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.

A continuation of the first article about writing RFP’s specifically for Open Source IP PBX systems.

Recently Olle E Johansson posted some details about his achievement of placing 10,000 simultaneous calls on a single Asterisk server.

Most large enterprises would naturally write an RFP for something as critical as their communication systems but also these are the Fortune companies who still haven’t really caught onto the awesomeness of Open Source IP PBX systems, though sooner or later they will and there are some things they should know when writing an RFP specifically for an OS IP PBX.

I believe that Asterisk is at a crossroads and has been for some time. Asterisk stands on the Path of Life for applications and ponders a fork clearly visible: Free or Commercial? Champions of the Cause of Asterisk on either side of the path cheer for one of the two forks. Which choice will the application make? Do the creators, contributors, designers, and dreamers really have a say in the matter? Is everyone making noise for nothing?

Learn how and where Open Source VoIP can and should be used within the carrier space.

Today Nortel announced its acquisition of Pingtel, an Open Source IP PBX software company

This week I’m using some link bait which discusses a few of the differences between Asterisk and FreeSWITCH. David Greenfield wrote a short blog post discussing one particular case study where FreeSWITCH was used over Asterisk. I wouldn’t say I’m all that crazy-go-nuts over the post but the topic is worth additional discussion since FreeSWITCH [...]

I just got some tutorial chapters from PackT Publishing’s AsteriskNOW book by Nir Simionovich. Although most OS-VoIP readers aren’t developers, and the ones who are probably rarely use AsteriskNOW, I figured there’s no harm in putting these up even if only a few people find the chapters useful.
Here are the two chapters extracted from the [...]

Well… the title of this post is a little deceiving, Microsoft isn’t really “being Open”, but they’re openly (and officially) working with people who are, like Junction Networks… open by association Microsoft is!
When a company as big as Microsoft decides to form a partnership with a VoIP provider who’s network is openly, and almost entirely [...]

At some point I’ll be writing a full article on the squillions of Open Source VoIP apps out there but until I find the time to do so, I want to share with you all this list called 74 Open Source VoIP Apps & Resource.
Here at OS-VoIP, one of the things I’m [...]

Junction Networks is a better than average hosted VoIP provider and yesterday launched a new partner program which warrants a mention at OS-VoIP since many of our readers just might be interested.
Junction Networks’ OnSIP hosted VoIP product is almost entirely engineered using open source software like Asterisk. This is a testament to Asterisk and Open [...]

The second annual Digium Innovation Award is coming up folks! The deadline for your submissions is August 1st so don’t forget.
This award was created last year to showcase all the “innovative” applications for which Asterisk can be used. Those eligible for the award are all Digium|Asterisk customers and partners world-wide with solutions that are live [...]

I stumbled upon this article on eWeek which was written by Sangoma CEO, David Mandelstam. This short paper discusses a few things that I consistently have to re-iterate to every client when selling an Asterisk based PBX. Hopefully now this article should save me some time.
It is articles like these that truly help out the [...]

Presence is one of those nifty little features that just totally impresses the heck out of most users… and it’s entirely possible with Asterisk+bluetooth. Presence is the ability for the IP PBX to recognize when someone’s in or out of the office. When you’re in the office, the IP PBX will route calls to your [...]

So I just heard from my Polycom guy today that as of yesterday the Polycom IP670 phone is available for order. I had a few things to say about this phone in a previous blog here, but now that it’s available I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we get one to play [...]

So last week Counterpath released a new audio conferencing solution called Quick Conference (QC). The Counterpath Eyebeam softphones have always been our softphone of choice with Asterisk and QC works just as well. Conferencing isn’t anything new to Asterisk and for a company with mild conferencing requirements, having control via handset over conference calls is [...]

Just today I stumbled on this article written by Flavio E. Goncalves which compares Asterisk and OpenSER. It’s a short and concise article worth sharing with you all. Here’s a few snippets.
“If you work with IP telephony, it’s quite possible that you have not heard about OpenSER, but certainly you must have heard about Asterisk. [...]

In the spirit of exploring the capabilities of Asterisk beyond its typical use as an IP PBX, external paging is a great feature to increase the value of your Asterisk system by having it assume the functionality typically reserved for a distinctly separate system and additional investment. Most people configure Asterisk systems for paging via [...]

One of the things I want to do with this blog is explore all the wild applications in which Asterisk is being used under-the-hood. Rarely do people advertise the use of Asterisk in their VoIP products so here’s one business where Asterisk was just right for a very unique application.
Although they’ve been around for over [...]