beelinebill March 21st, 2008

Digium was active this week at both Digium Asterisk World (DAW) in San Jose and VoiceCon in Orlando. It was a very successful week for us all here at Digium and the results of both events clearly indicated continued growth and interest in Asterisk, Asterisk market success, and Digium and partner product offerings!

Tuesday was a news-filled day for Digium http://www.digium.com/en/mediacenter/. Digium Asterisk World kicked off at VON.x in San Jose with Mark Spencer’s Keynote address at Digium Asterisk World. Danny Windham, our CEO, did a VON.x keynote - An Open Source VoIP Primer - to a full room of enterprise users, potential Asterisk adopters, and open source Asterisk interested parties.

Numerous other Digium folks presented at DAW including Jared Smith, Steve Sokol and Brian Degenhardt. VoiceCon in Orlando on the opposite coast ran with talks by both Mark Spencer and Bill Miller on Thursday.

There were three announcements that are exciting to Digium and they include A global Distribution partnership with Westcon to distribute the entire line of Digium products. Westcon’s new CollaborationPoint line of business is focused on open source solutions including Digium’s Switchvox IP PBX (http://www.digium.com/switchvox), the Asterisk Appliance (http://www.digium.com/en/products/appliance/), and Asterisk Developer Solutions and toolkits including all Digium’s telephony cards and Asterisk Business Edition (http://www.digium.com/en/products/).

Tuesday Digium announced the Switchvox SMB 3.5 release, the new version of the award winning SMB software that already includes the Switchboard user panels with built in Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, and Google Maps web-based interface panels. These built in tools allow users to build outstanding customer and support relations with their target customers. New features include multi-level administration - unlimited levels, built in Phone Configuration tools which are great for resellers and larger systems allowing provisioning of Polycom phones in minutes using batch tools for DID assignments and caller IDs, and adding of extensions, and the ability to easily find users in the directory by simply typing the name and similar to your cell phones locates the name directly in as few keystrokes as possible. Also, the SMB 3.5 software automatically populates the users desktop Polycom phone directory with contact info from the Switchvox address book - a time saving tool and excellent user experience.

Digium’s newest appliance, the Switchvox Appliance AA60 was also announced Tuesday and will be available with Switchvox SMB 3.5 software on March 31. The AA60 is a small footprint wall mountable package that offers higher reliability and lower costs and includes a standard 1 year warranty and an extended warranty option for 3 years.

Lastly, Digium announced our call for second annual “Innovation Award” entries http://www.digium.com/en/company/awards/. In 2007, we had an overwhelming response and for 2008, we have invited an outside community judge - more later on this person. Winners will be announced at Astricon in Phoenix in September and be invited to speak about their winning innovations at DAW in October in Boston. This is a great PR opportunity for those involved!

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I was at VoiceCon. I can share with you some of the event happenings. Digium’s booth was busy from start to finish full with enterprise users, resellers from major IP Telephony vendors who want to add Digium’s products to their offerings, and partners. Tristan, Randy and Gayle were overwhelmed giving demos, answering questions and setting up follow-on meetings. I was busy with three and a half days of press and analyst meetings. Mark Spencer flew to Orlando to participate in the “VoiceCon Summit: Software Architectures for Unified Communications” featuring Digium, IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Siemens, Mitel, and moderated by Fred Knight (Jitter.com Publisher and VoiceCon co-chair) and Jim Burton (UC Strategies). I did a panel with 3Com and Nortel on “Open Source in the Enterprise: How much and how soon?”

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Digium Asterisk World reports came back that Mark’s keynote (Why Digium Asterisk World?) and Danny’s keynote (An Open Source VoIP Primer) were well received and well attended. Digium had several other speakers: Brian Degenhardt spoke on the impact of next generation web technology on open source telephony applications, Steve Sokol on flexible platforms that enable voice applications, and Jared Smith did an introduction to Asterisk - all in the Open Source DAW track where all sessions were well attended. John Todd was the guest moderator and feedback was he did an excellent job - Digium and Pulvermedia thank John for his efforts making the overall program a success!

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We are hoping that overlapping events like this week never happen again! Please Pulvermedia and VoiceCon….no more concurrent dates!

