What is Asterisk
Asterisk is the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit. Offering flexibility unheard of in the world of proprietary communications, Asterisk empowers developers and integrators to create advanced communication solutions…for free.

Asterisk® is released as open source under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and it is available for download free of charge. Asterisk® is the most popular open source software available, with the Asterisk Community being the top influencer in VoIP.

Asterisk as a switch (PBX)
Asterisk can be configured as the core of an IP or hybrid PBX, switching calls, managing routes, enabling features, and connecting callers with the outside world over IP, analog (POTS), and digital (T1/E1) connections.

Asterisk runs on a wide variety of operating systems including Linux, Mac OS X, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and Sun Solaris and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX including many advanced features that are often associated with high end (and high cost) proprietary PBXs. Asterisk’s architecture is designed for maximum flexibility and supports Voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

Asterisk as a gateway
It can also be built out as the heart of a media gateway, bridging the legacy PSTN to the expanding world of IP telephony. Asterisk’s modular architecture allows it to convert between a wide range of communications protocols and media codecs.

Asterisk as a feature/media server
Need an IVR? Asterisk’s got you covered. How about a conference bridge? Yep. It’s in there. What about an automated attendant? Asterisk does that too. How about a replacement for your aging legacy voicemail system? Can do. Unified messaging? No problem. Need a telephony interface for your web site? Ok.

Asterisk in the call center
Asterisk has been adopted by call centers around the world based on its flexibility. Call center and contact center developers have built complete ACD systems based on Asterisk. Asterisk has also added new life to existing call center solutions by adding remote IP agent capabilities, advanced skills-based routing, predictive and bulk dialing, and more.

Asterisk in the network
Internet Telephony Service Providers (ITSPs), competitive local exchange carriers (CLECS) and even first-tier incumbents have discovered the power of open source communications with Asterisk. Feature servers, hosted services clusters, voicemail systems, pre-paid calling solutions, all based on Asterisk have helped reduce costs and enabled flexibility.

One of the main advantages of open source software is the freedom to modify and redistribute software as anyone sees fit thanks to the GNU General Public License many of the open source software packages carry. Unfortunately, a lot of these packages require somewhat intimate knowledge with the LAMP software bundle (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) that many people can find very intimidating. All of the latest and greatest packages remain just out of reach for the less tech savvy individuals and those small businesses lacking IT managers.

Fortunately, there are hosted software solutions in existence that offer many of the same benefits and features found in the latest open source software, such as Zoho’s hosted business suite.

What is Zoho all about?
Zoho is a suite of online applications (services) that you sign up for and access from Zoho’s Website. The applications are free for individuals and some have a subscription fee for organizations. Zoho’s vision is to provide their customers (individuals, students, educators, non-profits, small and medium sized businesses) with the most comprehensive set of applications available anywhere (breadth); and for those applications to have enough features (depth) to make your user experience worthwhile.

What is the main advantage of using Zoho?
Zoho is bringing together a wide range of online applications making it easier for individuals and businesses to manage all their work while dramatically reducing the cost. But being more productive and saving money is just the beginning of using Zoho. As they continue to integrate the various Zoho services and innovate on new ways of getting things done, they hope that you will find working online not only more rewarding, more collaborative, but more enjoyable. You can read some of their blog posts to learn more about some of the advantages of working online. Here are a couple of sample posts: “Offline vs. Online”. and “Business at the Margins”. a post by Zoho’s founder and CEO.

While using Zoho your documents and data are securely stored online on their servers and can be accessed from anywhere. This means as long as you have Internet access you can access your Zoho data from any computer and enjoy a productive and convenient working experience wherever you go without the hassle of bringing your computer with you. In addition, Zoho helps people collaborate on projects and share information with a simple mouse click. For example, in Zoho Writer, there are several ways to share documents in private, make them public or even perform collaborative editing in real time. Zoho also offers a very economical approach to getting your work done. While we offer free editions of all their applications, businesses also have access to our business editions at extremely competitive rates.

VMukti Solutions Pvt. Ltd. is an innovative, multi-point unified communications, collaboration and conferencing server platform. VMukti core features provide fourth generation conferencing services with real time data transaction. It is all about collaborative conferencing engine and its core features include online Video conferencing, Audio conferencing, Chat, File search, Whiteboard, File-sharing, Presentation, Remote monitoring/controlling/sharing, Scheduler and more… all at use very low Bandwidth usage

VMukti scores over USE-AS-IS systems that are non-customizable and non-scalable by providing P2P modular customizable platforms to clients. It is proud to promote the emergent open source culture. Their product also tides over the problem of High costs owing to large server / bandwidth requirements as well as low quality output of collaboration product.