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Hit "*" for More Options Don't want to shell out for an outdated, overpriced PBX? Transfer your calls to Asterisk, an open-source phone server. By Owen Thomas, May 09, 2005 When Mark Spencer was starting a Linux company six years ago, he had $4,000 and some cheap, leftover hardware from a company where he had interned during college. His first conundrum: How were customers going to call him? A private branch exchange -- the specialized hardware that routes calls around an office -- was going to set him back $6,000. So Spencer decided to program his own Linux-based PBX. "Telecom was not really our core business," he says. But he released the software as open-source, and as contributions of code started coming in, Asterisk was born. Today, his company, now called Digium, focuses entirely on developing Asterisk and selling related hardware and software. He won't disclose the revenue of his closely held company, but he says it is profitable. The success of Asterisk shows the growing power of open-source. Digium could have tried to roll out its own proprietary PBX -- and likely would have been crushed by the likes of Avaya, Cisco (CSCO), and Nortel (NT). But by sharing his code, Spencer has created an ecosystem full of niches waiting to be filled. That should keep his phones ringing for quite a while. In addition to routing calls, Asterisk also serves as a voice-mail system, and you can plug in all manner of phones, from analog lines to voice-over-Internet-protocol handsets, to hardware running Asterisk. Best of all, you can run it on a repurposed PC rather than buy expensive, custom PBX hardware. A fully supported version from Digium, available later this month, will cost $750 per machine, though users will still be able to download the source code for free. As with Linux, though, I suspect most users will want to buy a finished product rather than compile the code themselves. Joe Kraus, co-founder and CEO of JotSpot, a Web-based software startup in Palo Alto, toyed with the idea of installing Asterisk, but his operations chief told him that any time spent configuring that software would be time not spent on developing his company's product. Chastened, Kraus shelled out for a conventional PBX. Having bought a PBX, Kraus isn't about to rip it out. (That's one of the many problems with old-school PBXs: You can't reuse the hardware for something else.) But he talks about his decision wistfully. As it is, his employees rarely use their phones, preferring Skype -- a VOIP service Kraus could have run in-house with an Asterisk PBX. "It's a common misunderstanding that just because it's an open-source solution, you have to do it yourself," Spencer says. That's a big opportunity for the likes of Fonality and SwitchVox, which have already built ready-to-use Internet PBX products around Asterisk. Other resellers make a specialty of configuring Asterisk to suit a company's particular needs; branch offices, for example, may want voice-mail that's integrated with headquarters, while a call center operator would like sophisticated call-transferring capabilities to get the customer on the line with the right service representative. The ultimate customer for Asterisk might be the phone company. Some VOIP startups, like VoiceGlo and VoicePulse, use Asterisk to run their services. The incumbent providers have been more hesitant: For now, Spencer says, only overseas telecoms have deployed Asterisk for customers. Some regional phone companies in the States are testing it, as is AT&T, which showed off Asterisk running on a system connected to its Internet backbone at a recent industry conference. "We thought we should take a look at Asterisk and see what all the Web hubbub was about," says Mark Vince, a technical consultant for AT&T Labs who's been testing the software. One of the best aspects of Asterisk, he says, is the wide range of developers it has attracted. When he wanted to see if Asterisk could support an obscure VOIP standard, he simply had to search the Web and download a software driver from a programmer who'd already solved the problem. Just one more example of the productivity multiplier that is open-source software. -- * Simon P. Ditner / ON-Asterisk Mailing List / http://uc.org/asterisk *
