Digium, Inc., the Asterisk (News - Alert) Company, is in final preparations for AstriCon 2007, the longest running conference of the most widely used open source telephony software, Asterisk. As creator and owner, Digium (News - Alert) is also the innovative force behind Asterisk and uses it as the basis for its own voice over IP (VoIP) solutions.

Through a dual-licensing model, Digium licenses Asterisk for use by myriad software and telecommunications companies around the world, enabling them to deliver their own differentiated solutions. The widespread use and feature set of Asterisk make it one of the most influential open source projects today.

The AstriCon conference offers sessions for Asterisk experts in addition to those just getting started with the software. Industry-focused sessions are targeted toward enterprise users, carriers, and Internet telephony service providers (ITSPs), and call centers.

Topics for the industry-focused sessions include:

-- Deploying open source telecommunications in enterprises.

-- Building an enterprise-class call center with Asterisk.

-- VoIP security.

-- Asterisk high availability and load balancing.

-- Clustering Asterisk.

-- Running Asterisk on embedded systems.

-- Peer-to-peer telephony applications.

-- Speech recognition and Asterisk.

-- Designing custom Asterisk applications.

"Asterisk will be downloaded more than 1 million times in 2007 and used to power voice communications in businesses with a few people and organizations with tens of thousands," said Mark Spencer (News - Alert), creator of Asterisk and chief technology officer of Digium, in a Tuesday statement.

"The software owes its success to the enthusiasm and involvement of the worldwide Asterisk community. In Phoenix at the sixth annual AstriCon, Digium looks forward to meeting with and hearing from all who have made Asterisk a part of their businesses, including customers, partners and software developers."

Since its founding in 1999, Digium has grown to become the open source alternative to the traditional communication providers, offering solutions that cost as much as 80 percent less than proprietary voice communication platforms. The Asterisk is available to the open source community under the GNU General Public License and uses business-class Asterisk to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses.

Digium has been able to drive Asterisk success through its open source platform and significant cost savings. As communications continue to play a key role in the success of the organization, companies are seeking ways to ensure next-generation compatibility without next-generation costs. Asterisk provides a great solution and its widespread acceptance and adoption makes interoperability possible.

 

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMC (News - Alert) and has also written for eastbiz.com. To see more of her articles, please visit Susan J. Campbell’s columnist page.