Case Studies

Small Business

Small businesses make up a large portion of the IT market. These customers are unlike any other: they need upscale features with limited resources. It is very common for small businesses to require advanced features while needing to keep costs down. It's also common for small businesses to want to appear larger and more established than they are to increase customer confidence. Asterisk can be a great solution for small businesses as it suits these needs well.

The Scenario

ACMEsoft is a software engineering firm with 40 employees. According to recent usage studies by their telephone company, they usually use about 18 lines, with their peak last month at 22 lines. They have a number of hosted extensions from the local telephone company (often referred to as Centrex service), which they have been using for years. As their five-year contract with the telephone company is up for renewal, they wish to replace the expensive hosted service with an in-house solution.

They will be contracting with us to provide the deployment, ongoing support, and maintenance of their new phone system.

ACMEsoft employs four first-tier support engineers, two second-tier support personnel, and one third-tier support specialist. Each member of each tier has similar talents and can handle the same calls.

They employ a receptionist, an operator, and an administrative assistant. There are 20 programmers, five testers, four project managers, and one person in the shipping department.

The Discussion

Asterisk is an appropriate choice for ACMEsoft. Asterisk provides all of the features common to Centrex solutions, and then some. Since they have no illusions of having an in-house tech to administer Asterisk, only our knowledge set is in question. Since we are professionals who specialize in using Asterisk, we will be able to make it work according to ACMEsoft's expectations.

Asterisk is a powerful alternative to the more expensive hosted solutions. When using Centrex service, each extension must have an analog line. These lines are expensive to install, move, and maintain.

With the current usage statistics, a Primary Rate ISDN (PRI) line makes the most sense. The reason for this is that we will need less than 23 concurrent lines. PRI allows us to use advanced signaling; also, echo is less likely with a PRI than with POTS lines. PRI is often cheaper than having 23 separate POTS lines coming in to our server. Therefore, for this installation, PRI makes the most sense.

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