Telephony Industry Marks Decade Full of Change: Digium

With the New Year underway, it’s common for many businesses executives to take time to reflect on the evolution of their industry and where their company stands today. And Digium, Inc. the Asterisk (News - Alert) Company, is no exception.

 

Danny Windham, president and CEO, Digium, Inc., discussed how the ever-changing telephony market reached its current model and how open source technology has played a role to help reduce margins and costs in the communications space at a keynote session at ITEXPO today.

 

“The telephony industry that existed at the beginning of the decade has little resemblance to [that of] today,” Windham said during the keynote.

 

Citing Nortel (News - Alert) as an example, Windham discussed how the company's assets fell from a value of about $100 billion ten years ago to less than $1 billion dollars today. Windham said the introduction of open-source technology is one reason for the dip.

 

Today, the big, iron PBX (News - Alert) market is dying, and separate telephone departments are heading toward extinction, Windham said. Now, data networks are reliable enough to support voice and IP has became the preferred transport for all data types, he said. Plummeting bandwidth costs have also contributed to the rise of VoIP.

But the main reason for the growth of open-source really comes down to cost.

 

“It’s all about money. Running a single department costs less. Open source costs less than proprietary alternatives,” Windham said, adding that open source shifts power to the hands of end-users.

 

Businesses executives’ heavy focused on cost saving will only drive the following new trends, Windham said. They include:

 

* The economic weakness is driving cost pressures in organizations to figure out how to do more with less. More businesses will look at VoIP to save money.

 

* Mobility will become a bigger player in corporate communications.

 

* Open source software will continue to disrupt proprietary alternative. The opportunity for open source adoption in the near term will double.

 

* Asterisk remains the de factor choice for open source telephony.

 

So, how does Digium (News - Alert) qualify the last decade? For service providers, it was rough, Windham said. But for end-users who saw their equipment, infrastructure and bandwidth costs fall and saw the power shift from proprietary suppliers into the hands of end-users, “It was actually one hell of a decade,” he said.

 

As TMCnet reported earlier today, Digium launched AsteriskExchange, the online marketplace that offers products built on or integration with Asterisk.

 

Noted as the world’s most popular open source communications engine, Asterisk is a free software toolkit that lets integrators and developers transform computers into advanced communications systems. This helps them improve business productivity and reduce business communications costs.