TMCnet Asterisk Week in Review

It was a good week for Asterisk® - based solutions, the VoIP market space and emerging optimism about Open Source Software (OSS)   in general. 

Asterisk®, and by extension the OSS market in general, added to its impressive market validation when Advanced Communications (News - Alert) (News - Alert) Group (ACG), a recognized inbound and outbound call center service provider for some of world's leading telecommunications companies, deployed Indosoft’s Q-Suite contact center software for Asterisk (News - Alert).   

TMCInet Contributor Anil Sharma quoted Dave McCall, president at ACG as saying, “"We were aware of the tremendous technology advantage and cost savings associated with Asterisk and were looking for a top of the line contact center software to complement Asterisk PBX (News - Alert) (News - Alert). Q-Suite provides the best of both worlds; its standard features and out of the box functionality came with the ability to build and customize services using the API for CTI (News - Alert) (News - Alert) integration, and the impressive ability of its contact center software ACD to scale with growth,” said McCall.

Gabe Bourque, chief operating officer at Indosoft (News - Alert) highlighted the view that an Asterisk®-based Call Center ACD is a game changer for any company seeking to improve performance without increasing costs.

A not insignificant boost to VoIP and hence the desirability of Asterisk®-based solutions cam on June, 10 with an article in the Wall Street Journal, “Top 10 Thriving Industries.” research firm IBIS World has released a list of the top 10 fastest-growing industries and topping the list for fastest growth for 2010-2016 was VoIP providers . While the category was not well-defined as to VoIP segments (software, services, equipment, SIP trunks, etc.), it certainly is reason for the industry to feel good about its prospects given all of the general economic gloom.

On the smart customers are usually your best customer’s and collaborators front, TMCnet Contributor Nahesh reported on  Digium’s (News - Alert) invitation to open source software developers and other contributors to the Asterisk (News - Alert) and Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF) platforms to take part in the upcoming AstriCon Developer Days — planned for the days prior to and following the annual AstriCon event to be held from Oct 25 – 27 at Westminster, Colorado.

In other news, Sangoma Technologies, joined the VoIP Users Conference (VUC) as a Platinum Sponsor. TMCnet Contributor Carolyn J. Dawson noted that Frederic Dickey, Director of product management at Sangoma, Frederic Dickey who joined the VUC, is expected to talk about how the company’s NetBoarder Express software version 4.0 negates the need for any external gateways, providing instead a highly cost efficient and flexible solution.  The company also hosted an interesting webinar on June 8, highlighting the debate on the “best” was to develop and deploy applications, “Right" Development/Deployment Platform for Your Voice and Media Applications.”

Finally, as TMCnet Contributor Jyothi Shanberg reported, a recent survey conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners and its partner The 451 Group named “Future of Open Source Survey” has been released and shows interesting results regarding the growth of adoption of OSS.  In particular, the survey, now in its fifth year revealed rapid customer adoption and huge opportunities in SaaS (News - Alert), Cloud (public and private) and Mobile.  

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Peter Bernstein is a technology industry veteran, having worked in multiple capacities with several of the industry's biggest brands, including Avaya (News - Alert), Alcatel-Lucent, Telcordia, HP, Siemens, Nortel, France Telecom, and others, and having served on the Advisory Boards of 15 technology startups. To read more of Peter's work, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves