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A university council in Belgium that coordinates academic projects in the Flander region's on development cooperation, Vlir-uos, is moving to a telecom infrastructure based on open source.

"Open source was one of the award criteria in our tender", says Katrien Windels, responsible for IT at Vlir-uos. "Our institute co-operates with many organisations in the south, where open source is commonly used. We also know that it is usually easy to integrate open source solution in existing IT projects."

The institute also choose open source because of the rapid pace of development in this type of software and, lastly, because it cut out the costs for proprietary software licences.

Following a public tender in 2010, it selected an Belgian/French IT firm specialised in Asterisk, SIP and other open source telephony systems. "The first of our 23 SIP-telephones were installed in February." Workers at the institute can also use a software client installed on their desktop PCs.

The company also installed an Asterisk telephone exchange (IP-PBX), SIP phones and provided training to some of the users. "They handled the installation and the default configuration. Externally we still use the plain old telephone service, but the idea is to switch to an all IP-based telephone system in the future."

The Vlir-uos coordinates research on development aid, done by five universities: Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Universiteit Gent, Universiteit Antwerpen, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Universiteit Hasselt. The secretariat employs eighteen staff members, including two representatives in Congo and Ethiopia.

More information:

Vlir-Uos

Press release (in Dutch)

Press release (in French)