Industry Veterans to Discuss Cloud-Ready Service Providers, Open Source’s (News - Alert) Impact in Contact Centers

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., September 12, 2012—Digium Inc., the Asterisk Company, announced today that Chris Gatch (News - Alert), chief technology officer at Cbeyond (Nasdaq:CBEY), and Clint Oram, cofounder and chief technology officer at SugarCRM, will deliver keynote presentations at the ninth annual AstriCon User Conference & Expo, the longest running conference devoted to the Asterisk (News - Alert) communications platform.

This year’s event will be held October 23-25, 2012, in Atlanta, Georgia, bringing together the world’s open source enthusiasts – from code developers and Asterisk integrators to service providers and enterprise IT professionals – who share an interest in Asterisk, the world’s most widely used open source telephony platform.

Gatch will present “Head in the Clouds: A Service Providers View of Open Source” on October 25 at 9:00AM CST. He will discuss the changes to anticipate in the small and medium-sized business (SMB) market induced by cloud technology and how a new genre of service providers will fuel this shift. Gatch will also address some of the emerging services from the network service provider and hosting industries that make it easier for SMBs to utilize cloud services.

Specifically, he will focus on the nuances of the cloud market, emerging network and infrastructure services supporting the cloud trend, and the critical importance of security to the transition from on-site to cloud-based services.

Gatch is responsible for leading technology strategy at Cbeyond (News - Alert). Since the company’s inception in 1999, he has served in many leadership roles, including vice president of business development, vice president of product development, vice president of engineering and CTO.

Oram will present “The Impact of Open Source Technologies in the Contact Center: Let’s Get Real” on October 24 at 9AM CST. He will share his insight into the fast-changing world of the modern contact center and how open source solutions are changing the way the industry conducts business. By intelligently merging affordable and feature-rich technologies such as Asterisk and SugarCRM, modern contact centers can achieve things that used to require significant financial and technical resources.

Oram helped launch SugarCRM in 2004 with the goal of enabling companies around the world to turn customers into loyal fans. Today, he leads product strategy and the product management and community teams. He was one of the original architects and developers of the Sugar application and has focused on helping build out the product, company, partners and community in a variety of executive roles.

Along with compelling keynotes, the AstriCon conference contains four tracks with more than 45 topics to offer attendees variety and options during this two-day event. Tracks include cloud, tutorial/development, enterprise/large scale and innovation.

“Digium is dedicated to making AstriCon the largest, most exciting Asterisk community event,” said David Duffett, Asterisk community director. “Every year we look forward to offering both experts and those new to Asterisk insight to the new frontiers of our application by providing expert speakers and a variety of informative tracks.”

About AstriCon
AstriCon is the pioneer and longest-running event devoted to all things Asterisk, one of the most influential open source projects today. Attendees will learn about trends in Asterisk use, the growing Asterisk ecosystem, the newest applications and a wide range of technical topics from Asterisk developers, users and entrepreneurs.

AstriCon will be held from October 23-25 at the Sheraton Downtown in Atlanta. There is a pre-conference tutorial day on October 22 with various introductory as well as developer tracks. Registration is open at www.astricon.net.

About Digium
Digium, Inc. provides Asterisk custom communications and Switchvox (News - Alert) Unified Communications (UC) business phone systems that deliver enterprise-class features at a price businesses can afford. We are the creator, primary developer and sponsor of the Asterisk project, the world’s most widely used open source communications software that turns an ordinary computer into a feature-rich voice communications server. With a community of more than 8,000 developers worldwide, Asterisk has been used to create VoIP communication solutions in more than 170 countries. Since 1999, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, giving people an innovative solution for business communications that increase productivity. Digium’s wide range of business communications products is sold through a worldwide network of reseller partners. More information is available at: www.digium.com and www.asterisk.org.