Implementation and Evaluation of Open Source Unified Communications for SMBs

In today's world, businesses are under enormous pressure to reduce operational and capital expenditures related to their use of communications technologies. Businesses are also looking into re-organizing to work more collaboratively and efficiently. Unified Communication (UC), the integration of two or more real time communication systems into one platform, is a viable solution in tackling this pressure. Integrating core communication systems into one overall enterprise level system has proven to deliver more than just cost saving. These real-time interactive communication services and applications over Internet Protocol (IP) have become critical in boosting employee accessibility and efficiency, improving customer support and fostering business agility. However, some small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are far from implementing this solution due to the high cost of initial deployment and ongoing support. In this paper, we will discuss and demonstrate an open source UC solution, viz. "Asterisk" for use by SMBs, and report on some performance tests using SIPp. The contribution from this research is the provision of technical advice to SMBs in deploying UC.