NADRA (the guys who issue your National identity card
numbers, drivers license numbers, passports and a host of other IT savvy cards) has decided to dump their expensive Nortel PABX system (thats your basic internal company phone exchange) and instead opt for Emergen’s Asterisk On Linux based Voice over IP solution.
Nadra also did not opt for Cisco’s popular IP phone system, that is deployed at large enterprises such as Gul Ahmed Textiles. Some other customers who have had Emergen come and ‘rescue’ them from the commonly known evils of Microsoft, Cisco and others are : Bank Islami, Tameer micro-finance bank and LUMS.
About Emergen:
Emergen is one of the very few system integrators who solely work on open source systems as their core business. Emergen has been quietly converting customers from proprietary desktops, firewalls, IP PABX’s (internal IP phone exchange), and email servers onto linux based equivalents over the last 2 years. In that sense they are unique..very few companies can claim to understand open source like they do, and they validate that there is money to be made with the Open source model in Pakistan from a commercial angle, not just a government’s bullhorn perspective.
I’m sure Nortel up there in Islamabad is pissed 
and I’m sure Cisco and Microsoft are watching…
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October 6th, 2007 at 4:51 am
great success story for Emergen.
asterisk is getting huge attraction world-wide, so Emergen needs to look beyong PK to get bulk of their business. VoIP will remain a taboo topic in PK for some time to come
October 9th, 2007 at 4:52 am
Thanks for posting this, Mohtashim. To add to the flexibility offered by Asterisk- NADRA can even further choose to not ‘dump’ the nortel outright. Instead, Asterisk has been integrated to their Nortel to allow for a phased replacement. This allows them to expand using Asterisk keeping their Nortel intact and replace it when the time is right. Asterisk integrates with the nortel by acting as a PRI CARRIER (The nortel thinks asterisk is another PTCL PRI) - a feature not available in the Nortel itself.
October 9th, 2007 at 8:20 am
I dont really know what that meant (pri?) but you guys rock
hehe!
October 9th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
Nothing would have been possible without the support of the people at NADRA itself. These smart people are genuinely working towards the betterment of their organization (and in turn the country). They could’ve easily (like many other govt/semi govt organizations) stuck to their existing closed and expensive solution but they were far-sighted enough to adopt the technology of the future. Kudos to their team.
November 24th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
[...] NADRA dumps Nortel [...]
December 1st, 2008 at 11:22 pm
[...] NADRA dumps Nortel [...]