Open Source – What really drives it? is the desire to change and create something new? is it a firm belief in the idea that knowledge wants to be free and that software should roam the world? or when you boil down – is it just plain Ego?

I’ve been an Open Source advocate and evangelist for the better part of the last 20 years. I’ve started my days with Slackware Linux, moved to RedHat, then to Mandrake, then over to CentOS – which is now my choice of OS for the desktop and server. During these 20 years, I’ve seen various project come and go, companies rise and fall, technologies adopted and abandoned. A recent post on facebook from Dovid Bender got me thinking about this issue again:

Now, let’s put aside the grand discussion on the way the OpenSIPS project came about, their domain hijacking tactics, their overall confusion in the initial stages in regards to the difference between OpenSIP and OpenSER/Kamailio – let’s just put these apart for a second. Honestly, I can’t really tell the two apart, they use the same general configuration syntax and in most cases (over 95%), you can use the same configuration on both and it would work exactly the same. So, what does it boils down to? it boils down to Ego. Do I want to be considered traditional and stable and work with Kamailio, or would I like to be perceived as cutting-edge and work with OpenSIPS (although that isn’t true at all).

The same issue can be attributed to the ever growing battle between Asterisk and FreeSWITCH. Now, each one was built for a totally different class of operation (although, Asterisk 12 does introduce new functionality that makes it shine much harder than FreeSWITCH). People repeat the old “You’re melting our switches” FreeSWITCH urban myth, but again, I still hadn’t seen one installation that truly did everything with FreeSWITCH and is truly focused on using FreeSWITCH to leverage something else. So, if FreeSWITCH is only used as a media/application server, then I see no difference between it and Asterisk in that regard. More than that, if the added value of using FreeSWITCH is just a mere 5-10% increase in performance, it just isn’t worth my time to do so. Now, I’ve used FreeSWITCH in the past, don’t get me wrong – it’s a wonderful tool in that respect, and for Class-4 switching it is a massive tool. But when it comes to Class-5 and high-level services, sorry to say, Asterisk will always be my choice – not because it is better, not because it’s support and community is far more experienced, not because it out-performs FreeSWITCH – it will always be due to one simple reason – it is the one I know will require the less amount of ongoing support and maintenance and will bring me to my target much faster than FreeSWITCH.

A few weeks ago, I put the following status on facebook:

Now, the two have direct correlation – When a CTO/VP R&D isn’t a telecom’s guy – and he takes decisions for development of the platform – simply based upon the writings of others on the net – which is purely influenced by a religious war – he is incapable of making the right decision. Take Jajah for example, when Roman and Daniel started Jajah, they only tool they used back then with Asterisk@Home – because that’s what they had. When the company grew, they could have easily moved to new grounds – FreeSWITCH was already around. Why didn’t they? Why did Jajah remain with Asterisk – adding OpenSER/Kamailio into the mix later on? Why didn’t they move to a new platform? was it because they have loads of code developed? companies throw away code like dirty socks every other day – they had the resources. Fact remains, the service was alive for a long time, the company was bought out by Telefonica Digital at a price of $215 Million.

On the other hand, let’s take a company like Truphone (and pardon me James, I know you’re gonna kick my ass next time we meet). Truphone had changed technologies over the course of times many times. Each time, abandoning the previous tech and going for a new one. So did companies like Rebtel, Spikko, Skuku and others. Amazingly enough, none of them could be considered a massive success. Word on the market currently says that Truphone is looking for additional investors, as their existing ones aren’t willing to put in more cash. Spikko’s original model is totally gone and the company literally caved-in on itself – and same applies to many others.

So, what does it boil down to? is Asterisk better? is OpenSIPS better? – these are the wrong questions. The questions should be:

1. Is your R&D lead actually knows the arena he’s treading in?
2. Are your decisions based on actual investigation or just by whim?
3. Are you completely aware of the various obstacles and challenges you’ll meet?
4. Are you building your development and product on rapidly changing technology?
5. Who is backing your choice? a proper business entity? or a mere group of people with an idea?

