Opensource VS proprietary

[techster]

Hi Guys

Trying to put up a center for a friend in India. He is not from call center industry and had been given few opinions (skewed and genuine both):

1. Hardware dialer are far better than software dialers..
2. Commercial dialers like avaya, concerto are better than open source.
3. Bandwidth requirement in commercial dialers and hw dialers are far too low.

I could not really answer these up to his standards but I am sure experts here would help me out with it; I really do not want him to burn his money on non essentials and later repent.

[Michael_N]

He dont want you to use vicidial when setting up a callcenter?

Has he got a qoute on a proparitary callcenter ?

How does he define better?

Bandwith? well both are using the same codecs and that industrialstandard.

When showing opensource to a sceptic it also very important to know what you are doing, since its easy to mess things up.

[techster]

By better he thinks stable, continuity and performance.

He Isn't from industry so all I want is to make him aware about stuff. He had been on linux since few years but not explorative one.

Telling him what hardware and software dialers are, moving to vici is all I'm interested in telling.

[mflorell]

Well, even hardware dialers have software that governs how they operate. Do they mean T1/E1?

As for the stability, I could challenge that from several clients that had constantly crashing proprietary system before switching to ViciDial.

Another thing to consider is end-of-life, with ViciDial it will never go end of life, the same cannot be said of any proprietary solution.

You also have the ability with open source to truly manage and customize the system yourself without being beholden to the manufacturer forever.

Another consideration is the cost of implementation. ViciDial is free, no seat license costs and no forced maintenance costs.

[techster]

YAY!!! mFlorell said it all... here it goes out to this friend...

BTW, for hardware dialers was told that they require special cards on each pc then for E1 line you need a card and then hold lot of licenses are a required.

Any light on that part?

I will take it all out in front of his team and lets see our vicidial in one production center... a decently done 100 seater is what I am talking about. They are considering 2X2mbps line, 1:1 for calling.

[mflorell]

If that's what they mean by hardware dialer, then yes ViciDial can be one too, with Sangoma T1/E1 cards and/or Digium/Howler G729 transcoding cards.

[techster]

You mentioned "if that's what they mean"...

I might be misinformed, can you throw some light on what exactly is a hardware dialer. Don't want to sound stupid in front of his team

Also, should they opt for suse based or ubuntu based dialer? I am getting the feeling that I will convince them to be part of such a nice community.

[mflorell]

I really don't think there is any advantage of either hardware or software dialers. It's not even really a consideration at this point.

[techster]

But generally speaking, could you throw some lights on this "hardware dialer"?

I am very curious to know this because I always thought that ACD is a feature of a software based on asterisk or similar. Hardware might be for noise cancellation, transcoding, analog to digital converters... FXS/FXO card/audio code..correct me if I am wrong.


Thanks for so much of the information. I am sure this will at least help me understand what a hardware dialer is..

[mflorell]

Yes, hardware dialer would be what you listed. All of the proprietary dialer companies now are also software-based, so it's not really an issue.

[techster]

Just a real quick one..

if I add those to vicidial, what will happen?

Lets say, FXO/Audio codes are attached; transcoder is bought; zaptel timer is bought.. the reason why I asked this is, if required I can suggest his team to buy these hardware.

Then the major question always is about the AMD and FAX tone detection.. any heads up there?

I am excited to learn these things about vici.

[mflorell]

Yes, you can add all of those to ViciDial:

- FXO/FXS
- T1/E1
- codec translation cards
- call progress detection SIP gateway(AMD, Fax, pre-Answer, etc...)