Asterisk SCF, a New Open Source Framework

Digium, Inc., a company that created and provides Asterisk (News - Alert), well known open source communications software, introduced the Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) in collaboration with the Asterisk open source community.

A framework that enables the developers to create real-time communications applications with voice, video and text, Asterisk SCF is able to be incorporated within a range of environments, such as embedded applications, enterprise solutions and carrier solutions. It has been designed with an aim to offer enhanced levels of availability, scalability, extensibility, fault-tolerance and performance. 

Digium (News - Alert) will provide Asterisk SCF as a system of distributed components, and enterprises can deploy the solution in clusters on a single system or on a number of systems as well. As an inherent feature of its basic architecture, the Asterisk SCF platform supports a number of real-time IP communications, such as video, multi-channel wideband and ultra-wideband audio, chat, desktop sharing.

In the words of Mark Spencer (News - Alert), founder and chief technology officer at Digium and creator of Asterisk, the Asterisk community ask for easier ways to use Asterisk in larger and more complex applications; it wants to make massive scalability and fault tolerance simple; it wants rich APIs for developing applications, and it wants performance that effectively utilizes modern systems and architectures. Spencer continued that rather than trying to ‘grow’ Asterisk to address these areas, Digium and a committee of Asterisk developers decided that a companion product would be the most effective approach, since it allowed the organization to consider the widest range of tools, platforms and architectures.

According to Ed Guy, co-founder, CTO of CleverSpoke and Asterisk SCF steering committee member, the world of communications is changing rapidly, and the Asterisk community was compelled to develop a solution to meet the greater scalability, reliability and functionality requirements that have emerged during the past 10 years of Asterisk’s evolution. Guy noted that Asterisk SCF is the product of this vision, and it is a communications platform that will address today’s requirements and will allow for future enhancements and growth.

The company doesn’t intend to present Asterisk SCF as a replacement for Asterisk, its flagship open source voice communications platform, and emphasizes that Digium and the Asterisk community will remain committed to the continued development and support of Asterisk, the telecommunications software. To support this commitment, the release of the next long-term support version of Asterisk, Asterisk 1.8 recently had been announced.

In March 2010, Digium, Inc., signed a distribution agreement with SYNNEX Corporation to distribute its Switchvox (News - Alert) business phone systems and telephony cards to resellers in the U.S. and Canada. According to the agreement, Digium will work with SYNNEX’ dedicated telephony group to provide unified communications solutions to resellers that service the small-to-medium sized business.

Raja Singh Chaudhary is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Raja's articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jaclyn Allard