Asterix, Asterics, Asterik, and More: The Story Behind the Name of Asterisk

“Asterisk” is one of the most commonly misspelled words in the English dictionary.  Some of the more common misspellings consist of “Asterix,” “Asterics” and “Astericks”; however some accounts of the more severe “Astrixs” do exist on the web.  In fact, Googling “Asterix” in search of  Asterisk telephony related material will leave some people scratching their heads as information about the famous French cartoon character “Asterix the Gaul” populates the screen.

Since “Asterisk” is so difficult for us—many of which are highly dependent on spell-check already—to spell; it begs the question why Mark Spencer, original creator of the open source PBX, named his program such a tricky word.  In order to get to the bottom of it, we decided to contact Mr. Spencer to get the official reason in his own words.  As you might expect, the answer is simple yet well designed:

“[I named the software Asterisk] because of the UNIX wildcard symbol meaning ‘everything’ like ‘rm -rf *’ and I wanted Asterisk to be everything for telecom!”

So it turns out that Mark wasn’t actually just trying to teach us how to spell a difficult word, instead it appears that he simply has a knack for coming up with interesting and strangely appropriate name concepts.  So next time you start typing the words “Asterix pbx” into Google, just remember that Asterisk’s name comes from UNIX, not from a Gaul.

Healthcare Reform: Cost Savings Through Improved Hospital Communications

President Barack Obama has boiled his healthcare reform down to three objectives:

1. Offering affordable, compre­hensive, and portable coverage.
2. Containing spiraling health care costs and improving quality of care.
3. Promoting and strengthening prevention and pub­lic health.

As Americans it is our personal choice whether or not we agree with President Obama’s US healthcare reform plan.  Yet Americans of all political beliefs are united in the belief that the need for healthcare reform is necessary, due to the fact that America’s healthcare costs are growing faster than inflation and national incomes.  One of the proposed measures to lower healthcare costs (Healthcare Reform Objective #2) across the board is an emphasis on investing in healthcare Information Technology to improve patient care and efficiency.

Various studies show that improving hospital communications through wireless nurse call integration is an effective way to dramatically lower healthcare costs and improve patient care:

University of Maryland’s Center for Health Information and Decision Systems released a study in 2006 that showed “Use of  [wireless nurse call integration] systems reduced overall mean time for completing a patient request by 51 percent.”  Also William Greskovich, the CIO at the 300 bed hospital where the study was performed, estimates that “the system helped save 1,500 hours of nurse time” over the 53 day period.

A 2008 study showed that  hospitals with wireless nurse call integration received  “an increase of 10% to 60% excellence” in “promptness in responding to patient call bells.”  The 27 bed pediatric acute care inpatient unit that was the focus of the study initially scored only in the 40%-50% range.

America’s healthcare is extremely expensive relative to other industrialized countries, yet we don’t necessarily have the best healthcare.  With hospital care taking up approximently 31% of the national healthcare budget, any changes that lower hospital costs will dramatically lower our national healthcare costs.  Hospital investment in the nurse call system is certainly one good option to lower our healthcare expenses.

Learn More

To learn more about how Dalcon’s healthcare solutions can improve patient care while reducing the cost of healthcare, contact us at (877)WE-UNIFY (938-6439).

NASBA

Dalcon uses the open-source PBX software, Asterisk, to provide a unique telephony solution for NASBA – at an unbeatable cost!

The NASBA (National Association of State Boards of Accountancy) serves as a forum for the boards of accountancy of 55 states and US Territories.

As primary support provider for these boards across 55 States and US Territories, as well as for thousands of individuals registering for the CPA Examination at any given time, NASBA’s system runs an average of 5,500-plus calls per day.

Need to Integrate Telephones and Information Technology Drives Search for Telephony Solution

Given his organization’s high-volume and highly interactive environment NASBA Chief Technology Officer, Ed Barnicott, made tightening the integration between his telecommunications and IT systems a top priority.

“Our group was challenged to engineer a platform for Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) and a robust Integrated Voice Response (IVR) platform,” he says. “Each caller’s account needed to be automatically brought up on our customer service representative’s (CSR) monitor as soon as we received the call.”

