I apologize for not having more time, perhaps to dig up
some of my old data. However the methodology went something like
this. Equipment + Install + Configuration + User time cost + Time cost for
upgrades, maintenance, and expansion/changes. Assuming you have an average
size small business. In that small business you have ~40 phones and 50
employees. Each employee gets their own did. ~5 phones are
"executive" (fancier model) and you have two which are for receptions. The
receptions will monitor one of three "main" incoming lines and will need to know
which one has been dialed before they answers. Similarly you will need 3
different dial by name directories which may or may not have some overlapping
people. Each person needs to be able to switch between 3
preprogrammed settings on how their calls are handled. Integration with their
business calendar so the phone system automatically switches between
several settings depending on the individuals availability (in a meeting, out of
office, etc.) is a big plus (ShoreTel does five settings as a base and was
expandable but their was something about the expansion that I can not remember.
ShoreTel also did the integration with Outlook, Lotus, and a half dozen
other applications calendars out of the box, but since they publish their API
you could program your own if you wanted) The business has
10 remote sites to manage. About 10 users will require custom soft
buttons. You hotel desks so that one physical phone may be used by several
people during the course of a day so people need to be able to login and out of
their phones easily. People also need to be able to quickly and easily record
phone calls and manage those recordings. Voicemail must be integrated into
email. It also needs to be trivial for people to mange DND exception
lists. And you need to assume you will change out about 15 employees a
year. You also require 10 departmental voice mail boxes that are
integrated with a personas individual mail box for people who are authorized for
that public box. In addition all equipment must be warranted for ten
years. (etc. etc. etc.) This is what I remember of the PBX
requirements Cornerstone Homes had back in 2005.
Running this sort of system the cost of having some one
set it all up, train local non-technical staff on how to maintain this, and
provide support had a total cost of about $20,000 for equipment, install,
and training. In addition training cost was about 15 min per employee
plus 45 min for the HR department who managed the systems operation. I
originally estimated this at about $2000 of cost for employee time. In
addition I estimated and additional $2000/year of operational
& maintenance cost. In fact cost less then $5 of
my HR departments time to set up a new user and a new phone with custom soft
buttons, voicemail, phone call handling (when should it ring, when should it
roll to an assistant, when should it go to voice mail, which voicemail greeting
should it give, etc), the companies directory, personal directory (usually
integrated with their pim, but it could be via a text file too) and automatic
updates (if using pim integration). Now the phone cost about $150, and
with licensing and the estimated cost to house and maintain the equipment
required for voicemail. Of course both those costs are fairly typical when
compared to Asterisk and are moot if just replacing an
employee. Professional support was free for 2 years with 4 hour
service guarantee and $6K per year their after, but no one I interviewed ever
renewed support since the equipment had a lifetime guarantee and was so easy to
set up and maintain. Professional support was $75/hour for remote support
and $150/hour for on premises support up to 6K/year (at which point you
purchased a support contract) if you needed it after your first two years was
over. Equipment is warranted for life. All upgrades, patches, etc.
are also free and done by ShoreTel professionals.
I wish I had my information from when I was looking at
Asterisks, but if I recall correctly, the numbers I got from the one asterisk
vender came in at about $18,000 for equipment, install, and configuration.
No training and $150/hour for support; but the first 5 days of
support was free. They did not offer an inclusive support contract at
the time. While interviewing asterisks owners I got to an average
estimation of about 20 hours a month by in house technical staff
to support the users and maintain the system, plus about 100 hours of
education per tech/year to keep the system updated, secure, and providing
advancing service for the users. So if you have two qualified people (so
one can take a day off some time) then you are looking at about 440
hours. Lets call it 400 hours or about $14,000/year of in house
support cost. Now this may seem like a large amount of time, however
it was the average from the people I interviewed. Though I only included
groups that had not had an outage in the last 2 years. The cost per hour
of telephone outage in the middle of a work day for my employer at the
time was calculated to be approximately $10,000 and one call center I
interviewed averaged 4 hours a year of outage; so I just tossed their estimation
of maintenance time out. Although it was really inside the range of
others, but they were also a larger institution having about 200 phones
attached to the system in three different call centers (funny thing is they
shrank to less then 40 in three years, funny
economy)
So, I
have a two year cost of ShoreTel as $26K (actual cost was actually about $35K
including the fax system, but we would have plugged that fax system into any
phone system we would have purchased, save Avaya, which had their own fax
system)
Estimated cost over two years for a Asterisks system was about $45K or
almost twice the cost. This is not to mention I could not find nearly the
refinement of productivity tools or PIM integration.
