There are a lot of us out there that owe a big thanks to Mark Spencer (creator of Asterisk). Until Asterisk was released pretty much the only PBX’s out there that were legacy systems. Mark came along and opened a whole new market for both sellers and buyers. From a sellers point there are a lot more out there to offer and it is very easy to configure and maintain Asterisk (assuming that you know Asterisk 😉 ). All one needs is a good knowledge of Linux and you are off. From the end user’s point it is great as well. Gone are the days of paying $3,000.00 to have your system work with SIP. I had a client who told me that his system was “SIP Enabled”. We were trying to figure out how to connect to the system since there was nothing in there that pointed to SIP. He called his phone guy and was told to have SIP capabilities he would need to purchase a VOIP card for his PBX that would run him $3,000.00. With asterisk it’s just writing a few lines of code (OK some times more than a few). Gone are the days of paying extra for every feature. A while back I was in a company who purchased a PBX from 3Com. They went with them for the name. They spent a little over $45,0000.00. I could of done the same for them for about $2,500.00 (using good hardware). All that would have been required was some research on working with Asterisk. It amazes me that some people are still scared to use it because it is open source.
To sum it up I think many of us owe our jobs to Mark. He has done something great for many of us.
/D