Three wishes for Digium

As the afterglow from AstriCon fades, I think there are three areas where Digium could do a better job telling its story. To set the stage, I need to turn the clock back to June and NXTcomm with a conversation at the Heart Bar in Las Vegas

I was hanging out, ah, meeting, with Seamus Hourihan of Acme Packet, and the discussion turned to the subject of awards and customer wins and how they relate to companies and their lifecycle of announcements in building a reputation. Since Acme Packet currently has around half of the SBC market, I figure Seamus might have a clue here.  [Apologies in advance to Seamus if I misquote him; it was late and there was a lot of smoke in the bar]

"When [start-up] companies start out, first they talk about awards, because that's all they have. So they talk about that," he said. "Then, they make smaller customer announcements, because that's who they get.  Finally, they make large customer announcements and rack those up." 

Applying the Hourihan evolutionary scale, Digium is somewhere between steps two and three. It really doesn't need awards per say; the open source community of developers embracing Asterisk is far more valuable than any sort of award you could purchase. Still, there's a laundry list of accolades (if not a PowerPoint race car logo slide) from eWeek, TMC, Linux Magazine, InfoWorld and VoIP-News, not to mention FierceVoIP.

In lieu of customer announcements, Digium has its Innovation Awards to recognize what people are doing with Asterisk. You have to dig a bit, but users include health care (Emdeon Business Services) and call center applications (Aheeva).  NTT software is currently conducting a big time trial of Asterisk and adoption by a large carrier brand name would do a lot to dispel the prevailing mythology that "Asterisk doesn't scale."

(Another PowerPoint race car slide with customers/users would be a good thing as well - and I'm a guy who's snarky about race car slides).

But - at first glance, the Skype/Digium deal sounds good, but it's not Paris Hilton hot. Having access to over 300 million users on the biggest non-carrier carrier is a big deal, but the devil is in the details. Skype needs help breaking into the business market and an Asterisk box providing call routing capability to a bunch of independent desktop clients is just what the telephony doctor ordered. I'm sure Digium will sell more software, and Skype will be able to get its foot in the (product/service overcrowded, certainly cruising for a right-sizing) SMB market with Asterisk.

In my opinion, what Digium needs is to 1) better tell/communicate the stories about the customers and users it already has, 2) have a few clear big installation customer/user stories to both a) lend credibility to the company and b) dispel once and for all the "Asterisk doesn't scale" myth, and 3) Get one or two big corporate/IT endorsements.  

We're starting to see work on 3) with the current announcements with Skype and BroadSoft on the partnership side, but my wish for 2009 would be to see someone like IBM embrace Asterisk. IBM has a big love for open source, is progressive enough to actually think "out of the box" to do this, and has both carrier telephony and UC/enterprise presence. I've been told that IBM would likely prefer to remain neutral since it is so entrenched dealing with proprietary/legacy hardware.

- Doug [1]