Digium, the Asterisk Company, has announced that Brian Aker of Sun Microsystems (News - Alert)/MySQL and Stefan Öberg of Skype are set to be keynote speakers for AstriCon ’08.

 

Positioned as the world’s largest and most informative gathering of expert developers and users of the popular Asterisk telephony platform, AstriCon also plans to expand track sessions for this year’s conference.

An open source hacker who has worked on a variety of Apache modules, the Slash systems and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database, Aker currently serves as the Director of Architecture for MySQL AB. He will speak on the topic of “The Parallel Evolution of MySQL; One Foot in the Commercial World and the other in the Open Source Community.”

 

Öberg serves as vice president and general manager for Skype (News - Alert) Telecom and Skype for Business. His previous positions included a stint with Tele2, the Swedish telecom operator, initially in Sweden and later in Estonia and Russia.

 

Öberg is also the founder and chairman of Trigger Software, a wholly owned subsidiary to Tele2. He plans to speak at AstriCon with a focus on VoIP for Business.

While there is a stark contrast between the Skype network and software model and the open source nature of Asterisk and its underlying VoIP protocols, Digium believes that  the controversy can make for an interesting discussion.

Digium is excited about Öberg’s planned presentation and expects that his insights will provide an excellent basis for discussions and deliberations well beyond the boundaries of the conference.

The company also plans for AstriCon ’08 to be the largest and most successful event to date. This year’s conference is expanded to five tacks with more than 60 topics to offer attendees more variety and options during the two-day event. The tracks will include business, technical/introductory, carrier/large scale, and two advanced technical tracks.

“Digium is dedicated to making AstriCon into the largest, most exciting Asterisk community event,” said Mark Spencer (News - Alert), creator of Asterisk and Digium’s chief technology officer, in a Wednesday statement.

 

“Every year we look forward to offering both experts and those new to Asterisk insight to the new frontiers of our application by providing expert speakers and a variety of informative tracks.”

 

“Plus, I’m always looking forward to late nights at the Code Zone portion of the conference where we get some really great ideas, innovation and code from our developers and users,” Spencer added.

AstriCon is the longest-running event devoted to all things Asterisk, considered to be one of the most influential open source projects today. Attendees can expect to learn about trends in Asterisk use, the growing Asterisk ecosystem, the newest applications and a wide range of technical optics from Asterisk developers, users and entrepreneurs.

As the demand for open source continues to grow, opportunities for developers and users of the Asterisk platform also expand. This trend in the global market is creating more activity in the open source field, creating a significant buzz around key topics, such as those slated for discussion at AstriCon.

As this trend is touching nearly every industry, the applications are far reaching and this conference will help attendees to anticipate and embrace the benefits of open source and Asterisk.

AstriCon will be held from September 23-25 at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Ariz. FierceVoIP and TMCnet are set to serve as media sponsors and Polycom (News - Alert) and Sangoma are the platinum sponsors for the event.

There is a pre-conference tutorial day on September 23rd with various introductory as well as developer tracks. Registration is open at www.astricon.net.