By Cat Yong
When KL-based system integrator, Intuittech, started out 5 years ago, they had set themselves a few simple rules to follow. Since then, they have gone on to collect proud-worthy achievements like a regional award and even a contract with the US Army to deploy core communications solution for 250,000 soldiers in Iraq.
This could well be the biggest Asterisk system ever built.
To date, big organisations like Hong Leong, Pizza Hut, Maxis and Singtel are just a few of the organisations that Intuittech has signed on as clients – all this with a lean and mean set up of 25 people. In 2011 Intuittech entered into a strategic alliance with Strateq , a much bigger tech solutions provider with regional presence.
Intuittech CEO Daniel Krahenbuhl said, “When myself and chief strategy officer, Marco (DiCerbo) started this, we always said we don’t want to be an open source company and have small clients. So our strategy from the beginning, was to target just the enterprise market.” A typical installation size could be a couple of thousand phones at least, or a minimum of 50 seats when it comes to call centres, he had further explained.
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| (L-R) Marco DiCerbo and Daniel Krahenbuhl |
They were also very careful to only focus on being very good at 2 specific solutions, namely Nagios, an open source network monitoring system (NMS) solution and Asterisk, a communications platform or framework which is also open-source.
Tech and go-to-market decisions
Intuittech’s CEO believes a lot of customers like Nagios because it can go beyond usual NMS functions. For example, customised plug-ins could integrate into hardware and extend its capabilities beyond what bigger brand solutions offer. For example Nagios can enable monitoring the liquid capacity in a tank, or measuring the cooking time of pizzas, said Krahenbuhl.
He explains, “We can fit into any business requirement that is available.” The Nagios solution is more flexible, more affordable, uses open standards and easy-to-write and available programming languages unlike other solutions that could be proprietary.” Maybank, RBS and large enterprises in the oil and gas industry already count as some of their customers.
Asterisk, an open-source communications platform, he describes as a Swiss army knife of communications that can be used for a number of things. For Intuittech, there are 3 situations where it can be deployed: first for enterprise office communications, second as a soft switch for telcos to route calls from point A to point B and finally for use in call centres.
Krahenbuhl explained, “We use it in all kinds of environments like in banks, insurance companies but also oil and gas.” He also pointed out Asterisk is also very good for communication via satellite links in the oil and gas industry, because it uses very little bandwidth and is very secure.
In 2011, Intuittech also made the strategic move of going into collaboration with Strateq. Strateq sells Intuittech’s solutions for them, regionally, as well as offer first-level support to customers while Intuittech holds up their end of the bargain via implementations of the core set up and consultancy services.
Tech advantages
Intuittech boasts having Nagios experts and Red Hat certified engineers. “We have very, very experienced Linux engineers that are able to build large clusters, scalable systems and systems for higher availability. We are always looking for really good Linux engineers,” said Krahenbuhl.
But even though they have the core know-how, they have had to outsource certain areas, to be able to scale up. Strateq is just one example. There are also experts they engage to do certain customisations in terms of plug-ins.
“It can be quite sensitive when we go to a client about this. But we always make transparent that we use Asterisk and Nagios. We don’t hide the fact that it is an OS solutions. Some other companies in Malaysia, they take an Asterisk lets say it is orange, then they go to a client, make it blue and call it something maybe, “superbox” and they pretend that they have created something by themselves (from scratch). We don’t do that.”
Instead, he insists that they add modules around it. An advantage of this is that clients can easily update their Asterisk and Nagios solutions even if they go to another solution provider to do this.
“It is important (for them) to know that all our solutions are deployed in a way that if they want, they could go to another provider that offers Asterisk solutions. That is the secret of our success.”
All of the modules in Intuittech’s solutions are open source in essence, but he admitted there are also some modules that are proprietary software. “Call compression, for example. The codec is commercial software that has to be bought before it can go into Asterisk platform as an add-on.”
Krahenbuhl concluded, “Not everything in the open source world is good. We have to be realistic about it.”
