danny September 28th, 2007

It’s an exciting day for Digium - today we announced the acquisition of Switchvox. And even though these two names were the winners of the straw poll here at Astricon today, we’re not really considering using either of them in the future. Josh Stephens and the guys in San Diego have done a great job of building a product that will help us bring Asterisk to the masses - not to mention they’re a talented and fun bunch with whom I’m really looking forward to working. This announcement represents a significant expansion of Digium’s commercial product strategy and has taken the majority of my time over the past couple of months. I think we could have negotiated the rights to build a canal in a foreign country connecting two oceans with less paper than we would up with for completing this deal (lawyers!).

I’m sure there will be speculation that this announcement somehow signals that Digium is now more interested in its commercial success than the success of the open source project. However, that’s just not the case. Today Digium’s resource and financial commitment to the Asterisk open source project and community is greater than at any point in Digium’s past - a statement that we hope to make each year for years to come.

We recognize and respect that in Digum’s case there’s a delicate balance between open-source and commercial enterprise. Today there are a number of companies working to build commercial products using Asterisk as a basis, many of whom do little to further or improve the open source code base in the process. At least in the case of Digium, as our commercial side continues to grow, we pledge to grow our support of the open source project correspondingly.

Here are Josh’s comments on the acquisition…

We at Switchvox have always been interested in bringing the power and flexibility of open source software to the mainstream market. When we discovered Asterisk a few years ago, we were immediately struck by the benefits it could bring to small businesses like ours. Since then, we’ve been working on Switchvox in an effort to bring Asterisk to as many people as possible, whether or not they were interested in understanding the underlying technology.

In addition to making Switchvox easy to use, another goal has been to make Switchvox easy to integrate with the other products in your enterprise. To that end we’ve recently added both SugarCRM and Salesforce panels as well as the ability for users to easily add their own custom panels. This is just the beginning, and we plan to add even more end-user customization tools and APIs in the future.

The entire Switchvox team is excited to become part of the Digium family and to be entering this new phase of the company’s life. We look forward to extending the reach of Asterisk and other Digium products, making them more accessible to more people. We have been working on a road map that we feel will change the IP PBX landscape, and with the knowledge and help of Digium we will to be able to work faster than ever to bring those features to market.

With all the changes going on we want to be clear that we remain committed to our users, resellers and partners and know that the rest of the Digium team is behind us. The products that are currently available will remain available and you can expect the same high level of customer service and customer-centric development for which Switchvox has become known.

–Joshua Stephens
President/CEO Switchvox

I’d like to welcome the entire Switchvox team into the Digium family.

Danny

• Community , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source , Products , Switchvox
• Comments(2)

beelinebill September 27th, 2007

Today Digium announces that Switchvox has become part of the Digium family. This is a group of talented people whose mission in life is to change the world by making things that simply work. In their past lives, the founders developed small systems that were self-contained and each time they progressively improved their vision. With their Switchvox IP PBX technology to deliver VoIP and hybrid solutions to small and medium businesses, they accomplished just that. Their asterisk-based IP PBX software simply works. It’s GUI is second to none to run an office phone system. It’s Web 2.0 Mashups are simply elegant, informational, and cool. The people are terrific and they are welcomed into Digium.

Today at Astricon will be an event of large proportion in the Asterisk open source community. For the first time, we will unveil the Digium Switchvox software in our booth. Users will see this simplicity, already installed and used in some 1400 installations with over 65,000 connected IP and analog phones. The personalities of the creators of this user-friendly software based on Asterisk are integrated into this offering and each release becomes easier to use for more people and businesses - driving Asterisk-based solutions into the mass market.

Digium and Switchvox executives will talk to attendees and community members today and answer any questions as best we can on the first day of an announcement. More details will be unveiled over the coming months. Some Bloggers who were briefed have already posted their first stories. Some posters are much more professional than others. I’ve seen the initial posts from people who were briefed earlier in the day and people who were in the right place at the right time at Astricon later last night after the Digium-Switchvox team had a joint signing celebration. Like software based on Asterisk, the blogs vary from easy on the eyes to read and understand to not so easy to understand or even comprehend what angle the writer was trying to take. Switchvox software based on Asterisk is clearly superior and easily accomplishes the workhorse tasks of a phone system in easy to read and understand graphical formats integrated with the web.

Other Asterisk-based software has lots of stuff and can do lots of what Asterisk can do, which is “immense” as described last night but is not elegantly presented or easy to use.

So read the blogs and the articles. After days of briefing press and analysts, you will read upcoming articles that you personally can compare, to describe the writer’s personal felt impact of what Digium’s acquisition of Switchvox will have on the Asterisk Community, Switchvox customers and partners, and Digium’s customers and partners. You decide which writers are bizarre, which writers are aligned with competitors, which writers “get it” and which writers are aligned with Digium’s and Switchvox’s vision.

