Mahmood,

Alas, the business case for open-source telephony solutions is not self-evident.

Of course, being invested in open-source, we'd all like to think so. But this is a reflection of our own competencies.

I have seen open-source telephony succeed massively, and deliver improved stability, security, efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and I have also seen--usually through acquisitions--platforms based on free/open-source ingredients fail miserably. Acquisitions of smaller companies for their perceived technical capital provide an important lens on this difference, because the operational and engineering priors of a FOSS-based smaller company may not consumable to the larger acquirer whose institutional knowledge is based on traditional, big-brand, proprietary telephony systems.

So, it really depends on the company's "corporate DNA":

1) Appropriate skill set of the engineers who work there now;

2) The ability to hire, recruit and retain such engineers, with a specific view to company culture and technology choices;

3) Management understanding of open-source, and the specific idiosyncrasies of open-source projects and ecosystems, and which ones work best;

4) Management understanding of the capital and operational expense structure of open-source infrastructure, and how this is weighted differently than for closed proprietary systems. For example, open-source systems, by virtue of being more hand-build and maintained entirely or substantially internally, suffer from more entropy, or "bit rot", and so require an ongoing OPEX commitment. With a proprietary platform, you pay the vendor for theirs.

In short, an open-source platform requires an engineering organisation that is largely self-reliant, and a business that has the ability and the motive to assume more of the "care and feeding" of its infrastructure. That requires having the right mix of people, culture, assumptions and budget.

Not every company is a good fit for this. If prior experience, business processes and so on are tailored to certain proprietary platforms, or if the company has a largely sales-driven, not especially engineering-heavy constitution, for example, open-source telephony may be a poor fit.

-- Alex

> On Apr 14, 2024, at 7:59 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via sr-users <sr-users@lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> I would like to hear some stories about moving away from proprietary telephony services whether on premises or on cloud to FOSS solutions and how much stable, secure, efficient and cost effective it was.
>
> I would like to present to my managers such cases to convince them to move away from proprietary telephony as it is just huge amount of cost and technical debt.
>
> Thanks everyone and really appreciate any insights, also I am sorry if this is not the place to ask for such!
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--
Alex Balashov
Principal Consultant
Evariste Systems LLC
Web: https://evaristesys.com
Tel: +1-706-510-6800

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