IP telephony: Brand solutions VS soft (free)

Regularly stumble on Habré on articles such as IP telephony "cheap and cheerful." I would like to make my humble opinion on this issue. Or rather, describe your vision of this issue and weigh the pros and cons

Most of the topics of this kind come down to the fact that there is a wonderful Astrisk solution and the solution on it is cheap and reliable, but evil brands like Cisco, Avaya, etc. just beating a lot of money is not clear why. This is one of the biggest mistakes. At least, this shows my personal experience with various office telephony systems. Immediately I would like to say that I have been working with various telephony systems for a long time (since 2003, I have experience in implementing and maintaining various systems, ranging from the simplest 2 urban 6 domestic lines of domestic production, to PBXs installed in factories and distributed corporate communication systems scattered around the whole of mother Russia and the CIS), and during that time, it was understood that in addition to making money from selling equipment and services, we must take a sober look at the tasks and needs of customers. Actually, based on the last statement, I will compare different systems.

1. Various software solutions, to which Asterisk himself and his derivatives, as well as a number of other products on the market. An excellent solution for the customer who needs to call, save on long-distance, and the minimum set of various additional types of service (hereinafter DVO). Also, this customer should have a fairly stable structure of the organization, which does not undergo changes for quite a long time. This position is due to the following points:
   but. to maintain these systems, you need an adequate linksoid, in the case of constant changes, it must be maintained constantly - the cost of ownership rises seriously, and if Linux runs only on the PBX, then it makes no sense
   b. Most of the good modules for DVO implementation are paid and far from trivial to set up
   at. there was an experience of barriers with the fact that there was a conflict at the software-hardware level, and the customer lost a large percentage of incoming calls, the glitch was not diagnosed by standard means, and therefore his catch was lengthy.
2. "Medium" budget solutions, most often in this direction consider Panasonic, but then we will consider a few more options. Thanks to a fairly aggressive marketing policy, excellent solutions at the turn of the century, he gained great popularity, and is regularly viewed by inertia, although it has several significant drawbacks. These include, in my opinion, “a kind of reading of standards” (problems regularly arise when mating with the equipment), high prices for IP in solutions. In this regard, Panasonic solutions should be considered solely for use as traditional systems, at least for connecting external IP lines, or building a network of exclusively mono-vendor nature. And now the promised other solutions: Samsung has been quite well lately (the big question here is what role Alcatel played in this - whether it provided real help, or if the Koreans were able to copy it very well). LG, in a consortium with Nortel, was able to pull up its offer to a high level, while leaving the port cost at an adequate level. Plus, here are a number of world-famous companies that are trying to enter our market and therefore keep the price at a level lower than that of the leading manufacturers.
3. Well, the price range. Here we have Cisco, Avaya (both “red” originating from AT & T, and “blue” former Nortel), Alcatel, Siemens etc. The key point in using solutions from these vendors is that in most cases the product is tested and supported at the level of rapid changes in the software for the requirements, as well as the printing of special software versions (firmware) for the specific requirements of the customer (personally for my at one time at least 5 firmwares were prepared for customers, some of them go into the following official releases, some remain at the level of special versions). In most cases, an adequate system administrator can learn how to support these solutions in a very short time, and some difficult questions are better to be trusted by professionals.

As a result, we have 3 groups of solutions mainly divided by price range. Since the possibility of building fault-tolerant solutions is in all groups, as well as the possibility of scaling. In principle, it is possible to solve the tasks of providing the VET, including the organization of the CallCenter, practically on any equipment. And now the most interesting:

As practice shows, in our country they like to count only initial costs, and they do not like to take into account such a component as the cost of ownership. And here we come to the fact that calculating the cost of the solution and it most often turns out, that all 3 categories come to about the same price tag for the first 3-5 years of ownership. And accordingly, in the future, large start-up costs turn out to be more profitable.

And one more thing, the same big vendors have specialized solutions for the SMB market, and they, in turn, at a price per port approach the cost of medium-sized exchanges for starting investments, and allow much more than they are used to demanding solutions of this level.
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PS It may be a little messy, but I have long wanted to set forth these thoughts. In principle, I am ready to discuss both protocols and more detailed + and - specific systems.