The open source community will gain from Digium’s move. Elements of Switchvox’s solution will be contributed back to the community over time. Digium’s success is always shared with the community by continued and increased investments in open source resources and events such as Astricon and Digium Asterisk World where users and prospects meet and learn more about how to use Asterisk, how to market Asterisk-based products, how to build dial plans that can turn the tables on a telemarketer, and on and on. Customers and prospects learn about more open source based choices.

Danny and Josh, the two respective CEOs will publish their thoughts here shortly, I am prefacing their post by telling you, “Woo hoo!!!!!!!!!” Get ready to Rock and Roll with Digium and Switchvox. When “best of breeds” get together, the results are “best of the best” so join us for the ride!

• ABE , AsteriskNOW , AstriCon , Community , Products , Tradeshows
• Comments(11)

malcolmd September 24th, 2007

And I mean that in the strictest Xzibit-sense of the word.

Matt Fredrickson’s been putting a lot of work into the multi-port digital card driver. That’d be the following cards:

TE420 , TE410 , TE405 , TE220 , TE210 , TE205 and of course the bundled versions of those cards (TE412/407/212/207).

These performance improvements result in reduced system load, decreased call setup / teardown times, and…we’ve also seen enough improvement that we’re comfortable enabling the hardware-based DTMF support on the VPMOCT128 and VPMOCT064, formerly the VPM450M, modules. So, for everyone that’s been using the relaxdtmf option, check out the latest 1.4 branch of Zaptel code. This new functionality isn’t yet in a tarball’d release, meaning that you won’t see it in 1.4.5.1, but you should see it in 1.4.6, when it becomes available.

• Products
• Comments(0)

malcolmd September 21st, 2007

Aloha,

All this talk of time travel reminded me that I had some old photos from the LinuxWorld from the Winter of 2004 that was held in New York. Back then, the employee count was somewhere around a dozen or less.

Continue Reading »

• Tradeshows
• Comments(5)

danny September 18th, 2007

This is the second most frequently asked question I have received since agreeing to leave a perfectly wonderful job as president of a large, publicly-held, well-established, and successful supplier of networking and communications equipment to lead the team here at Digium. The question comes in many different forms, some direct and some in a round-about fashion, and most often comes from someone that is, well, lets just say, more my age than is the prototypical Digium employee. After all, why would someone give up the big corner office with a great view on the top floor with the cherry desk and credenza for a folding table and this creature as an office mate?

This creature by the way is known as Guardian and is the creation of Mark Spencer, Digium’s founder and a man of rock-star status in the community of open source developers. It’s a Digium icon – but apparently is more of a fixed-base operator than a mobile operator – so when Mark moved out of this office upon my arrival I was awarded custody of Guardian and Mark negotiated visitation rights for every other weekend.

To someone who’s not been following the disruption that Digium and other open source companies like Digium represent in the world of software development (anyone notice the sell of Zimbra to Yahoo for $350M?), and is brazen enough to ask me directly, I suspect the stream of consciousness that spews forth for the next fifteen minutes includes far more detail than was expected or possibly warranted. But hey, I’m an excitable boy.

It gives me the opportunity to explain how IP Telephony and Unified Communications is disrupting traditional business communications. It’s usually followed up with how mass collaboration and open source is disrupting the way large-scale software development is done. I then throw in a few paragraphs about how the traditional PBX will become obsolete in favor of software applications running on either dedicated or virtual machines – and follow that up by explaining that Digium is at the epicenter of where each of these market trends intersect. By then, if I haven’t caused the person’s head to spin around backwards, I can move on to reasons that even my father, who approaches luddite status, can understand.

I don’t really know if people and personalities come in ‘big company’ or ‘small company’ models, but if they do I’m certainly of the small company variety. I will mention that when the little company I helped found was acquired by my previous employer, the combination was approximately the size that Digium is today. The excitement and enthusiasm of building something and watching it take shape along the way with the thrill of knowing that if you make bad decisions today you may not be here tomorrow, is in the Alabama vernacular, what cranks my tractor.

Having been at Digium now for several months, I’m even more bullish on the future prospects for the company than before joining (which I’m sure is a relief to my wife). That notwithstanding, I must admit some early apprehension to moving into a company where I have more gray hairs that the entire company combined. However, what the Digium team lacks in experience, they more than make up for in enthusiasm and innovation. After all, most of them were here when I arrived because they ‘got it’ way before I did. Mark Spencer had succeeded in creating a culture that attracts young, energetic, and innovative talents into the company. This has produced what might be called a ‘west-coast-style’ culture here in north Alabama – which is non-traditional, quirky, and occasionally irreverent, but is also fun, challenging, and engaging. Culture is such an important and often fragile aspect of any company’s success, and one of my goals is to preserve and protect those elements of culture that have served the company so well.

So, combine the business opportunity with a unique culture and an idealistic group of people who believe that Digium has the potential to change the world, and you get the answer to the second most asked question I’ve heard since joining Digium. By the way, if you’re interested in learning the answer to the most frequently asked question I’ve heard since joining the company, stay tuned to future blog entries.

Danny Windham

• Flip flops , Open Source
• Comments(0)