In this article I will discuss a steadily growing phenomenon called open source telephony. Although open source might be a misnomer and be widely debated, for the sake of argument, let's agree on the use of the term. Open Source telephony has come a long way since starting as a collaborative project among tech enthusiasts. Today it is used as the means of communication by an increasing number of businesses. Frost & Sullivan estimates that there are over 3300 businesses in Europe that have deployed commercial telephony products that use some kind of open source code.

The market is constantly being tapped by new players. Early entrants include ADDIX (Germany), Digium, ESCAUX (Benelux), and Novacom who have generated quite a volume of business in the early years. New entrants in the market include players of different backgrounds such as:
• Community based vendors such as Fonality and PingTel
• Channel partners of major PBX or IT/software vendors. There is a greater attraction among channel that deal with Linux.
• Major PBX vendors such as 3Com, Aastra. It is known that Avaya and Nortel are building skills in this area as well.
• Hardware vendors such as Dell, IBM and Sun
• Carriers such as British Telecom

The level of interest can be gauged by the number of free downloads of the base software. In 2007 alone, approximately 800,000 copies of Asterisk and TrixBox software were downloaded in Europe. Interestingly, overall in Europe an estimated 200,000 are still alive and are known to send heartbeat signals back to the community.

Our market research indicates that deployments have been scattered in the sub 500 user segment. The largest deployment that we studied was of 850 users by Novacom, which spans several countries in Europe and in the far East. The complexity that some of these vendors deal with span from simple call routing to support sophisticated call centre application. ADDIX, for instance, has been successful in deploying a number of call centre solutions in Germany.

Although, the total installed base of open source based systems in Europe is less than one per cent of the market, optimistic growth forecasts (probability 0.4) 4.5 per cent of the installed base by 2013.

A number of changes in the market dynamics favour the growth in momentum of open source telephony. The break-down of vertically-integrated industry structure is inline with the value proposition of open source. The ability to develop call processing software using open-source code running on off-the-shelf hardware and OS is expected to alter the procurement mechanisms in a number of organisations.

Email: shomik.banerjee@frost.com
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