Other stats out of the Digium press release include more than 9,800 people who have contributed code to Asterisk, in use in over 170 countries today with an estimate of about one [...]]]>

Digium (www.digium.com) played the numbers game last week. The company bragged about having Asterisk downloaded more than two million times for 2010.

Other stats out of the Digium press release include more than 9,800 people who have contributed code to Asterisk, in use in over 170 countries today with an estimate of about one million active servers and “Billions” of minutes of phone calls.

And let’s not forget the list of highlights, including the release of Asterisk 1.8, the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) – quite easily the most important piece of work out of the company in the past four years – and something about Gartner Magic Quadrant visionaries mumble-mumble.

I’m more interested to see uptake and applications done via SCF over the next six months.  Give us your stats, your case studies, your cool projects taking over the world of IP communications, Digium!

*ahem*

Yes, this was/is The Big Deal Digium employees kept hinting at [...]]]>

National Harbor, Maryland – Digium (www.digium.com) announced a new open source project today to go beyond the limitations of the company’s Asterisk IP telephony platform, adding a “Scalable Communications Framework” to enable “the highest levels” of availability, scalability, extensibility, fault-tolerance and performance.

Yes, this was/is The Big Deal Digium employees kept hinting at over the past month.

SCF opens up a new universe of possibilities for open source communications – not just telephony, bunkies – developers. And it’s not a replacement for Asterisk, but a new extendable platform.

At AstriCon’s morning keynote, SCF was demoed live in a fault-tolerant configuration. Audience members dialed into one of two “call centers”  with a shared conference bridge and then the power was shut down on one of the call centers. Calls were transparently shunted over to the second set of servers without calls being dropped.  

Asterisk SCF will be available as a system of distributed components that can be mixed and matched, deployed on a single system or a cluster of systems in a transparent fashion.

SCF comes out of long and on-going requests from the Asterisk community to use Asterisk in more and better ways. Fault-tolerance and scalability have long been the dual whacks critics have had against Asterisk, while developers have wanted easier ways to tie in the IP telephony platform into rich media/UC applications, preferably with a variety of software tools.

Rather than re-invent the wheel – and potentially breaking it – Digium and a core of about 20 outside advisory developers decided on a companion product/platform designed from scratch.  To communicate between processes and servers, SCF uses ICE – Internet Communications Engine – another open source project.

Developers looking to work with SCE will have a wide variety of options for programming via APIs and more broadly accessible “extension points” with everything from Java to Windows C# sharp being supported (along with Python, PHP, various other flavors of C, and various other languages that I can’t remember off the top of my head).

There’s more to come with SCF; I talked with Kevin Fleming after his keynote and there’s quite a bit to process between Kevin’s comments and my own thoughts. (Other than how I can’t nail the “Big Announcement” prediction more accurately).

If you are looking to brief, email me.  Or look for me in the loud, er, expressive [...]]]>

I’ll be running around at AstriCon 2010 (www.astricon.net) on Wednesday, October 27 and Thursday, October 28.   Don’t know if I’ll be tweeting on site; the last time I was at the Gaylord, wireless connectivity was hit-or-miss.

If you are looking to brief, email me.  Or look for me in the loud, er, expressive pink shirt.

The comments were unsolicited and came up as a part of the normal back-and-forth briefings held at IT EXPO (www.itexpo.com) earlier in the week and they all sounded a [...]]]>

Several people at IT EXPO thought Digium has become a little bit too conservative and unresponsive of late when it comes to doing business.

The comments were unsolicited and came up as a part of the normal back-and-forth briefings held at IT EXPO (www.itexpo.com) earlier in the week and they all sounded a near-identical theme: When approached with a new idea of some sort or feature add to the core Asterisk software, Digium managers wanted a business plan, justifications, and a whole bunch of other stuff before moving forward.

One conversation went so far as to suggest IP phone maker snom – a long-time Digium partner – might not be rolling out its new IP PBX offering in the SMB space if Digium hadn’t become so “bureaucratic” over the past two years. 

In “Phase 1,” Avaya customers will have “access” to Skype Connect, so anyone running a SIP-based IP PBX will be able [...]]]>

Avaya (www.avaya.com) and Skype (www.skype.com) announced much big love and a strategic partnership today.  But the meat of the agreement won’t be implemented until the second half of 2011. And it’s not exclusive.

In “Phase 1,” Avaya customers will have “access” to Skype Connect, so anyone running a SIP-based IP PBX will be able to exchange voice-based calls – but not SILK-quality calls.

Enterprises will have to sign up directly with Skype or a Skype Connect account and pre-pay for minutes since that’s how calls traversing between the SIP universe and the Skype universe are billed. (And seriously, how old school telco is that?)

Neither side would talk about compensation around Skype Connect minutes, but Avaya Senior VP/President Alan Baratz said they’re paying Skype for tech support in implementing the SILK codec and other technology.

Further out there, in the “second half of 2011” is a promise of fully integrated functionality between Skype clients and Avaya IP-based technology, including the whole UC enchilada of presence, messaging, voice, and video.  Avaya will wrap “enterprise level control and management” around the Skype application services.

