The Future Of trixbox?

I think a certain amount o companies will move to Google but I don't think it is that dramatic. My clients use my systems not because of the system itself but for the support provided. My clients know if something is broken they can call or email and one of our techs will get back to them.

Have you ever tried getting support from Google? My company is a Google Apps reseller. I have times where I requested support and I didn't hear back from their techs for a week. The same goes for a lot a large VOIP providers. I had an issue with Ring Central where one of the phones at a client had poor call quality. Their "tech" wanted me to make changes to the firewall that would not have fixed the issue. When I said it was a waste of time and it would not change a thing, he said "If you know so much why are you calling for support?" and hung up. I could rant about the hours I have spent on the phone with Speakeasy VOIP support or maybe the hours I have spent on the phone with Packet8.

In end I don't think another big name VOIP provider is going to change a thing, at least for me. My company never has and never will be the cheapest VOIP provider, that has and never will be our goal. We focus on support and only take on clients that care about the support and service over price. If you focus on price and get the clients that main focus is price you will not have loyal clients.

Asterisk, sipXecs, and FreeSWITCH are all vital in my environment and I don't think I'd trust a hosted style system to do queries on internal databases with sensitive information in them much less store everyone's voicemail. I think cloud based services are all over-hyped. I'd even go so far as to say it's a bubble that will eventually deflate or burst. Trixbox, Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, elastix, sipXecs, etc. etc. etc. Aren't going anywhere any time soon. In fact, judging by sheer volume on the sipX mailing lists, they are growing significantly.

Open source VoIP is finally in it's prime because it's almost caught up with the big proprietary platforms in terms of features, support, reliability, and scalability. With a cloud service you generally have to settle for 3 or less of those qualities

While I think voicemail transcription is nice I don't think it's a necessity.

If we only had a crystal ball rather than guessing at it, it would save us all some typing. I tend to agree with joshpatten. Here are my guesses and opinions:

1) Cloud computing is over-hyped and the over-stated bubble with pop, though admittedly there are some limited situations where it might make sense.

2) In most cases, I wouldn't trust my company's PBX to be hosted by a 3rd party, unless it is a highly distributed environment anyway (ie: everyone works at home), and I could actually go and see the hosting environment. You'd be shocked at what some companies call data centers.

3) Customization, connectivity, and security to databases is a real issue that probably isn't going to be dealt with anytime soon in a hosted environment. Most installations I do are custom enough that a simple "phone system" wouldn't fit the needs. The customization to the organization's needs is the value of the service that I offer, otherwise they could call any schmo to plug a phone in.

4) Google's hosted apps have a few huge barriers: No support; In some cases takes them months to resolve widespread problems that they are aware of (like broken billing interface so you can't renew or log into your account); Their single-sign-on and "intuitive" interfaces seem like they haven't passed the beta testing phase of the useability testers and QA group yet. Ok, enough ranting about that...

5) Regardless of what makes sense, little will change the fact that some people simply want their computer systems sitting in their office - it helps them sleep better at night. Now that the voice system is a PC, it is just another computer sitting with all of the servers, rather than this "thing" that takes up an entire wall that nobody is allowed to go near.

6) I think google voice is much like Skype in the sense that for a year or two, that is all that everyone talked about no matter where you went (even outside the tech circles), and while they have still retained some market share, they haven't put all of the other providers out of business.

7) With most software as a service, it either does what you want it to, or it doesn't. Asterisk was developed based on the idea that you can make it do anything you want, and I see that as a big part of the attraction. See bullet 3 above.

I like my trixbox so far, it blocks bad callers,
connects to the SIP services I need,
records calls when needed, and I even
got google voice cobbled together, I wish
google voice had regular sip or iax service also.

PS. I am not double posting.