Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Nuasis Competition Goes Open Source

Aspect Software announced today that they are going open source. By selecting Asterisk as the IP PBX solution, Aspect has chosen the smartest path. The business case is simple. There is a huge community of open source developers working on the Asterisk code. In addition, there exists a large installed user base. This adds up to rapid development and fast bug fixes.

The alternative, which Nuasis is clinging to, is a proprietary model where the company keeps the source code closed and does all the development and integration work internally. This has caused an interesting set of effects. First of which is a huge pressure on the Nuasis voice team. Currently at two members, the developers are throttling between feature development, bug fixing, and general firefighting. This in turn has lead to high turnover in the group. The current team average tenure is less than 1 year.

By chosing open source as its VoIP platform, Aspect positions itself to leapfrog Nuasis very quickly, perhaps as fast as 6 months to one year. This is the death blow. Aspect is a big company, and slow to change. When the big guys start adopting open source faster than the small startup, you've seen a sea change.

Aspect wasn't the first contact center company to realize open source was the correct path. Check out Aheeva. They integrated with Asterisk back in 2003 and have several contributors to the Asterisk open source project. Additionally, they chose SugarCRM, another hugely popular open source project. Picking these components off the open source shelf and tying them together is much faster then building it all yourself. The benefits of open source tell us that the development time is quicker and so is the time for bug fixes.

Aspect Goes Open Source

Sphere: Related Content

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey buddy, this is your old pal will. Looks like you are still kickin it. (soccer ref)

I have really learned a lot from your great setup you left me. syslog-ng, rrdtool, ganglia + nagios.

I still need to work on my networking skills but i am getting there.

iproute2 is the best thing since sliced bread.

Gentoo Forever.

wladda at gmail . com

Anonymous said...

Still a hack; you pushed worthless myopic ideas at Nuasis, and now you are angry because you’re gone. You don’t know call centers, you do not know telephony, but people are suppose to value your opinions because you are a junior Linux guy. Good luck.

Anonymous said...

By the way Will, Demetri did not create this environment, another person did. Demetri takes credit for it, like everything else, but another guy wrote the scripts that make everything work. Demetri doesn't even know how to write a script.

dmourati said...

Hey Anonymous,

Good to hear from you. How's your rash?

-D

Anonymous said...

will ladda is a low life loser.

dmourati said...

Hey again anonymous,

Found a job yet or still living in the past?

Anonymous said...

I think you have the wrong anonymous. This is someone else who just feels that he is a loser a lot of other things too.