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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