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Open Source Blog
Asterisk: the next big thing?
July 04, 2006
During the discussion on open source and VC funding at the recent OSBC conference, the name of one open source project was mentioned more than most: the Asterisk PBX.
"A lot of our brethren have been making that flight down to Huntsville, Alabama to talk to them," commented Robin Vasan, managing director of Mayfield Fund. I decided to investigate further.
Hunstville, Alabama is home to Digium the company started by Asterisk creator Mark Spencer, which sells commercial licenses of Asterisk for enterprises that don't want an open-source license, as well as PCI cards.
Spencer began the Asterisk project in 1999 when he built a phone system for his Linux-support employer using Linux. By August 2005 it was being developed by more than 300 coders and had nearly 250,000 users and had picked up the support of IBM, AT&T and Lucent, among others.
So why all the interest?
Asterisk can be used as a traditional PBX or VoIP gateway and with an interface card enables very cheap voice and data transport over IP, TDM, switched and Ethernet architectures, according to my ComputerWire colleague.
"How cheap? The FXS and FXO cards with echo cancellation retail at $2,095 and $2,335, respectively. Without the echo-cancellation module they would cost $1,810 and $2,050. Asterisk Business Edition license would be on top of that.
That compares to an average of between $600 and $1,000 per user for an enterprise to migrate to traditional telephony to VoIP using non-open source alternatives."
Far from a techie project, Asterisk is being targeted at enterprise environments by Digium with its Asterisk Business Edition offering, which provides support, advanced testing, legal protection, guides and technical information on top of the open source Asterisk offering.
Asterisk users include contact centre provider Aheeva, hosted VoIP provider Go2Call, and VoIP service provider VoicePulse, among others.
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