AstriCon 2008 â€“ Future Asterisk Delivery and Support

Phoenix, Arizona - Originally expecting to see Brian Aker of MySQL give the lead keynote, AstriCon attendees were instead briefed on four new initiatives Digium is undertaking to improve and support Asterisk and its developer community.

Digium executives were left scrambling due to a phone call late Tuesday night from Aker, who was stuck in Minnesota due to a combination of weather and airline scheduling problems. Wednesday's keynote became a combination of presentations about Digium's belief in open source as the key to the company's future success, announcement of customer innovation awards, and an outline of four key initiatives to be rolled out over the next couple of quarters, covering Asterisk Now, Asterisk's marketplace, Asterisk Application Manager, and subscription support for open source Asterisk.

Asterisk Now, the company's "software appliance" designed to be a complete set of code to easily download and install Asterisk, will get a couple of face lifts. Release 1.5 will have Asterisk running on the CentOS Red Hat clone with Free PBX running on top of it. The new release is expected to appear in the next week or so.

Longer term, Asterisk will appear as a binary installation for CentOS and a number of other popular Linux flavors. Support for Debian-based releases is planned, as is the capability to do code management from a repository.

The Asterisk Marketplace will also get a face lift, moving from a static document simply listing members of the Asterisk ecosystem, to a more dynamic and deep infrastructure capable of supporting all components for delivery if companies choose to do so, including billing.

A2M, the Asterisk Applications Manager, will provide much easier updating and installation of software. It will allow users to simply browse, click, and buy a self-installed binary. A2M will work not only for commercial releases, but open source software as well.

The announcement that created the most buzz in the audience was subscription support for the open source version of Asterisk. Subscribers will receive the same quality and type of support with open source as they now do with the Business Edition of Asterisk.

CEO Danny Windham said the four initiatives are in various phases of existence, with some of the announcements in the "definition stage" with details to be worked out.