How we reinvented the IP PBX Askozia, after the project was sold and closed by the developer

How wonderful it was until X

We are a small team of developers, which many years ago was engaged in the development and implementation of 1C programs. Back in 2011, we knew 1C software well and had no experience in developing our own solutions. At that time, the company was 5 years old and it was a bit tired of doing 1C classic business, I needed a breath of fresh air. And we plunged into the world of IP telephony, and specifically into the wild Asterisk. This is an awesome platform, with its own language for writing dialplans. Somewhere we have already seen it, platform + configuration, everything is like in 1C :)

One of the most popular configurations for Asterisk at that time was, and even now there is free FreePBX. In fact, this is a web-muzzle written in PHP, which takes all the Asterisk settings into a “user-friendly” web interface. You do not need to know anything about the Asterisk dialplan team, everything happens under the hood.

We installed this monster, and made our first successful product, the integration module of 1C and Asterisk programs. It was a mixture of C ++ code in the form of a DLL and 1C code for embedding in 1C.

The product went well to the market, but the developers, they are the guys from technical support, and one of them I just groaned on the number of applications for setting up FreePBX. We constantly twisted something, finished, changed practically from each our client. On the one hand, we had constantly changing 1C configurations, and on the other, FreePBX, which had a bunch of different versions, branches, and also an automatic update module.
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We again began to slide into the service model, instead of developing a replicable product, did customization.

We really needed the PBX build we controlled on Asterisk so that we could cover everything with tests and guarantee the performance of our products, at least with something specific.

At some point we found the Askozia project, from the German company Plantel. It was a free PBX with a small but sufficient functionality for the majority of our clients. We were finally able to assemble a complete boxed solution that fully worked after installation exactly as we wanted.



Over time, Askozia has acquired new functions: the editor of routes in the form of visual block diagrams, support for automatic configuration of phones, secure calls, various hardware cards and gateways. It hurt us a little ... The product became paid , and the support of some foreign providers and foreign standards for analog-digital communication channels for us was superfluous.

But despite all this, the product entered the market and sold well, we bought the domain Askozia.ru, made a website, were engaged in marketing and distribution.

Hour X

In August 2017, I was on vacation and was delighted with the call with the news: “Askozia was bought by 3CX”.



At first I did not understand the magnitude of the problem. Well, sometimes someone buys something. Of course, it was sad to find out that the guys, with whom we worked side by side for 5 years, sent each other gifts for the new year in the form of supportive bottles, became part of a large company. Probably, we will not have such warm relations.

But after a couple of weeks, we received even more fun news: “The Askozia PBX project is closing, sales are possible until the end of 2017, support until the end of 2018, everything is switching to 3CX”.

A phrase flies in my head: “Great, but how are we?” We have a website, marketing, deeply integrated developments, a streamlined work scheme, partners we have been trained in customizing Askozia and our 1C integrations ... Everything went down the drain!

What to do?

I didn’t want to go back to FreePBX, all the bumps that we stuffed have not yet healed. Askozia was taken away from us and they definitely will not be sold or developed. 3CX is a cool platform, but it is not on Asterisk, and we need to redo much to work with it. Not an option, because we now have a lot of clients on FreePBX and Askozia and even have desperate guys with pure Asterisk, we need to continue to develop our solutions.

And let's do our Askozia

This is just a web-interface, which is written by dialplans. Yes, in a couple of months we will sketch out a prototype, and in six months we will do MVP (something that is not a shame to show people). We know Asterisk as our 5 fingers, we know that Askozia was built on the t2sde platform (this is about a small embedded Linux).

There was excitement, but there was a catastrophic lack of time. In order to win at least a little, we got from Plantel guys the opportunity to purchase current Askozia versions for future use, so that we would have until the middle of 2018.

1 year has passed

We really were able to assemble a prototype in 3 months, and 5 months after the start of development, we replaced Plantel in our Askozia office with our own. But these were only the first 90% of the project :)

We released our very first release in September 2018 (a year later). Our Askozia is built on the same t2sde platform, at its heart is Asterisk, the PHP framework Phalcon is responsible for the web interface and internal API, and we chose the Semantic-UI style set as the web muzzle design.
Outwardly, it turned out pretty, internally-structured.



At least we think so!

Unlike developments on 1C, for us Askozia is a completely independent product, written from 0 and built on our own customized operating system. During development, we studied a bunch of useful tools: Jira, Bitbucket, Team City, Katalon Studio, SonarQube and all sorts of recommendations on structuring and writing code, on its design, automatic assembly and testing.

And let's throw a call to FreePBX

Such an idea came to me during the long New Year holidays. I like FreePBX for its functionality, a huge number of options, for being tested on hundreds of thousands of installations. It is completely free. Anyone can download, deploy, and do IP telephony for their company.

But he has a big minus. It has too many options, it is not so easy to configure if you are doing this for the first time. It's hard to integrate with him, because it is constantly updated, the version of Asterisk is being changed, which adds new options for the administrator and questionable additional business opportunities.

It's like a microwave, in which there is both a grill and a multi-cook, and a bunch of all sorts of programs, but in reality 99% of users are tied on one button.

We decided to re-invent the idea of ​​the guys from Plantel and make a simple telephone system for small companies that are sufficiently basic IP telephony functions. Most importantly, it should be very quickly installed, configured without unnecessary instructions and be free .

Why do you need Askozia if there are cloud providers

This is of course a matter of choice. I do not like vendorlok, I do not like when the provider will be able to listen to all our conversations, even internal ones. I don’t like to pay a monthly fee for every gigabyte of call recording storage and for each additionally connected number, for an API for integration into CRM or for each employee.
Cloud providers are comfortable buses that go where the majority needs, and their own PBX is a personal car that goes exactly where you need it. The choice is yours :) Despite the large number of cloud providers, Asterisk and FreePBX have a huge number of users, which means I have like-minded people!

What to earn if Askozia free PBX

This question is regularly asked me especially colleagues. Some twist at the temple. Have you spent a year and a half living developing a product and giving it away for free? Yes, that's it!

I studied the number of Askozia queries in Google search results from the moment it appeared on the market, and it was very active, added right up to the moment it was made a commercial product, after that the interest began to fade. It's a shame, because The idea and the project seemed to me very interesting. Let him live! Let's see what happens after years.
There are plans to make an English version, and wind the tail of FreePBX, at least in the place where one button on the microwave is enough to heat the sausage :) And after that we’ll think about monetization, paid modules and all that.

What do you think will fly?