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Cisco officials can now openly say support for open standards is a good business strategy for the company, which is not surprising given the rapidly growing use of open-source business communications software.
Asterisk, the popular open source package developed by Hunstville, AL-based Digium, Inc., for example, now owns about 18 percent of the international PBX market, concentrated in the SMB end, but making inroads with enterprise too. When a company such as Yahoo decides it can embrace open source, Cisco notices.
“The small business voice unit is focused now on new broadband voice products like the WIP310 cordless WiFi phone and SPA500 series phones, which are solely Cisco branded,” Sherman Scholten, product manager of Cisco’s small business voice unit told Voxilla.
And that’s great news for open standards.
“These devices seemed to be orphaned within Cisco,” John Todd, Open Source Community Director at Digium told us. “There seemed to be an almost palpable reluctance by Cisco to improve these phones significantly with different software that had more features,” he says, noting, “in the last few years that has changed slightly, [with] the acquisition of Linksys and their Sipura brand lineup.”
Scholten came to Cisco in 2004 when the company’s Linksys consumer/SMB communications hardware unit purchased Sipura, one of the most influential companies to develop the open source SIP protocol for voice over IP. He’s seen the open standard SIP technology developed at Sipura rise in prominence and value within Cisco, so that it’s now become the defacto platform for the company’s reach into SMB.
Deploying a Cisco endpoint on an Asterisk system once required a frustrating trip through through arcane ftp provisioning hoops, but new products like the Cisco Small Business Pro IP Phone SPA525G, a 5 line IP phone with color display that supports bluetooth connectivity and wireless provisioning through a familiar web-based GUI, are leaps and bounds ahead of Cisco’s former inscrutability.
“The SMB market will always demand well-built devices that are installed on the desktop regardless of the software running on the back-end server,” says Todd, who nevertheless remains wary of Cisco’s long-term strategy.
“I wouldn’t say I’ve seen a ’sea change’ in Cisco’s VoIP strategy towards open-source, other than their adoption of SIP, but certainly the shift to SIP is a tacit admission that interoperability is more important to customers than stories of how a single vendor would somehow be an advantage.”
For its part, open source seems well-positioned to gain even more attention in an economic downturn, as vendors and users alike look for ways to cut costs.
A company can start using an open source PBX such as Asterisk, or implement one as a component to expand their existing phone system for a fraction of the cost of implementing a proprietary solution today. Once they discover how amazingly capable open source is, they’ll build new tools, integrate their business logic, and grow into the platform as a vital component of their business delivery capabilities.
The costly process of doing that with a proprietary system has buttered Cisco’s enterprise bread for years, but it might be too late - at least bad timing - to make the approach work in the SMB space.
We’re seeing new doors opened due to cost advantage becoming more important,” says Todd of Digium’s perception of the market, “but we really think the flexibility of Asterisk will be what cements open-source Asterisk in the SMB and Enterprise markets.”
-----------------------------BY Lonnie Lazar
Source：voxilla
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