Coming into the conference, Ivan and I figured we’d be able to have some good discussions with people looking at ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers), as we have a package that fills their needs far better than other open source solutions.  Heck, we beat out proprietary ones too . What has been nice though is to really get a feel for the needs of other markets, such as call centers and larger enterprises.  We’ve found we can already fulfill a large part of their needs also, and can quickly extend to provide even more capabilities that no other products are fulfilling.  Many of these groups are realizing that they need to perform internal “billing”, accounting for departmental expenditures, or track individual callers usage.  Freeside’s provisioning system makes it much easier for many groups to setup users, manage inventory, and automate rollout procedures.

Many people are really seeing a future of Freeside powering a lot of their Asterisk process, and we couldn’t be happier.  Now we need to get more documentation on how to do it up on the wiki :-/

Oh, and the hackathon time will be really nice too.  Thanks to jsmith and sisd for helping me out with the trip.  If you want to learn about how to bill, or even account for Asterisk calls with open source, look us up, we’ll be featured in the Open Source Showcase.