Doug on IP Comm » Digium

Digium does hardware–services next?

Doug Mohney — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 19:13:31 +0000

Digium, the self-proclaimed “Asterisk Company,” is turning into the jack-of-all-trades company. For Enterprise Connect in Orlando this week, the company has rolled out “the first” of a family of VoIP gateways. Last month (well, more like two months ago), the company introduced its first IP phones at IT EXPO. I’m betting a cloud services offering at some point.

The new hardware are the G100 and G200 gateways, to support TDM-to-SIP and SIP-to-TDM applications (i.e. phone calls). With software based on the Asterisk “communications engine” and managed through a Digium point-and-click GUI, the gateways feature a power-saving design and “purpose-built” media processing capability via the DSP .

As you might expect, the G100 includes a single software-selectable T1/E1/PRI interface and supports up to 30 concurrent calls, while the G200 has two (2) T1/E1/PRI interfaces and supports up to 60 concurrent calls. Both models have integrated echo cancellation, a small footprint of 1U, half-width, half-depth, and no moving parts. List for the G100 is $1,195 while the G200 is $1,995. Hardware available today through a Digium distributor or integrator.

Digium’s move into more hardware begs the question as to how many other shiny products the company will roll into a VoIP hardware market already chock full of OEMs and name brands.

It’s not like there isn’t a market for VoIP hardware, mind you, given that the world is not even starting to crank into high gear to kick the TDM habit.

But hardware manufactures are starting to zag into services; Ericsson, Polycom, and ShoreTel all have rolled out cloud/hosted services, so it’s not a far-fetched idea to see Digium introduce a branded-version of Asterisk on a cloud.

Digium talks up Switchvox on campus

Doug Mohney — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:07:09 +0000

Digium (www.digium.com) has been talking up its Switchbox product in the education markets, both K-12 and higher education. The laundry list of customer wins is interesting, but it took a couple of queries to get an answer as to how many extensions you could support on a campus (Answer: A lot).

Customer wins include The Earth Institute, Columbia University (New York, N.Y.), Summit Public Schools (Redwood City, Calif.), University of Puerto Rico (San Juan, P.R.), and Southeast Kansas Education Service Center (Topeka, Kan.)

Since I used to work at a couple of Universities back in the day, I asked just how many extensions could be supported.

A single Switchvox system can support up to 400 users today. But you can gang multiple Switchvox systems together to support thousands of users in a large campus environment – something which is very cool and interesting.

Digium says some campuses are deploying fewer phones in each dorm building; makes sense since students now come with cell phones. Often, an individual department will upgrade the existing phone system to VoIP for UC features and use Switchvox to talk to the rest of the campus phone system.

There’s an interesting case study at: http://www.digium.com/en/company/casestudies/viewcasestudies/ucsd for the Union County School District of Georgia. There’s a multi-site Switchvox solution supporting over 230 IP phones, with a Switchvox server (“appliance”) at each of the five schools and the district office.

Digium announces AstriCon 2011

Doug Mohney — Mon, 09 May 2011 13:22:36 +0000

Digium (www.digium.com) has announced AstriCon 2011 today. The event will be held from October 26 through 28, at the Westin Westminster in Denver, Colorado.

Submissions for speaker opportunities can be made at www.astricon.net.

Digium typically makes a Big Announcement at AstriCon. The two I’ve liked have been the purchase of Switchvox way back when (Hi Tristan!) and last year’s announcement of the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) to fix all the things developers b****ed about when they tried to scale Asterisk or try to make it do things it wasn’t intended to do, like work with video.

(On the other hand, partnership announcements with Skype and IBM did not turn out all that marvy, alas).

ADTRAN, Digium in recovery mode after Northern Alabama tornado spree

Doug Mohney — Thu, 05 May 2011 16:16:52 +0000

ADTRAN (www.adtran.com) and Digium (www.digium.com) is currently recovering from the massive hit of tornados that swept through the southeast, with primary power restored to its facilities yesterday. Digium says none of its personnel appeared to have been injured, but several employees sustained “sustained personal property loss or damage,” according to a blog post by CEO Danny Windham on April 28.

Northern Alabama was hit by a string of tornados on Wednesday, April 27, sweeping across the state and clobbering multiple counties, including Madison County and the city of Huntsville. The storms took out houses and power, resulting in a dusk-to-dawn curfew in many places.

