TMCnews Featured Article


March 02, 2011

Digium Switchvox Solution Enables SMBs to Save on Total Cost of Ownership

By Rajani Baburajan, TMCnet Contributor


Digium, known as the Asterisk (News - Alert) Company, recently conducted a total cost of ownership (TCO) study that compares both the initial investment costs and total, five-year costs of its Switchvox unified communications (UC) solution to competitive IP PBX products

The results of the study indicate that small- and medium-sized business (SMB) customers can achieve 60 percent savings on their initial investments and as much as 80 percent on the TCO over five-years with the Switchvox (News - Alert) UC solution.

Switchvox is based on Asterisk, a widely used open source telephony software. It provides all the functionality and stability of a sophisticated IP PBX platform at a fraction of the cost, company officials said.

According to Digium (News - Alert), traditional UC vendors charge SMBs big fees for their phone systems. This cost mostly results from the fees for system “add-ons” like adding separate voicemail servers, fees for mobile accessibility, fees for integration with other business software or CRM systems, and charges for critical features such as conferencing, interactive voice response (IVR) and call queues.

“When SMBs are evaluating UC solutions, it’s worthwhile to do a feature by feature comparison and evaluate the associated costs for the number of users needing those features,” said Leslie Conway (News - Alert), vice president of global marketing at Digium, in a statement.

According to Conway, the potential savings on that total investment could translate to $80,000 on the average phone system over time. “Our customers are in the unique position of making a buying decision that could eliminate $50,000 or more off their initial investment, while gaining enterprise-class features from a true unified communications solution.”

Clear Creek Telephone & Television, which provides telephone, cable and Internet service to businesses and residents of Oregon City and Redland, opted for Digium’s Switchvox solution over a ShoreTel (News - Alert) system, primarily because Switchvox was more affordable to them. 

“By the time we added all the individual features we needed, that weren’t included in the standard price, that ShoreTel phone system would have been five times the price we paid for Digium’s Switchvox solution,” said Rick Lundh, IT manager for Clear Creek Telephone & Television.

Earlier last month Digium formed a marketing partnership with Ditech Networks, a provider of voice quality solutions, to make Ditech's Voice Quality Assurance (VQA) algorithms available to the Asterisk developer community.


Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani's articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf