But they were bleeding money, and just sold $30M total last year. Lots of people use Asterisk (it's basically everywhere - whatever you call - dentist, doctor, plumber... - they have the default Asterisk music-on-hold), but not all of them put a coin in the box. :)
They're everywhere because they're already there, but doesn't mean new boxes are being installed.
Personally I wouldn't use it; I'd just write some quick code with Twilio (using Twilio functions or a companion app running on Heroku for the business logic) and let them handle it. Less maintenance overhead.
I'm not really old enough to have experienced Centrex, but for small businesses its promises makes sense from a business point of view. Less maintenance/support overhead is a huge plus.
sounds good. until you run conferencing services or whatever. Then the pricing is pretty simple: buying wholesale SIP and operating on your own is substantially cheaper.
irl maintenance is pretty straightforward. I do it as a side thing to my main job.
Somewhat off-topic, but what wholesale SIP provider would you recommend? Looking for something small-scale for now, pay as you go as opposed to $X,000/month.
The state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.
Seems like a huge hack. What we really need is some kind of etcd for telecoms, where you just configure it and they replicate and share state automatically.
It's not a hack. Think of Asterisk as if it was an http server + backend code. How do you scale?
You scale horizontally using proxies (kamailio dispatchers), (what you would call "reverse proxies in the http world), and use external storage / database / logic.
Asterisk is just another daemon. You could use etcd for it or Puppet or whatever to create config on the fly. On FreePBX you generally use MySQL/MariaDB.
Lots of ways. Usually externally, through a database. An Asterisk box processes and forwards calls - you can hook into a "master controller" that decides what is to be done.
And they also have a very decent line or hardware. Digium cards used to be the de-facto standard to build quickly a small PBX system, and I really appreciated their quality.