Talking with Danny Windham, CEO of Digium

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

Danny Windham is CEO of Digium (http://www.digium.com), the creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the industry’s first open source telephony platform. The combination of Asterisk software and Digium I/O hardware really got the ball rolling, inspiring other groups and companies to enter the world of open source communications.

For example, Nokia recently announced that it had made a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com), a publicly-traded company headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia, said, “Trolltech’s deep understanding of open source software and its strong technology assets will enable both Nokia and others to innovate on our device platforms while reducing time-to-market.” Without the invention of Asterisk, it’s doubtful that open source communications would have progressed to its current levels of technical proficiency and adoption.

And open source communications continues to gain in popularity, particularly among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and Asterisk/Digium remains at the forefront of the field.

It was only natural, therefore, that our first Open Source Communications interview would be with Danny Windham of Digium. Before joining Digium, Windham served as President and Chief operating officer of ADTRAN, a global provider of networking and communications equipment. Windham holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Mississippi State University where he was named a Distinguished Engineering Fellow in 2001. He also holds an MBA from Florida Tech.

RG: How do you keep up with all of the submissions and user community requests for new features?

DW: Digium’s Online Issue Tracker lets us keep track of all of the submissions and requests from the open source community. It lets us track all sorts of issues to a high level of granularity. Digium processes and solves over 250 issues per month including community patches, feature requests, bug reports and fixes. We attempt to isolate as many as possible to specific locations in Asterisk and identify who contributed them and the context in which the submission or request was made. There are over a dozen full time developers at Digium who focus on handling these Issue Tracker items.

RG: It’s said that your IAX and DUNDi technologies are optimized to solve certain problems that SIP and ENUM do not address as well or as efficiently. Does that upset some people?<.b>