10 things to know and love about Asterisk

beelinebill March 7th, 2008

I have seen this type of blog or article before, but thought I would do my version today which will clearly be different. Sharing one person’s view of Asterisk its community and its evolution, we shall explore through these 10 data points!

10. An entire new industry was formed when Mark Spencer released Asterisk software into open source under the GPL license in 1999.

9. A passionate Community was built to harness the power of Asterisk over the next several years culminating today in the largest open source IP telephony community.

8. www.asterisk.org became the resource for developers to meet each other, share coding and implementation and war stories; there are many mailing lists and forums to communicate with others.

7. Digium started making and shipping TDM gateway cards to enable commercial growth in the 4th quarter of 2001. This enabled businesses around the globe to start building hybrid TDM-VoIP IP PBXs at very low costs

6. Third parties started to develop GUIs for Asterisk in the mid-2000s to build specific targeted products based on Asterisk. The GUIs were proprietary on top of Asterisk to configure it more easily. The Linux/Asterisk techies still prefer command line but less technical Linux folks like the evolution of the newer GUIs. Digium loved the Switchvox GUI and acquired the company. Switchvox is the best CPE-based business phone system on the planet! The advanced features include built in presence, queue management, call recording, easy to use and literally dozens of other phone features.

5. One GUI, FreePBX, along with Asterisk that became the basis for a distribution called trixbox, a distribution found from time to time. Digium created its own AsteriskNOW to simplify a distribution for non-technical users and open sourced the AsteriskGUI from this distribution.

4. Digium’s TDM gateway cards for PCI grew to over 3M ports shipped and others entered the exciting fast growing market. To clone your products is the sincerest form of flattery. Some clone totally and some build slightly different products to solve the same problem.

3. An entire “ecosystem” grew to enable the Asterisk world. Sokol and Associates built Asterisk training and the Astricon user/developer conference; Digium loved this and acquired the company; consulting companies started with those who were tired of the proprietary company way; O’Reilly published the Asterisk book followed by others; Digium former partner programs and encourages ecosystem to grow to offer more complete and custom solutions for resellers and users alike.

2. Mark Spencer, the author, visionary of open source Asterisk, CTO and Chairman of Digium is requested to speak around the world about Asterisk which he does as much as his schedule allows - especially for community related events and long term relationships that he has established.

1. Asterisk has begun moving mainstream with hundreds of companies building Asterisk-based products. Some are built on open source. Some on Asterisk Business Edition. Some are complete appliances, some are VoIP services including SIP and IAX trunking. Some are hosted and hybrid hosted solutions. Some are success, others are not - just like any business. The business model is evolving. VCs are interested in some of these companies as strong investments. Companies like 3Com and NTT who have been in the voice business a long time have commercialized Asterisk offerings built around Asterisk Business edition.

In Summary, Digium is growing up. A Seasoned executive team; Digium Asterisk World and Astricon Conferences in partnership with Pulvermedia who helps manage and market the events; Commercial offerings that are second to none: Switchvox is the most powerful easiest to use CPE-based SMB offering today, with exceptional Business telephony features, including unified communications offerings traditional proprietary do not have yet; the AA50 Appliance for small unsophisticated offices and branch offices; PCI and PCI Express Gateway card business; A loyal and growing community of developers, partners such as Polycom and Lumenvox and many others, and channels; An interesting mix of open source commitment to the world of developers and user groups and commercial business building. It is fun, intense, highly competitive, eye opening, high visibility in the press and with analysts, and just coming to the office every day is exciting.

3 Responses to “10 things to know and love about Asterisk”

  1. # VoIP IP Telephonyon 14 Mar 2008 at 9:57 pm

    10 More Reasons to Love and Like Asterisk….

    I think I distorted facts enough and without confusing you further, I will guide you to Bill’s Article. Enjoy a good and informative reading….

  2. # Jon Sampsonon 15 Mar 2008 at 9:51 am

    is this 10 things about Asterisk or 10 things about Digium???

  3. # beelinebillon 25 Mar 2008 at 10:01 pm

    To be fair Jon, it covers both - count ‘em (7-3)! Working at Digium is certainly a terrific experience. Asterisk, however, clearly is the groundbreaker; the disruptor; the enabler; the leading and most powerful open source IP Telephony software. It has been downloaded nearly 5 million times, installed, modified, sold, supported, and has changed more lives than any telephony product in the world. You can take Asterisk out of Digium, but you can’t take the Digium out of Asterisk!

    Thanks for taking the time to visit the blog and post a comment.

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