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One last item that was my “you can’t make this stuff up moment”:

As VoiceCon was ending there was a chearleading event moving into the Gaylord Palms (a terrific venue by the way if you’ve never been there). The final day sessions of the conference were running as the convention committee placed placards in each rest room - Men’s AND Women’s! Now, why is the “AND” capitalized? Check this out:

• ABE , Asterisk Awards , AsteriskNOW , Channel , Digium Asterisk World , Open Source , Partners , Products , Switchvox , Tradeshows , VoiceCon
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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.

• ABE , AsteriskNOW , AstriCon , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source , Products , Switchvox
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ssokol February 18th, 2008

After nearly a year of cooking, AsteriskNOW! version 1.0 is ready for your dining pleasure. (So it took a year…. Blame the folks at Google. They’re the ones who made long-term beta tests popular. Some crazy idea about getting things right before they actually release them as products. Silly people.)

So, you ask, what is AsteriskNOW!? It’s a complete installation of Asterisk that doesn’t require a masters degree in Linux geekery to use. Download the image, burn it to CD, drop it in the tray, fire up the PC and 15 minutes later you’ve successfully converted an ordinary computer into an amazing telephony server with an easy-to-use web-based graphical user interface (a.k.a. the Asterisk GUI).

So, you ask, what can I do with AsteriskNOW!? Well, !?#& near anything. At least !?#& near anything that involves telephony. You can build a basic IP-PBX. You can VoIP-enable a legacy PBX. You can build a conference bridge. You can replace your ancient and limited voicemail system with a state-of-the-art Asterisk-based unified messaging system. You can make your one-man shop sound like a Fortune 500 enterprise with automated attendants (a.k.a. IVR menus). Oh, and you can do all of that from the comfort of the web GUI.

Want to take it up a notch? Ok. Dig in just a bit and you can build you own IVR system using the Asterisk Dialplan scripting language and either web-service or ODBC data sources. Want to stretch things a bit further? Learn the ways of AGI (the Asterisk Gateway Interface) and build a sophisticated voice communications application in the programming or scripting language of your choice. Feel like jumping in with both feet? Bust out your C compiler and build your own low-level applications using the Asterisk C API.

So what’s new since the last beta release? Great question:

• Over 1000 updates and improvements to the GUI
• Updated to Asterisk release 1.4.17
• Updated to Zaptel release 1.4.8
• Updated Linux Kernel 2.6.22
• Polycom phone auto-provisioning
• Improved package management and update capabilities

But wait…. That’s not all. This 1.0.1 version includes a few extras that aren’t part of the canonical Asterisk 1.4 release (including the Open Settlement Protocol and the phone provisioning module). Starting with the next release, AsteriskNOW! will be available in two flavors: AsteriskNOW! Pure, which contains only pure GPL and GPL compatible components and runs only the stock version of Asterisk, and AsteriskNOW! Plus, which includes non-GPL components and a limited number of features back-ported from the development version. As they say in in the burger commercials, have it your way!

One last thing: <shameless-commercial-plug>AsteriskNOW! is a great way for developers, VARs and ISVs to get started with Asterisk. Once you’ve seen the power, flexibility and feature set that makes Asterisk the most popular telephony SDK in the world, you’ll probably want to take a look at Asterisk Business Edition (ABE), which is AsteriskNOW!’s commercial counterpart. ABE uses the same simple installation, the same GUI framework and includes a range of support options and a flexible license model that make it ideal for commercial deployments.</shameless-commercial-plug>.

• AsteriskNOW , Community , Genuine Asterisk
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beelinebill February 11th, 2008

Digium is putting our money where our mouth is. We are investing in total quality programs throughout the company - and today we are rolling out the new Digium Exceptional Satisfaction Program (ESP).

ESP includes:

• Quality hardware products with “Stand behind the product” warranties.
• Money back satisfaction guarantee.
• Courteous and helpful service agents.