When it comes to choosing between Asterisk and FreeSWITCH, here are my reasons for choosing Asterisk over FreeSwtich any day:

1. The ability to rapidly prototype any application is 5 times faster and 2 times more economical than FreeSWITCH
2. The installation path for FreeSWITCH is much more complex and convoluted than Asterisk, making future maintenance a nightmare
3. Digium is indeed a young company, but it sticks by its products and makes all efforts to make it the best it can – I always have someone to talk to
4. Barracuda Networks is a well established company in the Storage/Security market – if you go to their website, their support for FreeSWITCH (CudaTel) isn’t there at all – does that mean something?
5. Asterisk is a very reliable, dependable, predictable piece of code – it is something I can put my money on and know exactly what I’ll get, FreeSWITCH still isn’t

As some of you know, over the past 9 months, I’ve been heavily involved in the establishment of Humbug. For those who may not know, Humbug is a Call Analytics and Fraud Analysis SAAS. Now, differing from many of the current telephony SAAS projects, we are not based on Amazon EC2 or some other public cloud infrastructure, we build our own cloud environment. Why do we build our own cloud? simple, we need to keep your data secured and confidential. At Humbug, we see ourselves as a cross between Google Analytics – in our ability to analyze and handle data and Verisign – in our security and confidentiality requirements and methodologies.

Question be asked, why do people trust Verisign to provide SSL certificates around the world. What makes Verisign’s CA better than a privately owned CA – the answer is simple, it’s a third party 2 entities can entrust at the same time. Humbug aims to provide the same lever of trust, simply because we regard your data as sacred and valuable.

Since about 2 months ago, we’ve been contacting various Asterisk integrators around the world, inviting them to evaluate Humbug services. Now, while some integrators and vendors were somewhat reluctant, others were more than happy to join. We now have over 250 monitored systems around the world, with system being monitored and analyzed in Israel, USA, UK, Brazil and more.

The thing that amazed me in regards to some of the integrators who decided not to participate was that they claimed: “we provide our customers our own brew of fraud analysis service, we don’t require your SAAS”. Now, while I can accept the fact that an integrator would offer such a SAAS as an in-house service, I can’t see why a customer would rely on these services. In my view, relying on your integrator to provide fraud analysis services is like relying on the integrator of your alarm system to provide hired guard services – it just doesn’t make any sense to me. Why doesn’t it make sense? in Hebrew we say: “Go prove that you have a sister”. Imagine that your PBX integrator offer you such a service, then, in some obscure manner, your PBX gets hijacked and you get slammed with 50K$ worth of phone calls to Somalia. Now, your integrator would say: “Hmmmmm… that’s odd, we didn’t even get those CDR events to our system… you really got hacked bad…” – sure, if you only rely on CDR records to do your analysis (which is what 99.9% of integrators do). There is much much much much more to fraud analysis than just CDR analysis – if it all began and finished with CDR analysis, then by far Cvidya, Verint, NICE and many others would have been made redundant.

Allowing your integrator to provide you with fraud analysis SAAS is like putting the fox to guard the hen house, when things louse up (and they may), he’s the first one to bail out saying: “It’s not my fault”.

Humbug takes a totally different approach to fraud analysis, specifically, in the way we regards the various PBX systems and integrators. We are vendor agnostic and integrator agnostic – we will provide you with the clear and concise information you require in order to make an educated decision as to how you were de-frauded (if de-frauded) and provide you a faster alerting and response time. Our recent adventures had lowered our fraud alert response time from 60 minutes, down to 14 minutes in some cases. Most fraud analysis system carry a 24-36 hour turn around time, by that time, you can be out of 50K$ – our aim is to lower that number to no more than a 100$ in the worst case. Ambitious? yes, down right crazy? probably so, but we always say: “Aim for the moon, you’ll land on a star!” – so we know we’ll get there.

