Most people will never have heard of Asterisk, yet it's a sure bet that an increasing number of these same people make calls with it each day. This week, Asterisk registered its 1,000,000th download, while the company behind Asterisk, Digium, continued its dominance with its 24th straight quarter of growth.
Is there an end in sight for Digium's/Asterisk's success? Not anytime soon, it would appear. Tim O'Reilly has called Asterisk the industry's most under-appreciated open-source success story, and he's probably right, though it depends on whom you ask. Industry pundits may not give it the credit it's due, but customers certainly are.
Congratulations to Mark and team!
I've long been an admirer of Digium, the company behind Asterisk, the world's leading open-source telephony platform. Tim O'Reilly has been a longtime proponent of Digium and Asterisk, but I admit that I haven't paid enough attention to the telephony market to understand its importance fully.
I was fortunate to spend some time on the phone with Mark Spencer, founder of Digium and the Asterisk project, and he set me straight on how Digium is doing (Teaser: Exceptionally well), and what it's like to seed a market for one's competition:
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Surely, 3Com could have written its own VoIP software. In fact, it has, releasing two new products recently based on its own technology. But the more interesting release is its OEM'ing of Digium's Asterisk-based VOIP appliance.
"Digium is the leader in open source telephony, so we are partnering with the most significant company in that space," [3Com marketing director Kevin] Flanagan said. "By taking the [Digium] Asterisk Appliance and placing a 3Com UI on it and supporting it with our Global Service organization, which we believe no other open source telephony provider can do, we are making this technology available to even the smallest businesses and organizations."
I view this as a toe dip for 3Com. If successful, undoubtedly it will end up going even farther with Digium/Asterisk. Why reinvent a wheel that the open-source community is already building?
Digium is still acquisition fodder itself, but the company has decided to do an acquisition of its own, purchasing one of its partners, Switchvox, as CRN reports:
Digium is stirring up the open-source community it helped create by buying one of the vendors that has built an IP-PBX on its Asterisk VoIP platform.... Read More
Digium Thursday will unveil plans to acquire Switchvox, one of the many SMB-focused vendors that have cropped up in recent years with products built on top of Digium's open-source Asterisk VoIP software. Digium is the primary developer of Asterisk.
Most of the CEO profiles we've done have covered CEOs who serve the enterprise IT market. To an extent, Danny Windham, CEO of Digium, does the same. But Digium's market - Telecom - is broader than that. This is the company whose modest goal is to open the world of communications...from Alabama.
In fact, this is one of the things I like best about Digium: it is yet another proofpoint that in open source, anyway, it's not important to be based in the Bay Area. World domination of Telecom from Huntsville, Alabama. Who would have thought?
Name, position, and company of executive
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Danny Windham, CEO, Digium.
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