Paul Estrella, Chairman of ElastixWorld and CEO of Protodigits, speaks about Elastix and the future of Asterisk call-centers industry.

Paul Estrella is an Industrial Engineer from Ecuador. He is part of the Elastix project, and runs its training program. In 2011 he begun a parallel project called OpenDireito, a blog oriented to talk about technology and open source solutions. Paul is also the Chairman of ElastixWorld, the coordinator of Asiri.ec, and the CEO of Protodigits a product development company.

Q: Could you summarize for our readers your company profile, your target customer and reference market?
Our company works on engineering with a focus on software and product development. Our targets are SMB companies, however we have been doing large implementations more often in the last two years.

Q: Mr. Estrella, what's your view on the Asterisk call-center industry future in the next two years?
I think Asterisk broke the myth about Call Center implementation performed just by high tech companies. The accessibility to the functionality, that Asterisk provides, will prove to be the reason why more companies will implement their own contact center department, which will benefit marketing, product development and improve service and support.

Q: What kind of benefits do you experience with the Elastix and QueueMetrics integration?
Elastix has a powerful call center module, created to fulfill the needs of SMB companies. The integration with QueueMetrics takes Elastix functionality to a higher level and allows introducing high-end reports and statistics, which are the base of a call center service selection by several customers.

Q: What are the key factors which make a successful Elastix based call-centre?
First of all, the Elastix Call Center module is 100% open source, its easy to deploy and easy to manage. A call center supervisor can start campaigning in less than 8 hours of training. Another important thing is that it has a strong predictive dialer and all the functionality Asterisk can provide for the telephony operation.

Q: What are your thoughts about present and future strategic role of Asterisk call-center analysis softwares in our market?
One barrier I always see is the reluctance to use open source solutions; people tend to think that open source has a lack of support or specific functionality.
One of the things Elastix, FreePBX and other projects are doing is to bring more people into Asterisk. Serious projects, such as QueueMetrics, are also completing this work, providing an additional layer to specific requirements, which allows to deploy professional solutions at demanding scenarios. Asterisk is setting the platform to perform several kinds of projects; call-center analysis software is the perfect way to add value to each of them.

Q: What's your view on the evolution of QueueMetrics addon in Elastix based call-centers?
I think there will be an increase in the use of QueueMetrics and other solutions, since an addon installation is seamless and easy, however its important to educate the people about the power of the QueueMetrics-Elastix combination and that is a job for marketing. With the amount of information we have to deal these days, people loses sight on projects like this, so I think its important to stablish cases and show the functionality in action.