[Discuss] PBX Standards?

[tmetro-blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

Daniel C. wrote:
> Web servers are almost a commodity at this point.

Shared hosting absolutely is. Virtual private servers pretty much are
too. Cloud hosting is getting there.


> Why isn't there some similar standard for PBX's?  It can't be
> that hard to slap together an XML standard that defines your phone
> network, options, etc. and that all vendors agree on.

It's not a lack of standards that holds it back. Vendors could simply
coalesce around Asterisk and the Asterisk config files could be the
portable files. (You could trivially bundle them up with the prompts
into a zip file or some such for easy transport.)

The limiting factor in my opinion is that there is no market pressure to
commoditize the service. If you think about web hosting, what people
want to do with it dictates that it needs to follow some basic standards
in order to be useful and general purpose.

There are specialized platforms in web hosting where you get a
proprietary GUI for building your site - like Square, or Yahoo Stores -
but there are enough people that want some other web application that
there is a huge demand for a more generic offering.

In contrast, you can pair down the functionality of a PBX into something
that meets the needs of 80 to 90% of the customers that would consider a
cloud hosted PBX. The result is that the more knowledgeable customers
who see value in portability, and recognize the financial benefits to
commodity competition, don't number enough to attract vendors.


> Why hasn't anyone put together a web app that works in tandem with a
> phone tree, allowing the caller to view the options on screen while
> simultaneously hearing them read over the phone?

Create one. Twilio (http://www.twilio.com/), and its competitors,
provide telephony web services where you can create a telephony
application as easily as you can create a web app.

(This is a kind of commoditization happening in the cloud telecom space.
But until the industry standardizes their APIs, it won't really be a
commodity.)


> "audiolizing" (Which is probably why we have a word for thinking
> about things with our visual centers, while I had to make up a word
> for the auditory equivalent.)

(See the recent network monitoring thread ("Visualizing LAN traffic").
Apparently the word is "auralizing." At least according to the author of
the project mentioned.)

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/