The following post doesn’t really fit in line with the normal spirit of the blog, simply because it’s not funny nor directly related to technology. It’s called Business 2.0, as it relates to the ever problematic question any business owner has: “When should I grow and how?”.

As you may know, I’ve been a freelance Asterisk Platform developer since early 2003, turned to freelance development (Penguin for hire) around April 2007. Since that time, I’ve built systems and platforms for some of the better known brands around the world. Be it working directly with the customer or through a 3rd party (as a sub contractor) – I can easily say that I’ve completed over 120 different large scale projects within 3 years time. Now, when I refer to projects, I’m not referring to installing PBX systems, I don’t do that at all – I’m referring to highly complex application level development, creating some of the most innovative Asterisk based systems I’ve ever seen.

Image via CrunchBase

Image via Wikipedia

Putting aside everything, finalizing a rough estimate of 40 development projects on a yearly base, most of these performed solely by myself is a fairly challenging task. Sure, at times I’ll outsource some work to other freelancers like myself, specifically in fields where I’m not all that fluent (Database, Web Development, UI) – but yet, doing that means that I’m conducting 3 – 5 projects on a monthly basis.

After doing so for 3 years now, I can’t help but start thinking about expanding my business, taking it to the next level by hiring more people and building it up to a new level. Question remains for this: “How? What is the natural track of expanding your business?” – of course the simple answer would be: “Just hire another developer or two, and start doing more sales” – it’s not as simple as it sounds. After thinking about it for some time, I’ve concluded there are a few models of expansion:

Model 1: Organic Growth

Organic growth can be described as the simplest way of growth: “Hire a new guy and get more work in”. The problem with this model that it is fully reliant on your ability to sell more. However, as you concentrate on sales more, you take time from the development and delivery process – thus, the addition of the new developer is not a 100% addition, it’s actually 100% (developer) minus 40% (you) – so you are not at 200% capacity, you are 160% capacity. Surely 160 is 100, however, for the initial 6 months, till the guy learns the ropes, you are not at 160, you are actually at 80 – can you and your business sustain that?

Thus, the main issue with Organic growth is cash flow, can your business sustain the elevated expenses with less income for the period of transition? If the answer is NO, then you need a different method. If the answer is YES, then you are in the best place in the world, however, bear in mind that taking someone to work for you is a responsibility – people are not resources, they are human beings, with families and children – taking someone to work for you is like taking responsibility for their lives.

Model 2: The Partner

A partnership with a person who is equally matched to you is always a good option. Technically speaking, it means that you are teaming with someone who generates as much work as you do and is capable of finalizing the work as fast and as good as you can. Yet, taking a partner doesn’t negate the requirement for a new employee or two. In this case, you may end up with too much sales with too little staff to deliver – that is a big problem.

Another issue with partners is the issue of trust. While most partners tend to rely on each other and trust each other, that trust can easily be broken (in most cases by stupid things). It’s enough for one partner to now carry its weight in sales/development to initiate a chain reaction, shortly ending in the partnership dissolving.

So, the partner is a good option, however, may prove to be problematic if the wrong partner is chosen – in addition, dissolving a partnership solely on these issues isn’t all that simple – and usually ends up in litigation and other judicial issues – YUCK!

Model 3: Un-intrusive Angel

Some people ragard Un-intrusive Angels as “Stupid Money” – an Angel investor that doesn’t interfere in your company business model and operations. In many cases, this is how start-up companies start – someone gives them a lump sum of money to start their business, signing off to own a portion of the new company.

An un-intrusive investor usually gives you the money and pays you a visit once every few months to see how his money is spent. Don’t expect to raise a whole lot from these people, usually you will get anything from 25K$ to around 250K$ – tops. If you are getting an investment from an Angel, make sure you plan your business carefully – and make sure your investor knows what he is getting into. The Angel is not a found piggy bank, he is a business man looking for profit – if you make sure his expectations of profits (time frame, amount, percentage, etc) are kept within the reason of your business – he will make an educated decision and invest accordingly. Promises like: “you’ll double your money in 3 years” are stupid – make sure it’s realistic and to the point. If you promise the moon, and reach a star – that’s a problem, if you promise the skies and hit a start – that’s wonderful.

