TMCnet Asterisk Week in Review

This past week, TMC’s (News - Alert) Mini Swamy wrote that, in a bid to introduce new players to Open Source (News - Alert) (News - Alert) Technology and take it to a higher level, Sangoma Technologies, a provider of software and hardware components with an emphasis on IP Communications Systems (News - Alert), reached an agreement with TMCnet.

This will allow Sangoma Technologies to sponsor and update a series of three Educational Global Online Communities. The first in the series, the Asterisk (News - Alert) (News - Alert) Global Online Community was launched on TMCnet.

As Swamy wrote, company officials believe that the Asterisk Global Online Community will help companies succeed in the rapidly evolving Open Source Telephony market. Not only will it help introduce new players but it will also help advance innovations around that technology.

And this week Jyothi Shanbhag wrote that a recent survey has shed light on current trends in communications technology.

The survey, conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners and its partner The 451 Group (News - Alert), is named “Future of Open Source Survey” has been released and shows interesting results.

The survey is in its fifth year and included more than 20 industry collaborators. It polled a wide variety of members of the open source community on the important issues, opportunities and expectations of the industry for 2011 and beyond.

As per the survey results, open source is in the mainstream, with both the public and private sectors embracing it across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data.

Also this past week, TMC’s Erik Linask (News - Alert) (News - Alert) noted that the communications market has, for the past half-decade, gone through a product-focus metamorphosis of sorts, with an increasing number of vendors looking to capitalize on the vast SMB market – one that was largely ignored for a long time in favor of the enterprise market.

In some ways, Linask says, it made sense: one enterprise sale could be the equivalent of hundreds of SMB installations. The fact, though, is there are a limited number of those large enterprise customers and a seemingly endless supply of SMBs looking for similar capabilities at an affordable price point.

Several enterprise-class vendors have sought to downsize their offerings to take advantage of the SMB opportunity – some reasonably successfully, yet others with only limited success. The one challenge they all face is it’s not very easy to scale down a costly enterprise product to the point where it meets SMB needs from cost, feature, ease of use, and support perspectives. Of course, there is the hosted and managed services alternative, which has become popular, and which enterprise vendors have been able to leverage.

But, despite the benefits of hosted and cloud-based offerings, many businesses are still much more comfortable with managing their own technology, giving way to a vendor base that has focused entirely on the SMB market.

Also this week Susan J. Campbell wrote that Sangoma has partnered with TMCnet to offer a free webinar: Determining the “Right” Development/Deployment Platform for Your Voice and Media Applications, scheduled for Wednesday, June 8, 2011 TIME: 2:00 pm EST 11:00 am PST.

Click here to register today for this webinar as it will explore how developers must select between Open Source alternatives and more traditional “C” based proprietary APIs, as well as XML and Web 2.0 environments.

You will have the opportunity in this webinar to explore the pros and cons of these different environments. In the process, developers and operators will become better equipped to choose the one that might be the best fit for their particular needs.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO West 2011, taking place Sept. 13-15, 2011, in Austin, Texas. ITEXPO (click here.News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities. To register,

David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Rich Steeves