Asterisk--Threatening or Boring?

Digium [1] CTO and founder Mark Spencer [2] has people talking about Asterisk again.  But you wonder if everyone heard the same speech.

Giving a keynote at the IT 360 conference in Toronto last week, Spencer said he wants people to see the open source software as a telephony engineering platform rather than just a vanilla VoIP IP PBX. He plugged SwitchVox, acquired by Digium last year, as an example of how people have taken the core Asterisk software and built innovative applications around it. Other apps cited include a phone-based interface to access eBay auctions to the "Popularity Dialer," a mechanism for placing pre-scheduled callers to users--just the sort of thing to get out of a bad date.

Chris von Neida of Axcess News [3] declared that Avaya, Cisco, and Nortel "better watch out" and says the software is poised to disrupt a $7 billion dollar telecommunications market the way Linux put a beatdown on Sun and Microsoft. This despite the fact Spencer noted they only have 130 employees and it's hard to get carriers to respect you when you're that small.

On the other side of the spectrum, Sean Michael Kerner was bored; he's still waiting for an Asterisk appliance he saw at NXTcomm [4] last year. He more rationally notes both Asterisk (the software) and Digium (the company) have a lot to do before they actually reach full potential.

None of these folks caught some of the more real world politics about who feels threatened by Digium. A number of companies in the Asterisk ecosystem got bent out of shape when Digium bought SwitchVox, seeing acquisition of the SMB turnkey solution as a threat to their own livelihoods. 

And Digium is not really worried about the Avaya and Cisco and Nortels of the world as much as they worry about Microsoft and are irritated by the hybrid-hosted model of Fonality [5]. Spencer has compared Microsoft to the Death Star and tends to use adjectives such as "evil" when it comes to hybrid-hosting.

For More:
- DevX News Asterisk more than IP PBX [6] feature.
- Von Nieda's Asterisk Love [7] piece
- Kerner's Asterisk is Boring [8] blog posting

Related articles:
Digium Takes Switchvox [9]
FEATURE: Fonality rides decentralization [10]