[rahimnathwani]

If you want something you understand and can control, you could build your own phone system with Asterisk. Inbound calls could come via VoIP (if you can find an upstream phone company you trust) or PSTN (if you're willing to invest in having the necessary ISDN/phone line installed, and in the hardware to connect to those).

If you're doing it for the first time, you might be best served with specialised Linux distribution (e.g. Elastix[0] or PIAF[1]).

The cool thing about this type of setup is that you can do pretty much what you want (e.g. triggering scripts when calls come in, setting up fancy call routing rules, ...). The not-so-cool thing is that there's a learning curve and, if you doing anything fancy, then someone will need to make sure those things are working solidly. Also, as with any other server, you need to arrange for backups and disaster recovery.

[0] http://elastix.org/ [1] http://nerdvittles.dreamhosters.com/pbxinaflash/

[fenollp]

> If you want something you understand and can control, you could build your own phone system with Asterisk. Inbound calls could come via VoIP (if you can find an upstream phone company you trust) or PSTN (if you're willing to invest in having the necessary ISDN/phone line installed, and in the hardware to connect to those).

If you want to install it yourself / or not, have support, use a fully open source solution: go look at 2600Hz [0] (disclaimer: I'm a backend engineer there)

[0] http://2600hz.com/

[rahimnathwani]

I found your company's home page hard to understand, and to navigate. Also, the links at the bottom of the page are really low contrast (at least on my computer, running Debian 8).

But, I finally found links to the open source software you mentioned:

http://2600hz.org/bluebox_download.html

Your packaging approach seems similar to the Elastix folks. An ISO that does an unattended install of CentOS, with a PBX and a GUI. Except that you're using FreeSWITCH instead of Asterisk, and Blue.box (is this your own thing?) instead of whichever GUI they've skinned/modified.

EDIT: Hmm. This doesn't seem promising. The ISO download link on that page is broken (404) and the linked GitHub repo was last updated in June 2013. Going to http://repo.2600hz.com/Bluebox/ shows an ISO file from 18 months ago. I'd be more confident with a recent release of Elastix or PIAF.

[avatardog]

I work there, just saw this.

Bluebox was an old project to provide a GUI for freeswitch. Kazoo has been the focus for the past 4 years, bluebox is now a community project if I recall correctly.

Kazoo is a multi-tenant hosted pbx and trunking solution. It is an erlang cluster which uses amqp as a messaging bus and erlang apps which provide centralized call control and features across multiple freeswitch (media server) and kamailio servers (sip proxy). A shared cluster wide database is provided by bigcouch.

The difference between this and a cluster of asterisks (or broadcloud, kandy etc) is that you as a user or account, are not tied to a single server, any phone on your cluster can utilize the resources of the entire cluster as the erlang apps and AMQP bus provide a glue joining all servers in the cluster into a single "switch". Most of the "cloud" telephony out there is not distributed, it is mostly a lot of boxes with at best HA fail-over to another box that sits in as a warm standby with a unified provisioning layer to hide this from the users.

You can checkout kazoo at github http://github.com/2600hz/kazoo

There is a kazoo all in one ISO, which lets you run all the services in a cluster via a single server. You can get it at http://repo.2600hz.com/ISOs version 2 has the new GUI monster-UI.

Edit: phone does not a good comment make, spelling broken links ...

[rahimnathwani]

Thanks for taking the time to provide this background and level of detail. I will try out the Kazoo ISO some time.