Enabling that functionality on the organization’s 10 year-old proprietary phone system was possible, according to Barnicott, but extremely expensive. “It was already costing us an inordinate amount of money just to support and maintain the system, and we would have had to spend significantly more to get the CTI functionality we needed,” he says.

Flexibility, Functionality, Service

NASBA solicited proposals from a number of phone system providers, including its incumbent provider, and received quotes ranging from over $180,000, for upgrading the existing switch, to well over $500,000 for a new, comprehensive phone system.  The Dalcon solution cost was well below even the upgrade option and delivered a customized solution including a complete phone system replacement with full IP telephony.

Though the phone system’s cost was an important consideration, Barnicott placed more emphasis on the flexibility and functionality the system could deliver, as well as its ability to support NASBA’s future growth – anticipated to expand to 600 phones (up from its current 240).

Given NASBA’s technical orientation, Barnicott’s believed his expectations could best be met by a software-based system. After a yearlong evaluation process NASBA selected an Asterisk-based system from Dalcon in October 2008.

According to Barnicott, it was Dalcon’s business model that set it apart.  “Dalcon had an insight into the modern telephony market that I found lacking in the other providers,” he says. “Several of the companies that pitched us were traditional switch companies that had moved to VoIP. They didn’t understand that telephony is a software product, with commodity hardware. Dalcon recognized that the only way to differentiate is through functionality, flexibility and service, and they do a terrific job on that.”

Open Standards: Lower costs, Increased Flexibility

Dalcon’s use of the open standards components throughout its solution is evidence of his company’s focus on flexibility, says David Condra, President of Dalcon. “NASBA is an open source shop and they were looking for flexibility from their provider,” he says. “Rather than a hard-wired, inflexible traditional PBX, we delivered software running on industry-standard computer and network hardware. We call it ‘investment protection’. With an open standard model, NASBA bought a system of interchangeable parts, where each component is individually upgradable. There’s no danger of the whole system going obsolete.” Dalcon builds its solutions using industry standard hardware such as Dell servers and Polycom IP phones, and open source software such as Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Asterisk—the dominant, open source PBX software, and adds its own DCM software to provide easy configuration and administration by the user.

Dalcon and NASBA developed a comprehensive implementation process, the first and most critical step of which was for Dalcon to develop the custom code necessary to enable IVR integration.

“We had some very particular needs and aggressive CTI requirements in our call centers,” says Barnicott. “Dalcon developed functionality that would allow us to access an in-progress call, find the specific records in our database pertaining to that caller and immediately display the call on our CSR’s screen. Being the solution developer, Dalcon, of course, had access to their root code, which made the customization process so much easier and enabled them to deliver what we needed at a much lower investment than other providers, who were reselling other solutions and were twice or even 3-times the cost.”

Over the next several months, Dalcon worked with NASBA IT staff, configuring and testing the system and working through a range of technical details.  “We had a very deliberate and incremental implementation plan detailed down to the day and to every aspect of the system,” says Dalcon’s Condra. “We emphasized communication throughout, because NASBA is a big, technically oriented organization, with a lot of parts and pieces.”

Easy-to-Use, Feature-Rich

“We signed off on the Dalcon system four months ago and I haven’t given a lot of thought to it since,” says Barnicott. “And when I say I haven’t thought about it, that’s the biggest compliment I can give.”

In addition to its dependability, the Dalcon system has impressed Barnicott for its range of features – notably the Follow-Me and Voicemail-to-Email capabilities – and its ease-of-use. “We’re totally refurbishing on one of our floors, which disrupts everything and everbody. People are constantly moving from desk to desk, and at one point we had 20 people working out of our conference room,” he says. “With our old system, moving people’s phone lines around would have been a technical and logistical nightmare, but with a software-based solution, like Dalcon, you just take your phone and plug it into any data network jack at the new location and you’re ready to go.”

Barnicott points out that NASBA runs its Dalcon system on a single Dell server, which validates his belief that scaling the Dalcon system to meet NASBA’s future demands can be done with minimal cost and downtime. “Expanding to 600 phones is simply a matter of adding an off-the-shelf Dell server, any lines required and the additional licenses for that box,” he says. “So for literally a fraction of the cost of a traditional, proprietary phone system, we’ve got a world-class, open, software-based system that will manage all our present and future requirements and can do it without even breathing hard.”