I've been interested/fascinated/intrigued/learning about Voice over IP over the past number of months. I've been assessing it as a viable business technology, looking at on-premise solutions and outsourced solutions. From Cisco to Nortel, from Bell to Telus 
to OneConnect I've been thinknig about VoiP. I've been experimenting and embracing it personally as well, using Skype coupled with a vTech phone system while being exposed to other home based options that a co-worker of mine is experimenting with from D-Link.
In my opinion, it is all going VoiP - both in business and in the consumer space. What I hadn't entertained all this time was an open source option to VoiP. Does it sound scary? I mean, if people can't make the leap from MS Office to an open source suite like OpenOffice for fear of it just "not working", can you imagine the huge leap that needs to be made to abandon the good old fashion for an open source solution?!? I'm not saying it can be done, yet....but I think that all the VoiP vendors, as they push their wares on the market, people will find themselves locked into proprietary systems, a lot like Microsoft's Office suite. Heck, the phones systems we already have lock us into proprietary systems, but I think businesses haven't carried because all systems basically did the same thing. In the world of VoiP though, that changes, users are able to take their telephony in all new directions. And with that they are going to want options and freedoms - not lock-ins.
That is where the open source movement I think will become a key player in the VoiP space. I'm not saying that it will do away with systems that are proprietary, but they will have a major impact on the market/industry.
So why am I think about this, besides it being a part of my short, medium and long term thinking about VoiP as it pertains to our company? Well, in our exploration a co-worker installed and showed one such open source solution, and dear readers, friends, co-workers and casual passerbys....it is the real deal.
I'm talking about SIPFoundry's Open Source suite for PBX/VoiP solutions. You can download this software and set it up relatively easily. My co-worker did it and was making calls over a soft phone in relatively no time at all. I set it up across computers here in my home lab and again, easy as pie. You deploy this platform on a linux server, but then the desktop soft phone can be Windows-based. If you have a SIP phone you can simply plug it into the network and it should pick up an IP address and you're off to the races. We haven't managed that part...yet. Reason? The Nortel phone we have, while "SIP compliant" doesn't seem to play nice...hmmm...proprietary.
The solution from SIPFoundry is surprisingly robust, offering features like voice mail and call routing to name a few. There are many other features as well that the commercial vendors are current touting in their products. This is well worth a look and should be part of your long-term consideration. Ready to deploy in the enterprise today? Not for the faint of heart, but it should be watched closely, understood and then eventually siezed when the time is right.
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