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