Thanks for mentioning us in your blog.  I wanted to clear a few
things up for you.

You are very much welcome. I’ve known you for a few years now and I’ve been experimenting with FreeSWITCH, so I do admire your work and your abilities.

1) it’s FreeSWITCH not FreeSwitch.

Ok, I stand corrected

2) We indeed have a business track
http://www.freeswitchsolutions.com

Hmmm… I didn’t know that – well, I guess the fact that it is not on the FreeSWITCH website, at least not in a clear and direct location, made it invisible to me. However, the freeswitchsolutions.com website doesn’t really provide any clear business case nor a business track, thus, my comment regarding the lack of one still stands.

3) I disagree that FreeSWITCH isn’t a valid choice for most
carriers based on the several customers we have who are indeed
carriers including bandwidth.com iCall Teliax to name a few.
Most of these carriers are  also sponsors of the ClueCon
conference in Chicago this summer http://www.cluecon.com

Ok, I guess I need to rephrase what I wrote. My company works with some well established (who am I kidding, these are Tier-1) carriers around the world. While Asterisk is already considered a valid tool in the toolbox, FreeSWITCH is still considered to be a “thing to be looked at”, however, “not yet considered”. Carriers such as iCall and Teliax are good examples of carriers working in the Tier-2, Tier-3 environment, thus, they are more open to new and experimental solutions (such as FreeSWITCH, YATE, Asterisk-SVN, OpenSBC, etc).

It seems as though you are turned off by the fact that YATE was
trying to hard to promote itself but then you commented that we
don’t try hard enough to do the same. One would expect from your
comments about YATE that you would like the fact that we tend
not to blow our own horn. We are an Open Source project, take it
or leave it, Like you said, “right tool for the job” use one, use
all. If you make up your mind to use FreeSWITCH and you want to
get commercial support we provide it but we as a policy do not
try to “sell” FreeSWITCH to anyone. But we do offer a
triple-your-money-back Guarantee on the software itself.

I guess I need to rephrase again (damn my Hebrew speaking manner). The way YATE was trying to promote itself was what turned me off, not the fact that it is. Going about and dissing other projects or other people’s work is just rude. One thing that I noticed that the YATE team was simply walking about, whenever someone would talk about a large scale Asterisk project or other project that they’ve done, automatically the YATE team would immediate cut in saying: “Ah, that is no good, you should use YATE – it is much better than Asterisk” (not directly quoted). Now, I think that while FreeSWITCH’s exposure in the US is really good, it is fairly minimal in EMEA. A conference like Amoocon is the perfect place in Europe to show off FreeSWITCH and the fact that there was literraly no presence – well, it sucked, as I really hoped to learn some things about FreeSWITCH. Just to give you an example, till Amoocon I had my reserves about Adhearsion, however, after Amoocon I found it to be a highly useful tool for my work – and I’ve strated working on getting to know it better. The fact that FreeSWITCH isn’t doing the “push-by-nature” promotion is great, however, I would like to see a more EMEA presence.

While Asterisk is my personal passion, and I won’t go about debating the various pros and cons of using it, I would like to talk about the other 2 contenders. So let’s begin:

YATE – Yet Another Telephony Engine

YATE was spun by of the Asterisk community developers, a woman called Diana from Romania. Diana had established an entire company, called Null Team (*0) – currently the main supporter and developer of YATE. During the conference, I got to talk to Diana briefly (after knowing her about 7 years and always talking on the IRC). While Diana preaches for the adoptation of YATE, she keeps on playing the card of: “YATE can do everything”. Now, while that approach may work for Diana and her customers and supporters, that concept doesn’t work for my company. I strongly believe that utilizing and all encompasing tool to do telephony is wrong. As I won’t use Asterisk to do SIP registrations, I don’t want to do that with YATE – I prefect OpenSER or an SBC in B2BUA mode. Carriers, the prospective customers of Asterisk, YATE, FreeSwitch, WhatEverSwitch, will never use an all encompasing tool. If they use YATE as a single software for their service, they’re now locking themselves to a solution that can’t be replaced in the future – VERY BAD PRACTICE.

Another thing that Open Source promoters need is a certain finesse, the understanding that preaching in favour of a project doens’t mean dissing the other projects. The first Diana did when meeting me, was to do her best to convince me that Asterisk isn’t a good product and that I should use YATE. If there is one thing I hate is sales people, sell me what I want and need, not what you think I need. Diana truely believes that all non-YATE users are wrong, thus her preaching are automatically negative – bad move. Acknowledging other peoples work and accomplishments will go along way when promoting open source products.

FreeSwitch

FreeSwitch was spun out, following a fairly loud argument in the Asterisk community between Anthony Minessale and the Asterisk Core team. Anthony believes that the way the Asterisk development road map is going is wrong, thus, he decided to branch off and build his own telephony engine. FreeSwitch, in general, is a combination of a highly modular Soft Switching environment, while keeping in mind that initially people will want to use it as a PBX system.

While FreeSwitch appears to be highly scalable and doesn’t suffer much of the things that Asterisk regards as issues, its adoptation is still problematic. With a fairly lively development community and no real sense of business track, it isn’t a valid choice for most telco and carrier based customers. However, people currently in the Open Source telephony arena are speculating that FreeSwitch is a valid contender, thus, are investing time in learning it and understanding its pros and cons.

I’m somewhat disappointed that non of the FreeSwitch team had attended Amoocon. It was obvious that it has a following. Out of about 35 talks, only 3 or 4 were dedicated to FreeSwitch. In my book, the FreeSwitch team is failing promoting their product. Their software has a good name within the community and the following is growing, however, without proper outbound communications from their team into the community, via events outside of the US – it’s evolution in Europe will remain dorment.

Which one is for you?

That is a very good question – and the answer is: just check it out and learn. Each product has its own pros, cons, road-map (or lack of one) and a following. Read and learn the various aspects of each, then decide. In your analisys, make sure you take the following aspects into account:

• Project maturity
• Project road-map
• Project support and community
• Project financials (if any)
• Project commercial viability

If you are happy with your answers to the following, regarding a specific project – then take that road and start walking the path – good luck and god’s speed.

You’re probably wondering to yourself: “That’s odd, GreenfieldTech is an Asterisk/Open Source oriented – what does SEO/SEM has to do with Asterisk and Open Source?” – the answer is simple, EVERYTHING!

We’ve recently realized that most of GreenfieldTech’s customers have a unique form of web presence, however, as most of these are focused on their technology and less on marketing, they reach a point in their life cycle, where they are required to start marketing their services or products. At that point, as a means to yield fast results, they would introduce a high level of paid advertisements, a Media blitz attack or any other tactic, yielding short term results and long term disasters. As a means to provide a better service, we’ve decided to introduce SEO/SEM services to GreenfieldTech, thus, creating a mixture of SEO/SEM that truly understands our customers, their niche markets, their in-house and outsourced requirements – thus, providing a truly unique SEO/SEM service – one that understands their technology and service, not only the inner workings of SEO/SEM methodologies.

After evaluating multiple candidates and methodologies, we’ve decided to have Barak join our team. Barak had been working in New York for one of the leading WiMax resellers, as an Internet Marketing Consultant – focused on providing SEO/SEM marketing optimizations and SEO/SEM methodology implementation.Over the course of the next few months, Barak will be working closely with GreenfieldTech’s customers, optimizing their SEO/SEM marketing strategies and operations – we’ll update on these actions later, as time allows us and our customer allow us to release this information. Additional information will be available on the GreenfieldTech website.