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!
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! __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
Thank you for the insights Alex!
Now that I give it more attention, the need for employees with the required skillset would be challenging to find. And wouldn't like the company to suffer incase skilled personals leave.
________________________________ From: Alex Balashov via sr-users sr-users@lists.kamailio.org Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2024 7:18 PM To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List sr-users@lists.kamailio.org Cc: Alex Balashov abalashov@evaristesys.com Subject: [SR-Users] Re: Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other FOSS SIP software
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! __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
-- Alex Balashov Principal Consultant Evariste Systems LLC Web: https://evaristesys.com Tel: +1-706-510-6800
__________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:19 PM, Mahmood Alkhalil mahmood.alkhalil@outlook.com wrote:
Thank you for the insights Alex!
Now that I give it more attention, the need for employees with the required skillset would be challenging to find. And wouldn't like the company to suffer incase skilled personals leave.
It's not impossible, especially now that more tech jobs than ever seem to be remote, or substantially remote.
However, highly skilled open-source practitioners in esoteric areas (like IP telephony) are in high demand, and usually have strong leverage to pick their employers, if not necessarily set their pay. They will often look for companies with strong "open-source" DNA/mojo/chi/whatever word you want to use, whose technology stack consists of fashionable and interesting languages, frameworks, and tools, and have other smart, like-minded people working there to create a dynamic, experimentally oriented energy.
This does not describe many established businesses, regardless of whether the offering of the business is related to IT. Medium to large organisations, in particular, tend to extract labour from consistent (if unextraordinary) output of everyday do-gooders, and not the more stochastic and volatile heroics of open-source superstars. Thus, in a variety of senses, it's easier to hire people "off the street" to do the things involved in the provisioning and support of a Broadsoft than it is to hire people who can deftly manoeuvre Kamailio or FreeSWITCH.
This doesn't mean you shouldn't aim for that. That all depends. I think Jawaid, Fred and I are both just quick to point out the potential downsides, since we all, in one dimension or another, make a living in this stuff.
-- Alex
On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:25 PM, Alex Balashov abalashov@evaristesys.com wrote:
Medium to large organisations, in particular, tend to extract labour from consistent (if unextraordinary) output of everyday do-gooders, and not the more stochastic and volatile heroics of open-source superstars.
Sorry, I meant to say "extract value" here, not "extract labour".
But the larger point is that any successful formula heavily reliant on open-source is going to be a lot more dependent on culture, and on the strengths of individual people and their specific skills, than a formula reliant on a third-party vendor, all other things being equal.
-- Alex
I think it’s misguided to approach FOSS as a cost savings move. Of course this is an obvious benefit with the main easily detected benefit being the lack of any cost for the software itself and no licensing / recurring license fees.
-- Fred Posner Sent from mobile Phone: +1 (352) 664-3733 qxork.com
On Apr 14, 2024, at 8:22 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! __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
The cost saving that will be the main reason before licenses is the amount of hardware resources currently used, the system we are using in total is using around 128 GB of RAM, 64 cores of CPU, and total of 4TB of storage; That is for just basic telephony for around 400 phones with call recording for some with a mostly non working HA and not to mention the DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost an entire rack.
If such can be reduced for two kamailio nodes and a couple freeswitch nodes for any IVR / conferencing / voicemail that would at least lower the resources to the half of what being used if not more, keeping in mind that Calls per second count and concurrent calls count is really low.
To put this into perspective, to integrate the telephony system with MS Teams it will cost 70,000$ USD just for installation and basic configuration just to ring a deskphone when someone calls you on Teams.. ________________________________ From: Fred Posner fred@pgpx.io Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2024 6:54:49 PM To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List sr-users@lists.kamailio.org Cc: Mahmood Alkhalil mahmood.alkhalil@outlook.com Subject: Re: [SR-Users] Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other FOSS SIP software
I think it’s misguided to approach FOSS as a cost savings move. Of course this is an obvious benefit with the main easily detected benefit being the lack of any cost for the software itself and no licensing / recurring license fees.
