> I get a call from Altigen about once a week asking if we would like to > be resellers of theirs. Has anyone on this list had any dealings with > Altigen, They say they are based on a Linux based widely used PBX > platform, I don't want to fork over the money to find out it's a > Trixbox with some dedicated Hardware IP phones. > > Any one out there know about these guys, Google just returns page after > page of Press Releases, corporate filings, and Management > announcements.
I am very familiar with Altigen. One of the businesses that I'm a Co-Owner of a certified SIP Trunking providers for their dealer channel, so we do a lot of work with them. We did a lot of Interop testing between Asterisk 1.2, 1.4 and their recently released SIP trunking products (Altigen MAX 1000. ACM 5.2 etc..) Altigen is Windows based, not Linux based. They have been around for a long time (10+ years). They trade on the NASDAQ as symbol ATGN. Stock has been listed since late 1999. Current price is around $1.39 / share. It's always been a Windows based platform, running w/ DSP based boards (ISA, PCI) traditionally delivered on boxed solutions that they provide, although it does run on a few off the shelf systems. I've had one system in production that hasn't been rebooted in over 8 years. Very impressive for a windows platform indeed! :) They have recently brought in some new executive management (Jerry Flemming formerly w/ Interactive Intelligence), and have been going through a serious ramp up in marketing for their new SIP products, and changing their direction. In the past, Altigen delivered a complete end to end proprietary solution including phones, PBXs, and TDM interface cards. They used to do a lot of H323, but have now moved on to SIP. They are working very hard to open their architecture up so that any SIP standards device can be used w/ them. As an example, you can now use Aastra SIP phones instead of Altigen phones and they are testing many others. Ultimately, they want to be a software company, and not a hardware company. Their software is pretty darn impressive and stable for a Windows based offering, and is very competitively priced. We do side by side quotes w/ Altigen and Switchvox all the time, and there are certain features the Altigen has that make it very attractive for small business deployments that need solid integration w/ Windows applications (Outlook / Exchange etc..) We have a few recruiters using the PC Recruiter software package, w/ the Altigen soft-phone and we can't get them to even look at anything else. Altigen customers are kind of like Asterisk users.. Very loyal.. you won't get them to switch anytime soon.. Altigen is a good company. I'd keep an eye on their stock over the next few quarters. They are spending a lot of cash getting their new models deployed, and while they are declaring losses, their executive leadership really knows how to think long term. I wouldn't be surprised to see Altigen's stock above $3.00 a share in a couple of quarters. Oh yeah.. like any product, Altigen has it's quirks/irks and issues, but for the most part their stuff delivers a high level of value and stability for the dollar figure. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
