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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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
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