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September 12, 2005 (Computerworld) -- . . . as open-source private branch exchange software with integrated voice-over-IP capabilities gains adherents. "I believe they already know they're doomed," suggests Brian Capouch, chairman of the computer science department at Saint Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Ind.
Capouch argues that giant telecommunications providers and PBX manufacturing goliaths don't stand a chance against perky start-ups such as Huntsville, Ala.-based Digium Inc. and San Diego-based Four Loop Technologies LLC, which does business under the name Switchvox. Those vendors use Asterisk, an open-source technology that lets companies replace their PBX systems and use VoIP to transmit phone calls. Switchvox CEO Joshua Stephens says Asterisk lets you use a standard Linux server to connect to your network via a T1 line for traditional analog calls or to your Internet service provider to support chat via VoIP. Switchvox's system also handles voice mail like e-mail, meaning you can listen to it, forward it, store it and do anything to voice messages that you can do to e-mail, claims Stephens. Switchvox 2.0 ships at the end of this month and will add conference-room, intercom, call-parking and other new features. Pricing starts at $995.
Capouch says Asterisk and VoIP combined will do to the telecom market what Linux, Apache, MySQL and other open-source technologies have done to the data center: "radically change the landscape." Capouch shrugs off the argument that perceived problems with VoIP call quality may hinder adoption. "Cell phones have lowered people's quality expectations," he notes.

Jorg Janke, founder of ComPiere Inc.

Big ERP vendors are next in line ...
... for an open-source onslaught. Jorg Janke, founder of ComPiere Inc. in Portland, Ore., doesn't argue that SAP AG, Oracle Corp., Lawson Software Inc. and other ERP vendors are doomed by his company's eponymous open-source applications. But he does point to the 900,000 downloads of the software as a measure of its success and to the fact that it took Oracle a long time to be considered a serious player in the global ERP market. And he should know, since he was the first employee that Oracle hired in Germany to help the company compete against SAP. Janke claims that Compiere has 100% availability "not because it's fail-safe, but because it fails safely." He says that developers who try to make perfect software aren't living in the real world. By expecting glitches, Janke builds in persistent consistency checks so Compiere can always revert to the most recent consistent state should a problem occur. Compiere runs on top of an Oracle or Sybase Inc. database; by year's end, it will also work with DB2, SQL Server and the Derby open-source database. Naturally, the software is

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