Julie Webb
Digium
+1 (256) 428-6203
jwebb@digium.com

Laura Kempke
Schwartz Communications
+1 (781) 684-0770
digium@schwartzcomm.com

Digium® Intensifies Momentum Around Asterisk® in 2010, Closes Year with More than Two Million Downloads

Over the past 12 months, expands use of open source telephony software to 170 countries, releases major upgrade and launches new community project

HUNTSVILLE, Ala., January 10, 2011-Digium® Inc., creator and primary sponsor of the highly successful Asterisk telephony project, caps off a year marked by strong growth in the use of Asterisk and substantial technical advances in the product. Contributions from the open source community matched Digium's investment in Asterisk over the past year. To date, more than 9,800 people have contributed code to Asterisk, including more than 200 who worked on Asterisk 1.8. After releasing version 1.8 in October, the momentum continued later that month when the company also announced a new open source project, Asterisk SCF^TM. Enthusiasm for Asterisk among users, including developers, resellers, integrators and systems administrators, also increased as they downloaded the software more than two million times in 2010.

Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server that can power IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other communication applications. In over 170 countries today, small businesses, large enterprises, call centers, carriers and governments are using Asterisk to create standards-based, feature-rich communications systems at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems. Digium estimates that more than one million servers around the world are currently running Asterisk to handle billions of minutes of phone calls.

"Asterisk has made an indelible impression on the voice communications industry in the 11 years since it was released," said Bryan Johns, Digium's community director. "Its appeal keeps growing as businesses look for the value, flexibility, standards compliance and the technical superiority that result from the contributions of thousands of talented and visionary software developers. Digium is proud to sponsor Asterisk and to be a part of its community, which now counts 73,000 registered members. The company continues to focus on Asterisk's development, as we saw with the release of Asterisk 1.8 this fall and with the creation of a new open source project in Asterisk SCF."

A few highlights from 2010 include:

• Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)-The new framework, which is currently under development, will allow developers to create real-time communications applications that include voice, video and text and that meet the demands of a full range of uses, from embedded applications to enterprise and carrier solutions. Digium designed Asterisk SCF to provide the highest levels of availability, scalability, extensibility, fault-tolerance and performance. Asterisk SCF does not replace Asterisk; Digium is aggressively developing both projects in parallel.
• Asterisk 1.8-Released two months ago, the significant update includes 200 enhancements, including new security features, integration with IPv6 and extensive additions to ISDN-BRI functionality. Asterisk 1.8 is a Long Term Support release, indicating four years of support from Digium.
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony* report-In late summer, Digium was positioned in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony report.
• AsteriskExchange-In January, Digium announced the official online marketplace featuring both free and commercial products built or integrated with Asterisk. AsteriskExchange helps ecosystem participants market their products to the Asterisk community.

For more information about Asterisk 1.8, Asterisk SCF and related products, please visit http://www.digium.com or http://www.asterisk.org.

 

About Digium

Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source communications 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 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 and software to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey VoIP systems or to design their own custom telephony solutions. More information is available at http://www.digium.com.

*Garnter, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony, S. Blood, J. Lassman, G. Johnson, August 3, 2010.

About the Magic Quadrant

The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

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

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