For me Asterisk is one of the most interesting and exciting developments in the world of VoIP. It has been fascinating to watch Mark Spencer grow Asterisk from a little known open source project into a market force that is changing everything in telecom. Sure, the naysayers always tell you Asterisk won't scale, its not stable, the SIP stack is lousy, and on and on ..... They reality, however, is that Asterisk is getting better and better all the time. OK, Asterisk is not carrier grade now, but it will be - probably sooner that anyone expects. If you are in the telecom business and think Asterisk is a gimic that will not impact your business, you are either a dinosaur or a strategic planner working for an ILEC.
We first started working with Asterisk three years ago after hearing about Asterisk from customers. Since that time, I have been amazed by the number of Asterisk deployments. Just about every customer we have is using Asterisk or evaluating Asterisk. Only Cisco routers and Intel chips have greater penetration in the telecom marketplace. At Fall VON in 2006, a long time friend who is a product manager with a major VoIP equipment provider told me that they ship 30,000 SIP phones or ATAs to Asterisk users each month. 30,000 is a big number from a firm that is not an Asterisk partner and has a PBX solution that competes directly with Asterisk!
From my oberservations, Mark Spencer is a pretty shrewd businessman. Now that he has reorganized Digium and added outside capital, the market impact Asterisk is having will accelerate. We first exhibited with Digium in the Asterisk Pavilion at Spring VON 2005 and we are excitied about being part of the Asterisk Pavilion again this year at Spring VON 2007 in San Jose.
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