Digium (News - Alert) and Integrics, a software engineering company providing telecommunications software to customers worldwide, have announced they have partnered around sales and marketing of Integrics’ Enswitch, a carrier-grade switch based on the open source Asterisk (News - Alert) telephony platform, to carriers worldwide.

Under this new agreement, a route for closer technical, sales, and marketing collaboration between the companies has been developed. It also expands Digium’s involvement in the carrier market.

The creator and driving force behind Asterisk, Digium drives this open source telephony software deployed on more than four million servers worldwide to manage voice over IP (VoIP) calls for businesses and individuals. Asterisk powers Digium’s family of software and hardware appliances, including Switchvox (News - Alert), Asterisk Business Edition, and AsteriskNOW.

Integrics sells Enswitch to telecommunications companies, Internet telephony service providers, VoIP providers and others to allow them to create offerings such as full-featured, telephone management and billing solutions, calling card integration, toll free and number translation services, voice mail, call queuing, automatic call distributor, fax to e-mail, and multi-level IVR.

Enswitch is based on Digium’s Asterisk Business Edition or open source Asterisk, based on each customer’s preference, as well as other open source software, including OpenSER, MySQL and Linux.

The Enswitch solution runs on a single machine or on an Asterisk/OpenSER cluster and supports high availability and failover, allowing for failure of any single machine with only a few seconds of interruption to service. The clustered architecture, which can be geographically distributed, also allows additional machines to be added as the customer’s network grows.

“Enswitch is the most integrated system available today for hosted commercial telephony services,” said Alistair Cunningham, Managing Director at Integrics. “There are many other products available that provide PBX features, prepaid billing, postpaid billing, invoicing, and so on, but only Enswitch provides all of these in a single integrated product. Collaboration with Digium will help us better capitalize on sales and marketing opportunities and enhance our own product development over time.”

“The combination of Asterisk and Enswitch provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional methods for providing hosted PBX (News - Alert) and other commercial telephony services,” said Steve Harvey, Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Digium. “Asterisk’s open source architecture also lends itself to a high level of customization to meet the needs of each customer. We believe that a closer relationship with Integrics will help push Asterisk further into the service provider market by giving those companies a very attractive alternative to closed-source products.”

Integrics has done well to respond to the immediate needs in the industry and provided a solution that enables companies to maximize the value of their systems on an open source platform.

In doing so, the solution provides significant flexibility and scalability while also allowing service providers to respond to customer needs with new and innovative solutions. Such an approach will provide a competitive edge, while also helping to create new revenue streams for the provider.