"Have you ever embarked on what you thought was a fairly well-defined project, only to see it expand far beyond its original scope? That certainly happened to us with this series on vendor network and switching architectures. When we started, we had around ten vendors in mind--the heavy hitters like Avaya, 3Com, Cisco Systems, Lucent Technologies, and Nortel. But with a little research, we discovered that the VoIP switching marketplace is not just a North American business, as we identified many companies around the globe that were pitching IP telephony products, including firms hailing from Canada, Eastern and Western Europe, and the Middle and Far East.
"Moreover, we discovered that the lines segmenting the switching systems market were a little blurry, with systems that support just a handful of stations at a small business oftentimes very similar to those that can handle thousands of stations in a multi-location enterprise. We also discovered that when you peel back the cover of many of the 'software only' IP PBXs, you find the familiar open-source Asterisk system underneath..."
