Switchvox

Building a cohesive business phone system based on Asterisk

Overview

Switchvox was originally founded as a software architecture and engineering firm. During its journey as a small business, the company discovered that the technologies available for business phone systems were outrageously expensive and required a small army to set up and maintain.

The company is now a leading provider of PBX and VoIP phone systems for small-to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Switchvox enables these companies to take advantage of the latest advances in economical, feature rich, and easy-to- use telephony solutions. The company's flagship product enables SMBs to easily and affordably create and manage their phone system, using traditional analog lines, as well as VoIP services.

Challenge

Switchvox was at a crossroads in determining the direction of the company. Switchvox realized a market need for a cost-effective, quality business phone system and made the decision to build a product around this need.

Solution

Switchvox management was already aware of the benefits of open source. They had used open source technology in past projects including the building of Internet kiosks. The Switchvox team chose Asterisk because of their familiarity with the technology and its position as the main operating PBX in the market. They found that other PBX operating systems were either not robust enough or did not have the maturity with analog. The company was also interested in working with Digium because they not only had the capability to provide integration with analog, but the hardware needed to run the system.

The company then began researching how to build a phone system based on Asterisk. The goal was to build one cohesive phone system with Asterisk as the underlying foundation.

Implementation

Switchvox began to build its product by asking people what they wanted in a phone system and how they expected it to work. The company learned that people wanted to establish their own calling routing rules, voicemail and email, create new users reliably form a web interface. Switchvox also discovered that interactive voice response (IVR) complete with a graphical display was important to a large portion of respondents.

Switchvox was able to figure out Asterisk in just a few weeks. The company implemented Digium's PCI telephony interface cards for termination to the public network and installed these in conjunction with the Asterisk toolkit. With careful feedback along the way, the company designed a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that would take away the pain of implementing a telephone system.

Results

In February 2005, Switchvox launched its flagship product at the Linux Desktop Summit in San Diego. Now through Switchvox's PBX solution, SMBs can create and manage their phone system, using VoIP services, as well as established analog lines. The company's product is sold as a turnkey solution that includes the server hardware and pre-installed Switchvox software.

Since the company's product was built using Asterisk, they have continuous access to freely available software. They were able to build a PBX solution that would have otherwise required a large investment to create. They now can offer SMBs a fully functional phone system that can be easily self maintained for a small fraction of the cost of the proprietary leaders.

Switchvox stressed the importance of having core software and hardware from the same vendor. The company found that it simplified the development process, and in general, saves time since they can contact one company who understands both sides. Used in combination with Digium's PCI telephony cards, Asterisk offers a strategic, cost-effective approach to voice and data transport. Because Switchvox is built on open source software, it can be used worldwide without many of the compatibility issues associated with other PBX systems.