Is VoIP ready for open source?
In the space of just a few years, businesses have gone from having to be stuck with just a small number of traditional telecommunications providers to being literally spoilt for choice with the number of online communications systems on offer.
Among the biggest choices facing businesses today when it comes to adopting new technology is whether the potential benefits of open source software used alongside voice over IP telephony outweigh the potential risks, with opinion firmly divided over the matter within the industry.
While the relatively small number of open source providers at the recent VoiceCon Sprint 2007 Conference in the US was taken by the publication Computer Weekly as proof that the technology is still to be fully accepted, a senior network analyst at 3M, Murray Butler, told the conference that open source solutions are "seeping out of the desktop and server racks and into other areas of IT that are traditionally closed platforms".
Unsurprisingly, for a majority of organisations one of the biggest benefits of open source is simply that of cost, with software available at a lower cost due to a relative lack of intellectual property restrictions.
However, it's not just about the money, experts in the sector maintain.
According to Mark Spencer, the creator of Digium CTO and Asterisk, it is the flexibility of open source solutions which most attracts small businesses.
"It all fundamentally comes down to the control that the customer has," he explained in an interview with Amy Kucharik, the editor of the website SearchNetworking.com.
"The control is not in itself something you can really explain; it's how that maps out into more choices for hardware and software and how it changes the behaviour of your vendor because it can't keep somebody locked out of it.
"That control is reflected in a lot of ways in terms of how it actually ends up benefiting the customer," he concluded.
Many small businesses, however, will opt for the more expensive option since, as they have no specialist IT department or even an individual software expert, open source is of little use to them.
Just as smaller businesses are more likely to spend money on hosted VoIP services, so too will they adopt propriety systems, whereby they are able to get on with their day-to-day responsibilities and leave the matter of online communications to the experts.
Indeed, as with the rest of the online telecoms sector, it appears that, while the potential is certainly there, open source will only truly take off once the technology becomes simpler to use as well as cheaper to adopt.
As Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of enterprise research at the Yankee Group, told the recent conference, VoIP is "too early in the development cycle to be open sourced". 
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