Astricon

by James Gaskin

November 8, 2006 —

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The Open Source Voice over IP community was nice enough to locate their recent convention about 15 miles from me, so it was easy to go see what's cooking in the Asterisk world today. I saw more than I expected and less than I expected, making for an interesting visit.

Digium, "The Asterisk Company" may not ring many recognition bells for corporate types, but they rate at the top of the Asterisk world. If you're out of the Open Source Software VoIP loop, Asterisk is the first OSS PBX that zoomed to prominence. Well, the installed numbers may not impress you, but their percentage of VoIP PBX sales to small and medium businesses should, because they have the majority of them. Next time you're knee deep in the dreaded PBX upgrade, think of how nice it would be to load a complete PBX onto a standard server with one CD. That's the reality for the Asterisk crowd.

One company you do know, Polycom, believes in Asterisk and Digium's Asterisk Business Edition strongly enough to design new phones to work with that system. Pricing in the Asterisk world being the way it is, meaning cheaper, this should help Polycom's penetration into other voice over IP installations.

If you like WiFi phones to replace employee's cell phone and desk phone with one cell phone sized handset that works over the company wireless network, Astricon was a good place to play with those. Models from Linksys, UTStarcom, and ZyXEL were on tables around the exhibit area. That's the small, but multi-national, exhibit area, since Asterisk really sings in Europe and Asia.

It may not be Web 2.0, but a variety of voice over IP systems integrate better than ever with computer applications. That was one of the big promises, after all, that voice data streams would interact with application data streams, and now they do. See a phone number in Outlook and click a button to connect that call via your voice over IP system. SugarCRM, an Open Source success story, weaves in and out of VoIP systems even better.

Voice over IP makes great sense for small businesses and branch offices today. Be prepared, because you will see more of that technology sneak into the enterprise. Astricon exhibitors included at least three companies selling equipment to enterprises and carriers on a regular basis today. There will be more tomorrow.

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