Digium Unveils Asterisk SCF to Simplify Complex Communications Systems

By Tammy Wolf, TMCnet Copy Editor

Digium, Inc., which is known for its open source communications software, introduced today its Asterisk (News - Alert) Scalable Communications Framework (SCF), which will give developers the ability to create real-time communications applications that include voice, video and text, in order to meet the demands of a wide range of uses.

Asterisk SCF was built to supply the highest levels of availability, scalability, extensibility, tolerance to fault, and performance, according to company officials.

Delivered as a system of distributed components that can be deployed in clusters on single or several systems, the Asterisk SCF platform’s architecture supports a full range of real-time IP communications – including video, multi-channel wideband and ultra-wideband audio – chat, desktop sharing, in addition to other media types that may crop up in the future.

 “The Asterisk community asked for easier ways to use Asterisk in larger and more complex applications,” said Mark Spencer, creator of Asterisk and Digium’s (News - Alert) founder and chief technology officer. “They want to make massive scalability and fault tolerance simple, they want rich APIs for developing applications, and they want performance that effectively utilizes modern systems and architectures.

“Rather than trying to ‘grow’ Asterisk to address these areas, Digium and a committee of Asterisk developers decided that a companion product would be the most effective approach, since it allowed us to consider the widest range of tools, platforms and architectures,” Spencer continued.

Company officials stressed, however, that the new Asterisk platform is not a replacement for Asterisk, a widely used open source voice communications platform, as both Digium and the Asterisk community “are committed to the continued development and support of Asterisk.”

“The world of communications is changing rapidly,” stated Ed Guy, co-founder, CTO of CleverSpoke and Asterisk SCF steering committee member. “The Asterisk community was compelled to develop a solution to meet the greater scalability, reliability and functionality requirements that have emerged during the past 10 years of Asterisk’s evolution. Asterisk SCF is the product of this vision—a communications platform that will address today’s requirements and will allow for future enhancements and growth.”

Digium recently released its long-term support version of Asterisk, Asterisk 1.8.

(source: http://asterisk.tmcnet.com/topics/open-source/articles/111885-digium-unveils-asterisk-scf-simplify-complex-communications-systems.htm)