Be careful about Sam Houston State Univ though. They were the example case of a large school moving from Cisco to Asterisk…until they changed back. What motivated the reverse migration? Simple, the loss of key staff.

Asterisk, Freeswitch, insert yer-favorite-band-of-the-month-here, are not panacea. They’re a good, solid, open source competitors…but they too have significant knowledge overhead.

When a key staffer leaves can the enterprise find a suitably skilled replacement? When they go hunting for that replacement do they get to pick from many applicants or are they left head-hunting a possibly expensive candidate?

The human factors remain a large consideration.

I started out playing with Asterisk and ran into problems with specific features. FreeSWITCH was still very new at that point so I just watched and tinkered with both at the same time. Eventually FS got to the point where its functionality met my needs and then I jumped in full throttle. Oh, and I never looked back!

That being said, I agree with the basic idea presented here: do what works for you. I know a lot of people who just want a PBX out of the box and they use Asterisk or one of its derivatives like Trixbox. On the other hand, I know many power users who dropped Asterisk and use FreeSWITCH because of scalability or other concerns.

I’ll openly confess my bias towards FreeSWITCH. I highly recommend checking it out. Perhaps it will be “the right stroke” for you.

-MC