TMCnet's Asterisk Week In Review

In Asterisk (News - Alert) news this past week, TMC’s Paula Bernier reported that Kerio Technologies has come out with a second release of its Asterisk-based voice offering, just about four months after the initial product came to market.

James Gudeli, vice president of business development, says the quick turnaround on Kerio Operator 1.1 is a testament to the company’s dedication to keeping the product fresh and its culture of quickly meeting customer requirements.

The product is aimed at small and medium businesses seeking voice tools that are affordable to deploy and support on an ongoing basis, secure and flexible, Gudeli explains. “There’s never a need to open a terminal window on this,” he says.

Kerio Operator offers point-and-click configuration, supports ISDN/E1/T1/SIP, and is available as an appliance or a software-only. New with release 1.1 are protection against SIP password guessing; anomalous behavior detection (offering alerts if, for example, there are multiple unsuccessful attempts to access the system); multiple registrations of the same extensions (to allow different endpoints – even mobile devices – to share an extension); new PBX voice services; improved NAT support; call queue improvements; and auto provisioning support for Polycom (News - Alert) products.

Also recently Rajani Baburajan reported that IP phone maker Xorcom, a manufacturer of business telephony interfaces and appliances based on Asterisk open source software, announced that Lantone Systems has joined Xorcom distribution channel in Singapore.

Headquartered in Singapore, and with offices in London, Russia, Ukraine and Vietnam, Lantone Systems specializes in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) infrastructure and supplies telephony products such as Digium, Dialogic (News - Alert), Polycom, CISCO, Linksys and many more.

Following this agreement, Lantone Systems now distributes the entire range of Xorcom’s Asterisk-based IP-PBX (News - Alert) and USB2-connected channel banks to qualified resellers in the local market.

Also this week Asterisk’s Kevin P. Fleming wrote a piece for the company blog titled “The Evolution of Asterisk (or: How We Arrived at Asterisk 10),” noting that “we are fast approaching the seven-year anniversary of the release of Asterisk 1.0.0, which occurred at the first AstriCon in September, 2004.”

If you look back a little further, Fleming said, there were various “0.x” releases made as early as December of 1999… “my, how time has flown! We’ve had quite a few ‘major’ releases of Asterisk since then, including 1.2, 1.4, and most recently, 1.8. Each of these releases has included significant changes, and sometimes architecture-improving changes.”

Fleming concludes by saying “Is this Asterisk 2.0? If not, will there ever be an Asterisk 2.0? After quite a lot of discussion, we came to the conclusion that this is not Asterisk 2.0, but that it’s also quite unlikely that there ever will be such a release; it wouldn’t be in the community’s best interests to release something that is fundamentally different (and not compatible) but still call it ‘Asterisk.’  That then leaves the question we’ve been asked by many people: If there’s never going to be an Asterisk 2.0, why continue to call these releases 1.x? What does the 1 mean, if it’s never going to change?”

“The conclusion that we’ve reached, and that we hope you’ll agree with, is that Asterisk is always going to be Asterisk, and that you don’t need a 1.”

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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.