Hardware boards is changing…
Sept. 13, 2009: Intel Corporation today disclosed new information about next-generation Intel® Xeon® processors – codenamed “Jasper Forest” – for communications and storage applications, due in early 2010. With Jasper Forest, Intel engineers have, for the first time, integrated PCI Express* (PCIe*) in a dual-processing Xeon processor, which greatly facilitates dense storage and communications solutions such as IPTV, VoIP, NAS, SAN and wireless radio network controllers.
VXI* IVR / IVVR platforms get their power from the CPU; today last enhanced processors deliver superb computing power, performance, and reliability to manage a large numbers of simulteanous calls without using any specific DSP or boards.
Source:
Intel Corporation – http://download.intel.com/pressroom/kits/events/idffall_2009/pdfs/TechBulletin_JasperForest.pdf
Date: September 23, 2009 18h-19h
Location: IFEMA Centro de Convenciones Norte, Madrid – Spain
Conference: Interactive Telephony 2.0 with VoiceXML over Asterisk
Speaker: Ivan Sixto – I6NET
VoIP2DAY is born as point of meeting of the world of the IP Voice and Video in Spain and Portugal. Join Ivan Sixto, our Business Development Manager at I6NET’s conference to discover Telephony 2.0 with VoiceXML for Asterisk®. Look for our IVR / IVVR software add-ons and how these can help you increase your innovation possibilities for your Asterisk® systems. To register for the event, please click here.
Download: VoIP2Day Conference Schedule
More information: www.voip2day.net
SAVOIE: In East-France region, people find their nearest drug store thanks to the 3915 speech self-service 24hx7. Even if your are living in a city or country, from anywhere you are in France with any phone; you will get the same value-added service to find or contact in less than a minute your Pharmacy / Drug Store; this phone service is adopted by all Region of Savoie Pharmacies / Drug Stores, and it’s a very helpful service in health emergency situations too.
More information: www.3915.fr
I6NET is proud to announce next VXI* releases for Asterisk PBX will provide advanced Cloud Telephony for real. This approach will free carriers and enterprises to get their own Virtual IVR services powered by VoiceXML / SIP, the open standard speech XML language and VoIP protocol. Today traditional, Hosted Telephony or Phone 2.0 API services don’t provide to users a full access to their own IVR platforms management and engines control in the Cloud. With VXI* for Cloud, you will run any standard VoiceXML 2.0+ application for inbound / outbound telephony services by yourself in your own virtual OS server environment.
Coming soon next days:
VXI* Cloud Beta Program launching!
InfoWorld‘s (IDG) annual BOSSIES recognize the best free and open source software the world has to offer to businesses, IT professionals, and productive individuals who rely on computers to get work done.
More and more companies count on Asterisk to provide their most mission-critical application: dial tone. Asterisk has what you’d expect from an enterprise-worthy VoIP system, and integrates with other tools to allow for clustering, failover, IPv6 support, IVR / IVVR and a range of other functions. Asterisk operates as a back-to-back user agent, managing all aspects of a VoIP call, where some of its contenders deal only with VoIP signaling. Asterisk is not without rivals, notably OpenSER (recently renamed Kamailio), FreeSWITCH, and CallWeaver but it’s still the champ.
Maybe the most important fact is that keep the OSS IP Telephony community leadership. The really way to change the market is in this point, and we feel Asterisk becomes stronger, not only because it’s a wonderfull framework like Linux is, but because Asterisk manage to create an important developers/users ecosystem arround itself.
More information, here.
