When it comes to a robust and cost-effective business communication solution, most businesses are recently recognizing the potential of VoIP and gradually making the transition. While several VoIP business solutions exist built using open-source and proprietary technology, businesses prefer to opt for an Asterisk-based solution. Being open source, Asterisk solutions are cheaper, customizable, and offer much more community support for developers for troubleshooting purposes.
There are many benefits of using a tailored Asterisk solution instead of buying ready-to-use VoIP solutions. Furthermore, the business can get a competitive edge by using the Asterisk development services from a reliable VoIP development company. Let’s understand the benefits an Asterisk solution brings to a business.
Introduction to Asterisk
Asterisk is an open-source, Linux-based PBX software solution developed in 1999 by Mark Spencer, Digium. Irrespective of your organization size and your custom needs, Asterisk solution development allows businesses to create innovative business solutions with a wide range of primary and advanced capabilities that leverage Asterisk’s power. Furthermore, thanks to the modularity offered by Asterisk, you can integrate multiple APIs or 3rd party tools to enhance the features availed or streamline the business operations.
Being open source, organizations save up money on license fees, specialized hardware, and cherry-picked features. As a result, Asterisk can be the centralized platform for businesses to remain connected with their peers and customers at different geographical locations while being cheaper and more feature-rich than traditional phone lines.
Capabilities of an Asterisk-based VoIP System
- Supports both call devices: VoIP (Digital) and phone line (Analogue).
- Calls can be routed through the least costly paths using a call routing logic.
- Can send and receive voice calls over the telephone network.
- Supports teleconferencing.
- Provides voicemail services.
- Build IVR menus of every complexity type.
- Can manage small and large call queues
- Average hold duration callout
Let’s look at the benefits of integrating Asterisk PBX systems for businesses.
Asterisk Technology Advantages
Open Source and Free
Being open source, Asterisk users don’t need to worry about license fees, reducing the communication cost, and this is one of the major benefits of Asterisk Solutions. Open source means its code is available; hence you can modify and customize the PBX Solutions as per your business requirements and use custom integrations to add newly added features that power your work. Instead of opting for a readymade solution, developing an Asterisk Solution from scratch can save lots of your development costs and be an affordable choice for most businesses.
Flexible and Modular
Asterisk is a highly modular platform where developers can build feature-rich VoIP products with scope for customization. It supports concurrent call traffic without a sign of strain and handles call queues effortlessly. From a development perspective, Asterisk is the ideal playground for developers to build unique features built from scratch or using 3rd party plugins. Asterisk Solutions also provides many APIs which can be integrated with any third-party software to increase the functionality of your business. You can easily incorporate your Asterisk Solution with any internal or external CRMs, Software, or applications.
Businesses have tighter control over the features they want to be included in their products and bring down the overall development costs. The Asterisk platform is robust enough that developers can create the following popular Applications Using Asterisk Solutions:
- Business Phone System/ IP PBX
- VoIP Gateway
- Voicemail Server
- Call Center
- Conference Bridge
- IVR Server
Cost Effective Professional Grade Conferencing Solution
Companies worldwide need some ways for Audio and Video conferencing to communicate and discuss daily operations. Using Asterisk Solution, businesses can remotely connect with all the branches in the network via audio or video conferencing. Moreover, the different basic and advanced features offered can help businesses and organizations operate with complete professionalism and efficiency. Some of the advanced features currently possible in Asterisk Solutions are:
- Call Forwarding
- Auto Attendant
- Call Queuing
- IVR
- VoiceMail to Email
- Music on Hold
- Audio and Video Conferencing
- Call Recording
- Call Monitoring
- Call Barge
These features can easily give businesses of all sizes a professional look.
Scalable
Whether you are a startup or a large enterprise, Asterisk is the right fit for every business. Modularity allows businesses to add or remove features per the organization’s changes. Since Asterisk does not rely on specialized hardware, the upgradation can be as easy as enabling or disabling certain functionalities. In addition, having a dedicated Asterisk developer can easily allow businesses to scale the products based on the organization’s growth.
Asterisk Technology Challenges
It’s not all rainbows and glitter by choosing Asterisk development solutions. There are some challenges faced by administrators when choosing Asterisk.
Familiarity with Linux is required.
Asterisk works in most environments but functions best under Linux. So, you need to hire Asterisk developers familiar with the installation, configuration, and maintenance of a Linux distribution for running the Asterisk product.
Knowledge of Asterisk dialplan
The Asterisk dialplan is a form of scripting language exclusive to Asterisk. Dialplan instructs the Asterisk platform on how to execute certain functions or route calls programmatically. To use Asterisk efficiently, you should have knowledge about how to write a dialplan and what are contexts, extensions, and priorities in relation to dialplans.
No user-friendly interface
A lot of commands are executed via the command line or shell. So, a lack of a GUI can severely impact daily operations if you are reliant on a GUI. You may argue that some GUI solutions (like Elastix and FreePBX) are available in the market, but most of your work will be done through the command line interface.
Wrapping Up
As you might have taken away from this article, Asterisk is a versatile platform that can be used to develop interactive VoIP applications. In sync with how much Asterisk manages to provide businesses with features to remain up-to-date with the advancement in the communication industry, Asterisk development has become the most preferred platform in modern VoIP PBX systems. Suppose you are a business or VoIP service provider looking for innovative VoIP solutions. In that case, Vindaloo Softtech can create a wide range of communication and collaboration solutions for businesses of all sizes.