Digium Drives Open Source VoIP, Named Corporate Telephony Visionary by Gartner

The open source telephony market has traditionally faced a number of obstacles, including a negative market perception and competition from existing proprietary installations.  However, these image and, consequently, acceptance, of open source solutions are steadily gaining acceptance, thanks to a steadfast commitment to building awareness and promoting the benefits of open source telephony, not the least of which is cost savings.

 

Indeed, many open source solutions offer significant cost benefits over proprietary solutions, while providing the same features and benefits, not the mention the ability for developers to provide enhanced features based on specific requirements.

 

Research suggests that open source lines can cost as much as 40 percent less than proprietary solutions, with the potential benefit being even higher in call center environments.

 

The world’s first and most widely adopted open source telephony platform is Asterisk, developed by Digium founder Mark Spencer, and Digium has for two years found itself in Gartner’s (News - Alert) Magic Quadrant for niche players in corporate telephony.

 

Asterisk has been adopted by more than two million users worldwide, and continues to grow. In recognition of its continued promotion and development of open source telephony solutions, Gartner has now named Digium to its Visionary quadrant, placing it in a class beside giants like Microsoft.

 

“Digium’s founder Mark Spencer (News - Alert) had the vision to create Asterisk, which today is the world’s most widely used open source telephony software, so we believe the Visionaries quadrant is a perfect fit for Digium,” said Danny Windham, Digium CEO.

 

The fundamental driving Digium’s effort is an open global communications landscape, which would “transform the way businesses acquire and operate their communications systems.” Open source solutions enable unheralded flexibility, allowing users, developers, and integrators to create new applications to enhance their telephony solutions — without the costs associated with proprietary solutions.

 

Digium is helping drive the overall adoption of VoIP technology as well, with its low-cost, global standards-based, open source software and hardware, including gateways, media servers, and application servers, which support traditional and next generation voice and data protocols. Its Asterisk Appliance is a standalone PBX that offers SMBs an easy to deploy and manage premises-based VoIP or hybrid solution.

 

Together with Digium’s telephony interface cards, its Asterisk-based solutions present a strategic opportunity for businesses to enhance their communications capabilities and move from traditional telephony to IP-based communications infrastructures.

 

With the increased scrutiny of both OPEX (News - Alert) and CAPEX, Asterisk solutions allow businesses of all sized to reduce their overall costs, while adopting the VoIP and Unified Communications solutions that are becoming increasingly desirable in today’s age of mobile workers and collaborative environments.

With the growth of the open source market, led by Asterisk-based solutions, Digium, which leads that development, rightfully finds itself named a Corporate Telephony Visionary.

“We think the Gartner report highlights Digium’s unique role as the innovative force behind Asterisk and the company more businesses are turning to as an alternative to the high-cost, low-flexibility telecom giants of the past,” concluded Windham.