Commercial power was cut to the Huntsville, Alabama high tech campus on Wednesday – where ADTRAN and Digium have their HQs. Both companies had their Huntsville facilities closed until power was restored late on Tuesday evening, May 3.

Both companies are now back in full operation, but employees continue to cope with the aftermath of the tornados destruction.

Digium brags about 2010 Asterisk downloads

Doug Mohney — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:20:29 +0000

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*

Digium’s big news: Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)

Doug Mohney — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:19:21 +0000

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).

Digium’s new version of Asterisk

Doug Mohney — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:58:01 +0000

If you missed the news yesterday, Digium (www.digium.com) has released version 1.8 of Asterisk, rolling in more than 200 new features into the software. Highlights of the shiny-new release include new security features – explains all the security content at Astricon next week – integration with IPv6 (see previous re: Astricon), and “extensive” additions to ISDN-BRI functionality.

Asterisk 1.8 is designed as a Long Term Support release (i.e. not going away tomorrow) and indicates that Digium will provide at least four (4) years of support.

Security features in the new release include secure RTP support and a “security event framework” for logging and distributing security events with Asterisk. It also looks like they’ve cleaned up SIP implementation/security since the company is touting a “substantial increase” in the speed of registrations, TLS improvements and more flexible NAT handling.

Germans developers are supposedly happy about all the new shiny ISDN support, including call completion services, connected party identification, ETSI advice of charge (AOC), message waiting indicator (MWI), call rerouting and call deflection. I’m a little bit “euh” about ISDN support; European carriers – like anyone else with two cents of common sense these days – want to get rid of switched infrastructure and migrate everyone onto broadband sooner rather than later.

UC-esque bells and whistles include support for Microsoft Exchange, CallDev, and iCalendar, plus new conference call support, including default de-noise and no more need for DAHDI kernal for call conferencing.

“Additional” HD voice codec support includes support for flavors of Polycom’s Siren family, as well as signed 16 KHz media streams.

Scaling should be easier since XMPP is integrated now.

Another “feature” – but frankly, this is more of a Digium process change than a software embed – is Agile development. Under Agile, specific features are worked on in one month sprints and Asterisk users (supposedly) get newer features faster and insight into a road map as to what will come out when.

Along with Agile is a new automated testing process for better code quality.

AstriCon 2010 – I’ll be there on Wednesday & Thursday

Doug Mohney — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 15:38:27 +0000

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.

And the big news at Astricon will be …?

Doug Mohney — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 18:37:54 +0000

The Digium Astricon (www.astricon.net) show has become Digium’s annual event to announce Big News. Three years ago, the acquisition of Switchvox took place. Two years ago, it was the Skype/Digium interop agreement, while last year it was an IBM/Digium agreement.

Perhaps the big clue is Digium’s Kevin Fleming giving Wednesday morning’s keynote. From the description of his keynote on the AstriCon website–

“The Future of Open Source Communications
Asterisk has been an industry-changing open source project that has grown with the support of an active and thriving community. The news that Kevin Fleming will be sharing at AstriCon will further the disruption of the communications industry, as Asterisk did with its original release, and demonstrate Digium’s commitment to taking open source communications in an exciting direction for the Asterisk Community. “

Soooo… what does this mean, exactly? A deep embrace of Unified Communications (UC)? An overhaul of Asterisk code with lots of shiny bells and whistles? Something else completely?

A lot of the sessions this year seem to be built around the theme of “Asterisk is Scalable, Asterisk is Enterprise-quality,” with presentations from Orbitz, Gemeinschaft bragging about 10,000 phones with an Asterisk cluster, how to compete with Cisco and Avaya in Enterprise, mission-critical Asterisk implementations in Brazil and the energy industry, and a bunch of VoIP security stuff ladled on top.

Hopefully, this year’s announcement will be on the level of goodness that the Switchvox acquisition brought to the company. It took almost a year for Digium to work out the bugs with the Skype/SIP gateway and now Skype is Best Buds with Avaya. I’ve also been told that IBM has ditched their marketplace scheme, so Asterisk won’t be distributed through that channel.

Digium should also try to address some grumbling among some of its partners that the company has become too “ADTRAN-like” in its processes and slow to respond to requests for new feature adds to Asterisk and opportunities for working with the company.

IT EXPO – Digium too “bureaucratic”

Doug Mohney — Sat, 09 Oct 2010 15:41:32 +0000

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.