What
do you believe a modern cost of installing and maintaining this sort of system
would be today for Asterisks?
I
know, this is really short and not a full analysis, and I also understand the
number of people supporting asterisks in the valley has increased so my numbers
may be a bit off.
By the
way, if you already have an experienced ShoreTel person on staff and purchased
ShoreTel equipment off of eBay today from small and mid size companies that have
not survived this economic downturn, then your looking at about $5K in equipment
and licensing costs for the same install.
Why do you think TCO of an Asterisk system is HIGHER than shortel or
Avaya?
--
JD Austin
Twin Geckos Technology Services LLC
jd@twingeckos.com
480.288.8195x201
http://www.twingeckos.com
P. J.
O'Rourke - "Everybody knows how to raise children, except the people who
have them."
On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Bryan O'Neal
<boneal@cornerstonehome.com>
wrote:
Craig,
I think you are missing the point. So, not to call you out on
the
carpet here but have you ever managed a large enterprise? If so
could you
please explain your ideal concept of how you manage to keep
productivity
high and cost low without use of any non-free or non-open
products? Take
Asterisk for example. I love it but the total
cost of ownership is
outrageously high in comparison to systems like Avaya
and ShoreTel. And
that is without the incredible ease of integration
of systems like ShoreTel
have with outlook. You bag on Exchange but offer
no comparative substitute.
You complain about the fact it uses AD and how
much it costs even though it
is included free in several flavors of
Exchange distribution. You complain
about mailbox implementation but
seem to think it is the only DB your
company would be running. How do
you back up your Oracle, MySQL, DB2, or
Postges systems? And again
with the scanning, it provides it's own free
scanning system, however it is
idiotic to be dinging the bulk of your spam
scanning on the mail server.
By the time it reaches your server the cost of
resources expended to
handle it far outweigh the cost of third party
scanning. And the fact
that Third party AV scans can be integrated easily
is not a bad thing,
saying so is like saying postfix sucks because you can
use spamassisen and
calmav. In fact I can use clamAV but it does not
provide the same
level of service for the same maintenance cost of better
products like
Avast. That said you say the only client is outlook, so my
question
is what server/client system do you have that provides anywhere
near as
much to the party as exchange/outlook? If you have one I
would
really, really, love to try it out! But I have not found one.
Certainly
Cyrus is not it. And for cost I can put an exchange
system in for a 70
person office with all the clients and servers licensed
from scratch with AD
and everything, including the server and my time to
set it up for less then
$1500. In addition each users outlook costs
only $40 and that also includes
all the other MS bundled stuff we have not
talked about (Share point, etc.).
And while there are far better solutions
for nearly all of it (especially MS
SQL Server) Tell me now. Can you
purchase a server, provide a integrated
collaborative PIM suite in a single
interface providing mail, contacts,
basic CRM, takes, notes, and journal
com tracking for the same price? If so
I really would like to see it
because I have bee hunting for this for almost
10 years! I hold fast
that Exchange is one of very, very few MS products
that has a very high
ROI. And, have you every had to integrate a BES with
something other
then Exchange? Or are you some one who has never managed
more then a
handful of mobile devices.
Now if you're a single person or a company
of 5 it is stupid to implement
exchange. Use Google. If you're a
fleet of sales people who never talk to
each other and have an independent
sales management application, then again,
Exchange is not your option, but
for most small campus based businesses that
employ a group of average
people who need to communicate easily with their
teams exchange is your
answer. In the real world your business needs and
the bottom line
dictate the solution, not your personal feelings. And time
and time
again, for medium business after medium business, Exchange has
provided.
If you really want we can conger up an average small
company
prototype and each deliver a robust communications plan. But
I think your
average CFP will pick the exchange plan every time.
And
yes one of my three home computers is MS, and yes I run outlook on
it
(Evolution and thunderbird on the other two) But Outlook is my
primary PIM.
I find on lists like this I have the fringe voice of
pay/proprietary
software, just like in the business world I am the fringe
voice of free and
open source. So, I get flamed from both
sides.
-----Original Message-----
From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
[mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us]
On Behalf Of Craig
White
Sent: Friday, February 20, 2009 10:24 AM
To:
Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: RE: OT:Exchange good? (Was:Re: new
hotness?)
On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 09:45 -0700, Bryan O'Neal
wrote:
> I disagree... Mostly.