Model 4: The Strategic-Intrusive Angel

Image by TheFemGeek via Flickr

A strategic angel is similar to the previous one in terms of funds, however, he is more capable in assisting your business meet its goals. Usually, it would be someone who is already a well established figure in your business sector, had made his money from previous companies and is now looking for new ideas and businesses. I call him an intrusive Angel, as sometimes he may have ideas as to where your business should go – and he will make sure you hear his ideas. You may regard it as annoying, but you should still listen to your Angel and pay him the respect he deserves.

Sometimes this Angel may invest in your business due to the fact that he has a hidden agenda. An agenda can be: The angel looks at your business and see a certain potential you are not planning, he’ll invest and try to re-direct your company to the agenda he sees. This is usually the case when your angel is invested into several endeavours that is either parallel to each other or may have orthogonal intersection points. These angels can be the builders of your business or the destroyers, it is up to you to make sure the latter doesn’t happen.

Prolog:

So, which model did I choose? – I didn’t choose yet, I’m still figuring it out myself. What ever the model may be, the choice isn’t simple nor straight forward. At best, whatever choice I’ll take will have a profound impact on my business and me – so I’ll need to weigh my options carefully. If you can think of an additional model, I’d love to hear about it – so just comment on this post.

Revenue sharing is one of the oldest methods of earning profits, actually, I believe it may just be right up there with trading of goods and food. For those of you not in the know, I’ll explain what revenue sharing is:

1. A content provider wishes to distribute a certain type of content – charging for it.
2. The content provider has not ability to charge the consumers directly, thus he partners with another party – the transport maintainer.
3. The transport maintainer charges the consumer, while keeping a certain percentage in his pocket.
4. Everybody’s is happy.

In general, this model works really well in many markets – specifically those that are driven by unique content – for example the mobile content market (ringtones, screen savers, games, apps) – the Apple App store is a wonderful example of how this works.

In the telecom industry, the revenue shares business is very common – however, in many cases it is highly guarded as a secret – main reason is that now one wants anybody else to know how they do it. This hiding of information, usually results in some problems – as when there is hiding of information, only those in the know are able to access it. Those in the know are called “mediators” or in Herbew “Machers”. In this entire ordeal, the mediator also takes a small percentage – leaving the content provider with slightly less. So, now it looks like this:

1. A content provider wishes to distribute a certain type of content – charging for it.
2. The content provider has not ability to charge the consumers directly, thus he contacts a mediator to find him a transport partner.
3. The mediator engages the prospective transport maintainer.
4. The transport maintainer charges the consumer, while keeping a certain percentage in his pocket and passing some funds to the mediator as well.
5. Everybody’s is happy.

So, if everybody’s so happy – why am I bitching about it? very simple – people are Greedy and always want more – putting the entire model into a frenzy. In order to give an example, let’s imagine the following scenario:

1. Company A provides IVR based content utilizing Asterisk server, connected to the internet.
2. The mediator engages a premium number company, getting the total revenue of 0.08$ for every inbound minute of traffic.
3. The premium number company leaves 0.01$ in its pocket and also pays the mediator a fee of 0.01$ per minute.
4. The content provider gets 0.06$ of the 0.08$ – 75% of the net profit goes to the content provider.
5. Content provider says: “Hell, I want the mediators 0.01$ as well, and I think the premium company should only get 0.005$, so I would get 0.075$ at the end”
6. Content provider contacts the premium provider and starts complaining
7. Premium provider negotiates and strikes a deal for 0.07 to the content provider, leaving the premium provider with 0.005$ and the mediator with 0.005$
8. Premium provider says: “I’m not making enough money on this, actually, I’m loosing money – I’ll find a better alternative service for that access number”
9. Premium provider asks mediator to bring in a new customer, providing similar content – mediator has sure incentive here
10. Premium provider gets new customer and transfers the access number to the new customer – returning back to previous profits
11. Original content provider is left with no profits and only greed in his hands

