Starting with just three developers in 1999, Magnet had grown to a well respected technology solution provider with 50 people team by 2006. When we started planning for doubling our size in second half of the year, we wanted to make sure we put in infrastructure that can support our needs and scale well in the future.

The telephony solution - PBX - was one of the major infrastructure component. We wanted to have about ten incoming/outgoing lines and 80+ extensions. Our existing PBX system did not have the expansion slots that could handle this, so we had to start looking for a new system. Cost and flexibility were our biggest concerns. The existing system was rigid, difficult to configure (required following a specific sequence of numbers to be dialed for each setting!) and did not give any advanced features like voice mail and fine control over outgoing calls.

We started studying various EPBX systems available in market. A system with the capasity of around 10 lines and 80 extensions with basic features would cost us US$20000 or more. That wasn't the money we were willing to pay out!

Being in software, and having expertize in open-source solutions running over Linux, we started experimenting with Asterisk (www.asterisk.org). Asterisk is an open-source software based PBX system and telephony toolkit. It supported all the must have features and even gave in some nice-to-haves like interactive voice response, software phone support and ability to integrate with other software systems of the organization.

Hardware cost was much lower, excluding the phones, the PBX hardware would cost us only US$1500! Match that to the US$20000 of typical PBX systems! We decided to take an ISDN PRI line for telephony connectivity. This provided us featurs like 30 incoming / outgoing channels, single well remembered board number and 100 direct inward dialing numbers. Software phones eliminited the cost of expensive hardware IP phones and need of additional cables for phones. We decided to setup the entire system on our own.

It took us about a month to get everything working! We went through many technical difficulties, but were proud of the setup we created! Management was happy too!

Some of the customizations we implemented were:

• Intregration with organization wide authentication system
  
• Auto generation of extension numbers for new employees
  
• Customized IVR and greeting in local language
  
• A flexible dial plan with complete call control
  
• Voice mail
  
• Full call logging and reporting

After 6 months of the setup:

• We started receiving calls asking about our setup
  
• Many people wanted to visit our office and see how the system worked
  
• We deployed the technology for other organizations and call centers

Bottomline: With Asterisk based PBX system, not only we saved more than 65% costs, we also had a much more flexible and powerful system!