Open Source PBX in the marketplace

The website No-Jitter has shaken things up with their recently published survey of the North American PBX market. I highly recommend reading the full article, it’s well done, and has a surprising conclusion. By their numbers, open source telephony has captured an astounding 18% of the market. Take a look at the chart above. OST (open source telephony) is larger than Avaya, larger than Cisco, and even larger than the bruised, but still mighty Nortel. There are going to be many who will be skeptical of that number, and I’m having a hard time believing it’s that high as well. But even if it’s half as much, open source telephony has established itself as a solid and reliable solution for business’s telephony needs. And it has done so right under the noses of the major proprietary vendors (the Cisco’s and Avaya’s), without marketing budgets or a sales force.

Asterisk, by far, is the leader in open source telephony. With four packaged distributions of Asterisk (AsteriskNow, Elastix, PBX in a Flash, Trixbox) accounting for the majority of the installs. All of these use FreePBX (except for Trixbox, they use their own fork of FreePBX), an extremely powerful, polished, and easy to use front end GUI for configuration of the PBX. The installs themselves have become almost trivial, delivering a complete, powerful and highly customizable phone system in under an hour. There are many hobbyists in this space, as well as growing number of businesses. I concur with the article that the biggest percentage of businesses using OST are SMB’s (those with 100 or less endpoints).

Over the years, I have seen a pattern repeat itself many times. An IT employee of a SMB, driven either by frustration or cost of commercially available products, will seek out one of the Asterisk distro’s and post in the forums, asking for pre-installation advice or help with a post install. And it makes sense, a small SMB might only have one person tasked with IT who has both freedom and control over technology decisions. Given the costs and lack of flexibility that the proprietary sellers usually offer to smaller clients, it’s not surprising they’re seeking out other solutions. I suspect that the growth of open source telephony in the business environment has been mostly this organic. And the widening selection of IP phones, hardware, and providers are making the decision to switch even easier. Like drops of rain, enough of them have come together and are changing the PBX landscape.

It will be interesting to see how the majors react. Until now, they’ve simply ignored open source as any kind of threat to their business- the one thing they can’t do going forward. It won’t be easy. Simply pushing out lower cost systems aimed at SMB’s risk cannibalizing their existing products, and adding more customization abilities or features to justify higher costs won’t guarantee success either. For now, the sun is shining on open source telephony.

Comments

[Jeff]

*NOTE These comments are refugees from a previous iWeb hosted account.

joe.roper@gmail.com:
I'd agree with you, I've commented in a similar vein at www.fonicaprojects.com, and found myself amazed at the findings.

Given that this has been achieved with no marketing budget, then imagine what we can achieve with a marketing budget.

Hence the reason for Distro number 5 to add to your list, FonicaPABX.

Joe
Thursday, March 12, 2009 - 01:03 PM

Jeff Howe:
Thanks Joe. I'm downloaded FonicaPABX and giving it a spin in a VM. I really like the addition of OSSEC, Very Nice!
Friday, March 13, 2009 - 09:27 PM

Robert Spanek:
It will be interesting what kind of traction FreeSwitch will get once FreePBX or another gui makes it easy to configure. Scaling from Asterisk's 100's to FreeSwitches 1000's of simultaneous calls on inexpensive hardware is going to be attractive to the biggest users.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009 - 11:12 AM