asterisk users - Feb 2009 - Open Source in an Economic Downturn: Asterisk stories needed

I'm giving a talk at SCALE 2009 (Southern CAlifornia Linux Expo) on  
Sunday in Los Angeles, and the topic of my talk is "Open Source in an  
Economic Downturn".  I've got lots of talking points for this talk,  
but it would be interesting to hear some short anecdotes about how you  
in the Asterisk community are thriving, or at least surviving, by  
virtue of the benefits of Open Source.  I find that real-world  
examples are worth more than all of the bullet points in the world,  
and timely stories from the community would be more interesting than  
hearing me prattle on.

Please ensure that your snippet or list of points are in some way  
related to the benefits of open-source, or how other alternatives are  
less attractive in the <cough> "compressed economic
environment."  I'd
prefer of course to hear about how Asterisk is the silver bullet for  
your particular business, but I'm open to any OSS-based solution being  
a tool for you at this point.

Send your comments publicly or privately - let me know if you want to  
remain anonymous, otherwise I'll give you free advertising by using  
your name or company name in my talk if I use your story.

PS: Of course, the talk/slides will be available with Creative Commons  
Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, and I  
expect that I'll probably use all or parts of this talk a few times  
this year, given the focus on the economy.

JT

---
John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/

On Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:37:57 John Todd wrote:
> I'm giving a talk at SCALE 2009 (Southern CAlifornia Linux Expo) on
> Sunday in Los Angeles, and the topic of my talk is "Open Source in an
> Economic Downturn".  I've got lots of talking points for this
talk,
> but it would be interesting to hear some short anecdotes about how you
> in the Asterisk community are thriving, or at least surviving, by
> virtue of the benefits of Open Source.  I find that real-world
> examples are worth more than all of the bullet points in the world,
> and timely stories from the community would be more interesting than
> hearing me prattle on.
What "economic downturn"?

I'm sick and tired of hearing this mantra.

Michael

I work for a large health care company who does all their dealings with 
Cisco and the like. Would not even think of an open source solution for 
their telephony needs. The whole company had a need for an emergency 
notification system that would be triggered by a phone call and start 
paging both traditional pagers and blackberries. One of the other 
regions in our company went with some vendor supplied solution for a 
cost upwards of $175,000. I started thinking about it and created a 
clandestine asterisk system. With asterisk as the backbone to accept the 
phone call I created a database and some simple scripts to handle paging 
pagers and blackberries. All for the cost of a server and a digium card. 
The system is currently in the process of getting approved to be on the 
network (as it is not a cisco voip gateway ;-) )

Just thought i'd share. Have a good one all!!

Jim

John Todd wrote:
> I'm giving a talk at SCALE 2009 (Southern CAlifornia Linux Expo) on  
> Sunday in Los Angeles, and the topic of my talk is "Open Source in an
> Economic Downturn".  I've got lots of talking points for this
talk,
> but it would be interesting to hear some short anecdotes about how you  
> in the Asterisk community are thriving, or at least surviving, by  
> virtue of the benefits of Open Source.  I find that real-world  
> examples are worth more than all of the bullet points in the world,  
> and timely stories from the community would be more interesting than  
> hearing me prattle on.
>
> Please ensure that your snippet or list of points are in some way  
> related to the benefits of open-source, or how other alternatives are  
> less attractive in the <cough> "compressed economic
environment."  I'd
> prefer of course to hear about how Asterisk is the silver bullet for  
> your particular business, but I'm open to any OSS-based solution being
> a tool for you at this point.
>
> Send your comments publicly or privately - let me know if you want to  
> remain anonymous, otherwise I'll give you free advertising by using  
> your name or company name in my talk if I use your story.
>
> PS: Of course, the talk/slides will be available with Creative Commons  
> Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License, and I  
> expect that I'll probably use all or parts of this talk a few times  
> this year, given the focus on the economy.
>
> JT
>
> ---
> John Todd                       email:jtodd at digium.com
> Digium, Inc. | Asterisk Open Source Community Director
> 445 Jan Davis Drive NW -  Huntsville AL 35806  -   USA
> direct: +1-256-428-6083         http://www.digium.com/
>
>
>
>
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