Well last week marked the end of Astricon 2009 where a myriad of VoIP and Open Source companies came together to showcase new products, new solutions, and make big (and sometimes small) announcements. One of my favorites and more notable announcements which occurred at Astricon was between Digium/Asterisk and IBM.

You can read some specifics here, but in short IBM has brought Asterisk into its Smart Market. IBM’s Smart Market is a marketplace for applications designed or tweaked to operate on IBM’s hardware, specifically the IBM Smart Cube. Essentially the IBM Smart Cube is ready out of the box to run any of the Smart Market applications. Think of it like the Apple App Store which anyone who’s anyone will already be familiar with. Take the iPhone for example which is a “ready to rock” computer with a whole slew (70,000+) of applications designed to work perfectly (supposedly) on the iPhone… all purchased via the App Store. The IBM Smart Market and the Smart Cube is very similar… kinda.