Enterprise grade open source Voice over IP (VoIP) and Unified Communications (UC) Solutions

An enterprise-grade (or enterprise-class) application is one that is running a mission-critical piece of software. Such an application should have reliability and fault-tolerance features to handle any kind of failure while running. It can even be able to scale up and scale down the application resources depending upon the situation. The enterprise-grade applications should offer environment adaptability features for large size companies.

VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) is a protocol that allows you to get phone service delivered through your Internet connection instead of from your local phone company. Unified communication actually servers as a bridge between VoIP and all types of communications technologies available over the internet such as voice, email, SMS, video, fax, conferencing, etc.

What is the need for scalability in open source VoIP?

Asterisk, the leader in open-source VoIP, first released in 1999 as an open-source project years before the appearance of multi-core processors, virtualization, and cloud computing. Asterisk has a unified architecture that is built to support a single process (or multi-core processor). But it is not unable to run on a machine with multiple parallel processors. This architecture is fine for small and medium businesses but it does not scale to meet the needs of a large organization that want to provide VoIP service throughout the world. Asterisk was developed as a multi-purpose PBX specifically for voice communication before the rise of current-age unified communications. Although asterisk now has the incorporated all the features to become a powerful unified communications tool it still lacks the ability of large-scale deployment.

Digium, the company that owns Asterisk, is developing a new platform known as Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF), that will meet the requirements of large enterprises to provide wholesale VoIP and unified communication services such as call center, IVR, and voice broadcasting with built-in features like scalability and fault-tolerance. But the development of Asterisk SCF has been on pause since 2012.

VoIP and Unified Communications Solutions

Asterisk-based VoIP and unified communications software such as ICTBroadcast has the ability to for large-scale deployment. It supports virtualization which makes it an ideal technology for cloud deployments. With its added scalability and fault-tolerance feature, ICTBroadcast is attracting service providers as a low-cost solution because it is developed using fully open source technology. It is multi-tenant, virtual call center support, IVR, interactive voice broadcasting, multi-campaign, and white label solutions.