-- Fred Posner Sent from mobile Phone: +1 (352) 664-3733 qxork.com
On Apr 14, 2024, at 8:22 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! __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
Hello,
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:09 AM, Mahmood Alkhalil via sr-users sr-users@lists.kamailio.org wrote:
The cost saving that will be the main reason before licenses is the amount of hardware resources currently used, the system we are using in total is using around 128 GB of RAM, 64 cores of CPU, and total of 4TB of storage; That is for just basic telephony for around 400 phones with call recording for some with a mostly non working HA and not to mention the DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost an entire rack.
While this sounds like a riotously inefficient use of hardware per unit of telephony realised, such inefficiency is not inherent to proprietary systems, nor are superior unit economics inherent to open-source.
What you're using sounds like it's just bad, assuming that hardware is truly necessary and isn't just massively overprovisioned. If you're going to make the argument that you should switch to something less OPEX-intensive, I don't know that I would base it on the mere fact that the proposed alternative is open-source.
To put this into perspective, to integrate the telephony system with MS Teams it will cost 70,000$ USD just for installation and basic configuration just to ring a deskphone when someone calls you on Teams..
Maybe, but--and this is a mere hypothetical, I have no way of knowing--the cost in fully burdened engineer compensation to implement all those things yourself might be quite a lot more than $70K.
-- Alex
Mahmood, are you paying for that resource in something like AWS? That would be big $$$!
On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 11:38 AM Mahmood Alkhalil via sr-users < sr-users@lists.kamailio.org> wrote:
The cost saving that will be the main reason before licenses is the amount of hardware resources currently used, the system we are using in total is using around 128 GB of RAM, 64 cores of CPU, and total of 4TB of storage; That is for just basic telephony for around 400 phones with call recording for some with a mostly non working HA and not to mention the DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost an entire rack.
If such can be reduced for two kamailio nodes and a couple freeswitch nodes for any IVR / conferencing / voicemail that would at least lower the resources to the half of what being used if not more, keeping in mind that Calls per second count and concurrent calls count is really low.
To put this into perspective, to integrate the telephony system with MS Teams it will cost 70,000$ USD just for installation and basic configuration just to ring a deskphone when someone calls you on Teams..
*From:* Fred Posner fred@pgpx.io *Sent:* Sunday, April 14, 2024 6:54:49 PM *To:* Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List sr-users@lists.kamailio.org *Cc:* Mahmood Alkhalil mahmood.alkhalil@outlook.com *Subject:* Re: [SR-Users] Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other FOSS SIP software
I think it’s misguided to approach FOSS as a cost savings move. Of course this is an obvious benefit with the main easily detected benefit being the lack of any cost for the software itself and no licensing / recurring license fees.
-- Fred Posner Sent from mobile Phone: +1 (352) 664-3733 qxork.com
On Apr 14, 2024, at 8:22 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!
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to
the sender!
Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:40 AM, Jawaid Bazyar via sr-users sr-users@lists.kamailio.org wrote:
Mahmood, are you paying for that resource in something like AWS? That would be big $$$!
Given that he said:
"... DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost an entire rack"
I doubt it.
Moreover, the AWS cost of an instance that large, as you allude, untenable.
-- Alex
You are right Alex, it is all on premise!
We were offered to move it to cloud, and yes they asked for a lot… ________________________________ From: Alex Balashov via sr-users sr-users@lists.kamailio.org Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2024 7:58:35 PM To: Kamailio (SER) - Users Mailing List sr-users@lists.kamailio.org Cc: Alex Balashov abalashov@evaristesys.com Subject: [SR-Users] Re: Real life examples of cost saving from using Kamailio and other FOSS SIP software
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:40 AM, Jawaid Bazyar via sr-users sr-users@lists.kamailio.org wrote:
Mahmood, are you paying for that resource in something like AWS? That would be big $$$!
Given that he said:
"... DSP devices for PRI lines and media resources for phones which is using almost an entire rack"
I doubt it.
Moreover, the AWS cost of an instance that large, as you allude, untenable.
-- Alex
-- Alex Balashov Principal Consultant Evariste Systems LLC Web: https://evaristesys.com Tel: +1-706-510-6800
__________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
On Apr 14, 2024, at 12:26 PM, Mahmood Alkhalil mahmood.alkhalil@outlook.com wrote:
You are right Alex, it is all on premise!
We were offered to move it to cloud, and yes they asked for a lot…
The economics of public cloud providers depend on oversubscribing physical hardware with lots of small, and mostly idle instances.
