Jane Brooks
Digium, Inc.
256.428.6075
jbrooks@digium.com

Digium® Announces Keynote Speakers for Expanded AstriCon '08

The fifth annual event welcomes high caliber industry speakers to the official conference for the popular Asterisk PBX and telephony platform

HUNTSVILLE, Ala.,— Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, recently announced that Brian Aker from Sun Microsystems/MySQL and Stefan Öberg from Skype are slated as keynote speakers for AstriCon '08. AstriCon, the world's largest, most informative gathering of expert developers and users of the popular Asterisk telephony platform, also announces expanded track sessions to this year's conference.

Aker, an open source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database, currently serves as the Director of Architecture for My SQL AB. He plans on speaking on the topic of "The Parallel Evolution of MySQL; One Foot in the Commercial World and the other in the Open Source Community."

Öberg is Vice President and General Manager for Skype Telecom and Skype for Business. He has previously served in different positions at 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. His keynote will focus on VoIP for Business.

The contrast between the Skype network and software model and the Open Source nature of Asterisk and its underlying VoIP protocols may be a controversial topic, but one worthy of exploration. AstriCon is pleased to have secured Stefan as a keynote speaker, and it is certain that his insights will provide an excellent basis for discussions and deliberations well beyond the boundaries of the conference.

Digium, who is the creator and driving force behind Asterisk, anticipates that AstiCon'08 will be the largest and most successful event to date. This year the conference has expanded to five tracks with more than 60 topics to offer attendees more variety and options during this two-day event. These tracks include a business track, technical/introductory track, a carrier/large scale track and two advanced technical tracks.

"Digium is dedicated to making AstriCon into the largest, most exciting Asterisk community event," said Mark Spencer, creator of Asterisk and Digium's chief technology officer. "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."

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

AstriCon will be held from September 23-25 at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Ariz. FierceVoIP and TMCnet will serve as media sponsors and Polycom and Sangoma will be 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.

About Digium
Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Asterisk Business Edition and Switchvox IP PBX Software to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company's product line includes a wide range of hardware to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey solutions or to design their own voice over IP (VoIP) systems. More information is available at www.digium.com.

The Digium logo, Digium, Asterisk, Asterisk Business Edition, AsteriskNOW, Asterisk Appliance, Switchvox and the Asterisk logo are trademarks of Digium, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

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