The quality mantra starts with our customers and extends to every aspect of our products and customer service. Our goal is to produce the highest quality hardware and software and to deliver the highest quality business solutions, training and support to totally satisfy our customers. Over the past year, we have re-architected nearly the entire range of PCI Telephony interface and gateway cards and introduced a wide range of PCI Express cards. We have listened to the community and our customers and now offer an echo-free guarantee. We have refined the drivers and increased performance for these cards.

Effective immediately, on all current Digium cards we have set the PCI and PCI Express Card warranty at FIVE YEARS and offer a no-risk guarantee to our customers. (See our End of Life announcements for discontinued products.) We have improved our pricing on a number of products - and redesigned our channel programs to benefit those organizations that truly partner with Digium.

Digium PCI and PCI Express cards are the best value in the market. If the cards do not work with Genuine Asterisk as advertised, our top notch technical support team will work with you to resolve the problem. If the problem can not be successfully resolved, we will refund your money. Yes, you heard it. We have always done this, but now we are promoting it and will continue to. Digium’s Hardware Appliances offer standard 1 year warranty that can be extended by renewing the subscription on your product.

100% Customer Satisfaction. Make no mistake - Digium is dead serious. As benevolent sponsor and maintainer of the open source Asterisk project, Mark Spencer’s dream has forever altered the world of communications.

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What do our customers say? Here is an excerpt from one of the open source Asterisk mailing lists, one person responding to another:

I have been using 220B’s for about 6 months. I have about 20 of them out in the field. I have not had any issues with them, and feedback is positive.

Same here. I’ve been using five TE220B in my company at 5 different sites since october 2007; up to now, zero problems and no echo at all. One of the sites runs a small callcenter that handles about 1000 incoming calls per day. So far the feedback is really positive. Alberto.

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I have launched many programs over the years, and while we’ve been planning this program and launch I have received more exciting employee feedback than ever before. The hallways, coffee pot, conference rooms, and parking lot discussions are about the excitement of proving to the world that open source telephony solutions are ready for the mainstream and so is Digium! We are proud of our “Mark Spencer” heritage as the author and creator of Asterisk as well as today’s major sponsor and community steward. We have the worlds best IP PBX in Asterisk, according to Infoworld, who awarded us the “Best IP PBX” award last month to kick off 2008. World class service and people along with the best open source based IP Telephony products on the planet.

Customer Focus! Quality Products! 100% Customer Satisfaction!

Visit www.digium.com for all the details.

We look forward to serving you!

• ABE , AsteriskNOW , Community , Genuine Asterisk , Open Source , Products , Quality
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danny January 18th, 2008

Over the past week we have received a number of charged responses regarding the recent change in policy related to the use of Digium trademarked terms in Google AdWords. Some of the responses supported our attempts to better control the use of Digium trademarked terms. Some of the responses disagreed with the policy, but respected Digium’s right to have changed the policy. Others were from individuals who clearly were unhappy with the change and the process by which it was implemented. We have listened carefully to the feedback, and as a result are relaxing our Google AdWord policy.

While we did provide Google a list of organizations that would be authorized to use the Digium trademarked terms, in retrospect it’s apparent that we underestimated the number of organizations that were utilizing Digium trademarked terms in their Google AdWords marketing campaigns. Underestimating the magnitude of this policy change also resulted in inadequate planning of the implementation of the change – we simply could have done a better job of communicating the proposed change in advance of it being implemented. We also could have better understood the actual mechanics of Google’s enforcement engine – and better anticipated the corresponding result.

In short, we now believe we made a mistake and are working to relax the requirements for using Digium trademarked terms in Google AdWords. The resulting change will reinstate trademark rights for the vast majority of those using the terms. For the confusion and frustration created by this event, we sincerely apologize.

A common test that I often use in determining the proper reaction when something goes wrong is – were we doing it for the right reasons? In this case the answer is absolutely yes. On the part of Digium and the Asterisk community and ecosystem, there’s value in ensuring that the trademarked terms are used in a legal, consistent, and ethical fashion. While it is important for Digium to protect its trademarks, we now better understand just how significant an impact changes in this area can have and just how important it is for any proposed changes to be judiciously derived and methodically implemented.

Thank you for your continued support of Digium.

• ABE , AsteriskNOW , Community , Open Source , Partners , Trademarks
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