Over the past 10 years, I’ve seen this vicious cycle happen over and over and over again, in various formats and scenarios – but always ending in the same outcome – the content provider always suffers. If you’re a content provider and you provide IVR based services, let the people that provide you the access make their cut and the people in the middle, without them, you will have a service with no access – which means no service at all. Don’t go about thinking you can keep all the profits to yourself, you will break the equilibrium of this business, and eventually, no one will want to do business with you.

Last time, I’ve contemplated upon the various aspects of being an Asterisk consultant, mainly judging these from the Asterisk/Open Source point-of-view. Today, I’d like to contemplate upon a different approach of being a consultant, mainly, the various aspects that are usually not associated with Asterisk consultancy, however, can increase your overall perception by your prospective customer.

Be Targeted, Don’t be Limited

Most Asterisk consultant tend to restrict themselves to the Asterisk arena, at best, they will expand their knowledge into the realms of SIP and networks – but never beyond that point. It is true that telephony makes for over 80% of the Asterisk consultancy world, however, Asterisk isn’t limited to telephony only. More than 40% of the people using Asterisk are utilizing it for something completely different. Ranging from simple IVR to complex Micro Payment systems, Asterisk is there. Surely you can consult about Asterisk, but imagine the benefit your customer will gain if you are able to advise about other issues as well?

You are most probably saying: “I’m an Asterisk expert, I can’t be a **** expert as well!’ – you’re not being asked be one. You are being asked to expand your horizons beyond the Asterisk realm, being asked to be able to answer preliminary questions about various subjects. Over the course of my work I’ve been asked about subjects as: Google Adwords, Business Models, possible business partners, applicability of solutions and many more. Surely, there are people more qualified than myself to answer each of these, however, being able to answer my customer in a short time yielded something interesting, my customer became more at ease consulting with me about other matters as well – sometimes surpassing the realms of VoIP and Networking. When I was unable to answer I always replied with: “I’m not an expert about this, but I can check it out”. If I had an answer I would reply: “Per the information that I have, the answer is ………., however, I do suggest talking to someone more skillful than I on these matters”. This approach yielded an interesting response from my customers, mainly, their appreciation at me being able to supply a form of preliminary answer for a question – while on the other hand admitting at the same time that I’m not the best at this field.

Subjects that are fairly close to Asterisk include: GPL compliance, programmatic approach, platform design, billing considerations, scalability and redundancy and more. Again, always target your knowledge to Asterisk and VoIP, but don’t be limited to these.

Advocate for GPL compliance

As a consultant, you’ll be asked to perform various projects – some of these will most probably clash with the GPL spirit. If you encounter such a request, turn down this project immediately. There is no use or advancement by doing a project that violates the GPL code of conduct. No matter if you’re violating GPL v1, v2, v3 or any other of the Open Source license variants, at the end of the day, it will creep up behind you and bite you in the behind.

An Asterisk consultant who doesn’t advocate for GPL compliance is an outbound liar and a con-man. Consulting for the Asterisk market is prmoting the usage of GPL and Open Source software. Performing projects that violate both put you into the position of being perceived as a consultant without any code of conduct and no personal believes. You will be perceived as only being interested in money, thus, you will attract the type of customers you don’t want to attract.

Business Partners

The business partners you choose tell much about yourself. Sometimes, the big partners, which you really want to put their logo on your website as a partner is the wrong partner for you. Since the Q4 2008, my company had been approach by multiple companies wishing to become partners with my company – many have been declined. They were declined due to a simple reason – they were the wrong partners, even if they were companies generating over 25M$ of income per year. Does it make me sound stuck up and elitist, maybe, but there is no use partnering with a company that may clash with your own business model. Just like customers, partners tend to attract one another. Team up with the wrong partners, you’ll start attracting the wrong partners all over.