FierceVoIP Leaders: Mark Spencer – Founder and CTO, Digium

On the eve of AstriCon, FierceVoIP caught up with one of Digium's most frequent fliers, founder and CTO Mark Spencer.

FierceVoIP: How did you come to found Digium?

Spencer: I was a co-op student in 1999 with ADTRAN, then started a business running Linux support, and I was put in charge of finding a phone system. I realized it would be very expensive to put a new system in place at the office, so I created my own. I got the experience there and we refocused our model around phone systems.

FierceVoIP: Can we expect any big announcements out of AstriCon this year?

Spencer: One major announcement, I can't give any specifics on it though. We are also announcing the Innovations Award there.

FierceVoIP: Has all of the recent turmoil in financial markets and general economic slowdown affected Digium's sales at all?

Spencer: We have been fortunate not to have been part of the downswing and so far we have not been affected. We've had 28 consecutive quarters of growth and profitability.

I think some of that is because we are diversified and have more than half of our business overseas. We have a good presence in emerging markets as well as a strong core business in traditional markets. For instance, the largest gas company in Malaysia, PetroFac, uses our product to communicate with their rigs out at sea.

FierceVoIP: You are officially listed as CIO and founder of Digium. What does that job entail for you these days?

Spencer: I look for important emerging technology in the space and keep a monitor on the open source community and what they are doing. All together I try to drive the future of Asterisk, both at a company level and in the Asterisk community.

FierceVoIP:  Is it mainly an evangelical role?

Spencer: Partly evangelical, getting the word out about Asterisk and new developments, but also its about maintaining the company culture as we grow from the fifty  person company we were not too long ago, to a company with three times that many personnel. I love the culture of a small company, very down to earth and collaborative, but you have to grow and try to maintain that as you do.

FierceVoIP: Have there been any specific changes to Asterisk recently?

Spencer: We've dealt with some scalability issues in the carrier class with some tweaks but nothing too extensive.

FierceVoIP: Who do you feel is Digium's biggest competitor in the space?

Spencer: Well, you hear names like FreeSWITCH and Nortel with SIP. FreeSWITCH's main engineer started out with Asterisk, and they say we have scalability issues, but we have some huge installations working fine. Nortel's products can't even talk to their own phones. I think Asterisk has the value of practicality through open source.