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.

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?

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

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 [...]

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 [...]

Digium has just announced the release of their new AA300 Appliance. This new appliance replaces the AA350NR and have a few additional advantages over its predecessor. According to Digium, here are some of the highlights:
* More Versatile: The AA300 can be rack mounted or wall mounted. Please note that the AA300 ships with rack handles [...]

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 [...]

As more and more organizations wise up to what Asterisk could mean for their communication needs, I’ve noticed that the hospitality industry is one that is coming to surface with some unique requirements (like many industries) which I’d like to discuss and get some feedback.
First and foremost, unique billing requirements is one of the most [...]

This isn’t new news as I’ve been following these folks for months but they’re worth mentioning on this blog because I like the concept of a Visual Dialplan. I honestly don’t think this is going to become the widely adopted method for configuring an Asterisk system but it’s still pretty neat.
APSTEL’s Visual Dialplan is a [...]

Some people might consider it sacrilege to mention a company like Microsoft in a community like this but I’m going to anyway… live with it. I’m still waiting for Digium to roll out some sort of Unified Communications solution to Asterisk besides Switchvox which is in my opinion a completely different breed that I’m not [...]

Almost halfway through 2008 and already we’re seeing Asterisk everywhere. Asterisk has permeated almost every market in which VoIP is used, from the small business market to the carrier space. The question is, where is Asterisk going to pull ahead in 2008 and in what market? The past 12 months leading up to this point [...]