I was reading a post by Tom Keating about SHSU going back to Cisco Call Manager from Asterisk. I also asked the same question? "Say What?"
Like Tom I also wrote about the SHSU, Sam Houston State University's switching "A Suprisingly Simple Switch from Cisco Call Manager to Asterisk"
I went looking for the reason and came out with following answers, the first one was the statement by the person mentioned by Tom and the other is an anonymous reader who left a comment a little more than 2 years ago.
How true, it is not the Call Manager Nor Asterisk, It is planning I guess.
Jason Fuermann, from SHSU,
If you can’t tell we’ve moved to call manger. There were a lot of factors for this. Most significantly we were essentially maintaining our own branch of the code since we had to develop some of the features that were required and were in the process of trying to figure out how to program shared line appearances. In the beginning that wasn’t a problem (we were used to it since we were a majority open source shop), but after a significant loss of personnel these types of systems became much harder to maintain. It was decided that we needed something we could bring joe shmoe off the street to administer and here we are now. We successfully rolled our entire campus to voip and haven’t looked back.
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Cisco Phones don't require an annual license... furthermore there are NO annual "license" fees. The fact of the matter is that if you figure in unlimited software updates and hardware support as well as TAC support in weighing the cost of the annual maintenance it is quite a deal!
I have no problem with any VoIP manager making a decision to go open source but please make sure the facts and costs of operation are accurate. Open software leaves you with very little if any dedicated support that could ultimately cost way more in production down time than any maintenance fee would cost!