Oracle

It has come time to consider a phone system. While most of the company clan uses mobile phones for personal calls, we do have sales and support that do need real phones, with voicemail, multiple simultaneous dialtones, etc. We tried the Vonage thing, but that had too many "can you hear me now?" moments for a business to suffer, so we went to the multiple Qwest lines, which required little in equipment investment but is far too costly each month -- not to mention every time we move or want to add a line.

Last week we got a pitch from Qwest reps. The part that probably does make sense is doing a T1 with dynamic bandwidth allocation and integrated access, opening up some channels and handling all the phone switching from a box. (Not sure if Qwest is best choice for that, but I'll reserve judgment for now.)

The part I'm less sure of is the Oracle Cisco box they are bundling with the service package. They are going to put some numbers together but my hunch is that it's going to be just a tad more expensive than we are wanting (or even able) to spend.

It's also a closed-source solution, which gives me pause. Any time I'm plunking down a good chunk of change, I want to know I have ownership of the future. While I don't figure on Cisco going away anytime soon, past experience has shown that a company doesn't need to go under to EOL a product line.

There is Asterisk, which is open source. It even has a Drupal module for integration with Drupal (maintained by fellow Boulderite hunmonk). I plan on giving Chad a ping to see what kind of insights he may have. And Matthew has some measure of experience with it.

But just because it's open source doesn't mean it's enterprise-ready. This phone system realm is completely alien territory for me. Any recommendations? Warnings? Happy tales with flowers and dancing cats?