Massive instances break the whole mode, by reserving most or all of the physical hardware node to themselves. They hate those, and will price them punitively to discourage it.
-- Alex
Hi Mahmood,
I think FOSS often trades licensing/purchase costs for operational costs.
Sure, the software is "free" but because such software is rarely an exact fit for your use case off the shelf, you have to spend time (money) to: customize for your operation integrate into other operational systems - billing, provisioning, support, etc. maintaining that expertise over time - either in-house or contracted out, will cost you $
Fred and Alex have pointed out some additional things on this.
But I think arguments can still be made for FOSS in these areas: You can control the software, customize it, and are not reliant on a 3rd party software vendor to keep the software current. With traditional softswitch vendors like MetaSwitch, Broadsoft, Squire all putting these products on the back-burner and not investing in any more development of them, that could be a big organizational benefit.
The FOSS options are also, at this point in time, more likely to get future feature development. E.g. Asterisk, FreeSwitch, Kamailio all support WebRTC and rich media - and the legacy alternatives do not.
They all help you build highly fault tolerant systems with any number of architectures to suit your needs.
They can all be made to scale from thousands, to millions of subscribers, and the legacy alternatives do not.
I would say, IF there is an off-the-shelf, commercially supported system that suits your needs now and into the future, and has a cost model that meets your business needs, and supports your scale, you are almost always better off going with that.
But if the cost model is detached from your needs (nickel and dimed to death on 'feature licenses'), or, they don't support features you need, or, you don't think they are going to be further developed or supported into the future, or they won't scale the way you need, then, open source gives you the ability to build your own without having to reinvent all the wheels.
On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 8:52 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! __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
Excellent analysis, Jawaid.
I would add only that, in my opinion, a lot of the argument for open-source related to control over one's destiny lies in APIs, connectors and integration paths.
There are some value-added telephony services which rely heavily on these, so there is a lot of pressure on that kind of flexibility, because it's a revenue driver.
On the other hand, for a lot of more vanilla business PBX and POTS replacement services, these things are relatively unimportant, apart from the obvious need to import/export some data from billing, provisioning and other backoffice systems. In those cases, the scope of relatively conventional APIs from established proprietary platforms is likely to be sufficient, and the case for open-source does not turn much on this question.
-- Alex
On Apr 14, 2024, at 11:29 AM, Jawaid Bazyar via sr-users sr-users@lists.kamailio.org wrote:
Hi Mahmood,
I think FOSS often trades licensing/purchase costs for operational costs.
Sure, the software is "free" but because such software is rarely an exact fit for your use case off the shelf, you have to spend time (money) to: customize for your operation integrate into other operational systems - billing, provisioning, support, etc. maintaining that expertise over time - either in-house or contracted out, will cost you $
Fred and Alex have pointed out some additional things on this.
But I think arguments can still be made for FOSS in these areas: You can control the software, customize it, and are not reliant on a 3rd party software vendor to keep the software current. With traditional softswitch vendors like MetaSwitch, Broadsoft, Squire all putting these products on the back-burner and not investing in any more development of them, that could be a big organizational benefit.
The FOSS options are also, at this point in time, more likely to get future feature development. E.g. Asterisk, FreeSwitch, Kamailio all support WebRTC and rich media - and the legacy alternatives do not.
They all help you build highly fault tolerant systems with any number of architectures to suit your needs.
They can all be made to scale from thousands, to millions of subscribers, and the legacy alternatives do not.
I would say, IF there is an off-the-shelf, commercially supported system that suits your needs now and into the future, and has a cost model that meets your business needs, and supports your scale, you are almost always better off going with that.
But if the cost model is detached from your needs (nickel and dimed to death on 'feature licenses'), or, they don't support features you need, or, you don't think they are going to be further developed or supported into the future, or they won't scale the way you need, then, open source gives you the ability to build your own without having to reinvent all the wheels.
On Sun, Apr 14, 2024 at 8:52 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! __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe: __________________________________________________________ Kamailio - Users Mailing List - Non Commercial Discussions To unsubscribe send an email to sr-users-leave@lists.kamailio.org Important: keep the mailing list in the recipients, do not reply only to the sender! Edit mailing list options or unsubscribe:
-
Alex Balashov -
Fred Posner -
Jawaid Bazyar -
Mahmood Alkhalil