> > - Tough to
backup
> Like any database it needs to be shut down for standard file
backups
> to work properly. This can be done via a simple script
and is not a real
issue.
> However the use of back up programs like
BackupExec make it a breeze
> to back up and restore. However I
will agree that if you never had to
> deal with it before and you don't
have much space and you don't have
> something like Backup Exec it can
be daunting to figure out how to get
> regular backups working.
That said I also like to run all the clients
> so they keep a copy
of all activity locally. Not only does this speed
> up the clients
but it also ensures that if the server suddenly went
> belly up and the
last backup I had was 10 or 12 hours old (if I was
> using a file backup
system) I could restore everything up to the
> minuet for people who had
their clients running. If I thought it was
> worth the time I
would have liked to virtualizes the exchange server
> and take regular
snap shots of it throughout the day. However other
> projects provided a
greater return for the time invested so I never got
around to
it.
----
this is absurd - once you have used cyrus-imapd and all of the
e-mails are
separate files you realize how antiquated and stupid the
concept of an
Exchange mail store is. Oh, you can buy programs with
Exchange 'agents' to
allow you to back up live or you can use some routine
to shut down Exchange
to allow a backup but it's clearly a hostile
environment, much like backing
up any database.
----
> > -
Costly to integrate spyware, anti-virus and other content scanning
> I
never had any issues and must totally disagree. I have always used
> the
scanning built into exchange. This has been quite a nice feature
> since
Exchange 2003 SP2 which is quite good at controlling spam,
> viruses,
and generally enforcing corporate policies. However, for
> less
then $500 a year you can get a third party to spam scan all of
> your
email before it ever hits your server. If nothing else this pays
for
it's self in saved bandwidth.
> If you are a medium size company
initial spam scanning should be done
> by a third party, after that
Exchange can be tweaked quite easily to
> help enforce corporate
policies. In addition integration with
> products like Avast make
it easy to offer AV/Threat scanning. After
> that exchange is easy
to set up for limiting the kinds of files that
> can be sent or
received, how big a email can be, and even who emails
> can be sent or
received from. And while I never did it, I am fairly
certain you can
do key word scanning as well.
> Most of this this can be customized on a
per user basses.
----
I think you just made my point...buying
specialized software add-ons to
perform scanning - and of course, the
'Exchange Server' options.
----
> - Specialized client software
(Outlook) You can chose what ever client
> you want, but some features
may not be limited or not available. A
> fairly good webmail client is
provided. You can use POP and IMAP for
> any client with regards to your
email. With some server side add-ons
> colanders can be made available
as well and global contacts can be
> driven via ldap. While it is
true if you want to use the advanced
> features you have to use outlook,
but again, I have not found any
> other client/sere pair that provides
these features, so it is not
> surprising that other clients can not use
them when connecting to the
server.
----
good webmail is easily
implemented as are LDAP client applications. OWA
is
adequate.
----
> - Requires AD
> Yes. However this
is like saying that it requires an MS server to run
> so I really don't
see your point. I can integrate my Linux servers
> and clients
seamlessly into AD using krb and some people indicate the
> opposite is
also true. It is an enterprise mail system designed
> around
collaboration. If you don't have an enterprise to collaborate
>
with you probably are not looking at outlook. If you believe it
ads
> additional expense look at the small business edition. The
price for
> a fully integrated MS environment is very cheep these
days.
----
My point seemed to be rather obvious. You're in for the
penny, you're in for
the pound. The issue isn't about whether Linux or
Macintosh can integrate
into an AD environment...of course they
can.
The issue was about buying in and having AD dictate everything
from user
accounts to machine access and all resource management. To use
Exchange, you
have no choice other than to go the whole hog...there was no
other options
after Exchange 5.5
The simple truth is that Microsoft
didn't create the Enterprise environment
nor do they possess the only
logical implementation. They have the marketing
muscle and the foresight to
create artificial dependencies to use software
to dictate
implementation.
Start tossing in curveballs such as IP Telephony
integration and it becomes
a major clusterf**k.
The ultimate issue
is that the only decent client for Exchange is Outlook
and thus the only
decent OS to use is Windows and thus the vendor lock-in is
full
circle.
Clearly as businesses tighten their belts, the costs of license
6 or just
generally the various licenses necessary to be purchased for
client access,
whether to files or to Exchange Server or to MS-SQL server
get to be absurd.
As few businesses have embraced the move to Vista, Linux
options for the
desktop continue to improve and Exchange Server will see
its
value
declining.
Craig
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