Judging from the some of the comments given by both Baratz and Skype Enterprise GM/President David Gurlé, both sides are still in process of mapping out what would and wouldn’t be supported… which makes me wonder about hitting the “second half” of 2011, unless that means making a release date announcement for support to come out in 2012…

Two years ago, Digium (www.digium.com) and Skype announced a similar love-in/work-together integration agreement and it took almost a year to get what ultimately evolved into Skype Connect to properly work with Asterisk. 

Founder Steinmann started up SIPfoundry and the sipXecs project in 2004, along with morphing [...]]]>

Newly launched eZuce (www.ezuce.com) comes with some familiar names in the IP PBX world. Hoping onto the UC bandwagon – ok, so everyone is these days – eZuce openUC is bragging about seven years of development through SIPfoundry efforts.

Founder Steinmann started up SIPfoundry and the sipXecs project in 2004, along with morphing Pingtel from a handset manufacturer into an open source IP PBX software company .  He was rolled into Nortel in 2008 with the acquisition of Pingtel from its parking spot at BlueSocket to support its implementation of sipXecs as the Software Communications System (SCS), but you know what happened to Nortel, right? Also onboard is SIPfoundry/sipXecs-er Doug Huber, who is listed as “Lead Architect.”

eZuce openUC is being touted as an enterprise-grade open alternative to Microsoft, and being targeted at firms with anywhere from 200 to 10,000 users.  There’s also some positioning to put it as “where Asterisk left off” – uh, guys, do you really want to go there again? – by offering a fully standards-based solution for replacing existing legacy IP PBX systems both as premise-based CPE and through hosted deployments.

Yes, I’m skeptical. If one remembers the snake-bit history of Pingtel – parked at BlueSocket because the cash ran out, then bought by Nortel before it went bankrupt – you might be skeptical as well.

"Digium is evaluating the public response and usage of the iPhone and BlackBerry Apps, and based on these results we’ll determine if and when [...]]]>

I hate to take Digium (www.digium.com) out to the woodshed, but this is the response I got when I asked about the potential for a Switchvox mobile client for Android.

"Digium is evaluating the public response and usage of the iPhone and BlackBerry Apps, and based on these results we’ll determine if and when we should develop a version for Android or any other platforms and if the current functionality should be refined or changed."

*sigh* Serious corporate-speak and not the sort of thing I would have expected to see out of them.

Digium is located in the Cummings Research Park, the second largest research and technology park in the U.S. and the fourth largest in the world.  Its’ neighbors include ADTRAN and a whole [...]]]>

Running around in Huntsville last week, I was invited to spend some time with Digium and see the company’s building and facilities.

Digium is located in the Cummings Research Park, the second largest research and technology park in the U.S. and the fourth largest in the world.  Its’ neighbors include ADTRAN and a whole bunch of aerospace companies supporting NASA and the Army.

Regrettably, I didn’t have a chance to get a picture of the outside of Digium’s multi-story office building — accidentally left my “real” camera back in the hotel room and the cabby had me annoyed because she couldn’t break a $20 on a$7 fare over from the hotel.  Just imagine big, shiny, and relatively new; Digium moved into its current building about two years ago and the company has an option to build a second one on an adjacent site should the need arise.

This is the ground floor atrium of sorts that extends up about two floors.  Do  I need need to spell out why the Asterisk is there?

A blurry shot of the Mark C. Smith boardroom.  Smith was the founder of ADTRAN and a mentor to Digium founder Mark Spencer, not to mention an investor in Digium and sat on the company’s board.   Of course, ADTRAN has named its much larger Conference Center after Smith, but it is the thought that counts.

Other conference rooms are named after various species of penguins (Linux, penguin mascot, Mark Spencer’s sense of humor).

Digium board testing area. While most people associate the company with it’s Asterisk IP PBX / IP telephony platform, the company still ships plenty of telephony boards.

Bins of assembled and packaged boards ready to be shipped out to telephony servers around the globe.

Manufacturing isn’t for the light-hearted, as it requires managing inventory, being able to deliver product on time, and being able to assess the quality of shipped products in order to improve them — returned products are no fun for customers or customers.

Digium hired someone out of the auto industry to refine its manufacturing processes and work on improving the quality of the products it ships to reduce the number of returns it gets on hardware.  Fewer returns mean less money and headaches on sending out a replacement part while a “lean” manufacturing process means being able to build the products you need when needed, rather than building a run of boards and having them sit on the shelves for a couple of months.  Idle/excess inventory means tied up dollars — not good for any company and really Not Good for a company that is rapidly growing and needs to put money into expansion.

Speaking of returned products, this is Digium’s failure-analysis lab.  Basic diagnostics of failed boards happens here while more sophisticated analysis is conducted on an outsource basis to one of the local engineering labs in the area — outsourced tasks can include fine sectioning of a board or a look through an electron microscope to discover a failed solder joint.

Digium’s humble shipping department.  If you look outside, you can see the Astri-truck.

A close-up of the Astri-truck.

Least we forget that Digium also does softwaer,  this is one of a number of programmer meeting areas with comfy chairs and a big whopping white board.