 04-10-2008, 03:39 PM | #1 (permalink) |
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| Cisco, Nortel & Avaya Better Watch Out For Mark Spencer and "Asterisk"
Cisco, Nortel & Avaya Better Watch Out For Mark Spencer and "Asterisk"  By Chris von Nieda (Axcess News) Phoenix - Mark Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk (http://www.Asterisk.org), a free open source software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of features office telecom switches (often called PBXs) typically supply. His business class software is poised to disrupt the $7 billion market much the same way the Linux open-source computer operating system crushed the price of business computing and brought woe to established leaders such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Sun Microsystems (Nasdaq: JAVAD). Here is an excerpt from their website "About" page: Asterisk is the world's leading open source telephony engine and tool kit. Offering flexibility unheard of in the world of proprietary communications, Asterisk® empowers developers and integrators to create advanced communication solutions...for free. "You couldn't set out to build a system like this. No one company could do it all. When you open source, people just keep improving things," says Spencer who just turned 31 today. Happy Birthday Mark. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its VOIP (Voice Over IP) Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO), Nortel (NYSE: NT) or Avaya (NYSE: AV). A quick trip to their forum: Asterisk Forums :: Index shows me they have over 53,000 active registered users and over 63,000 articles posted! Currently boasting over 2 million users it seems there is some interest in this software, wouldn't you say? For those of you REALLY interested you can download and read the 604 page O'Reilly book on Asterisk: http://downloads.oreilly.com/books/9780596510480.pdf but better get a couple reams of paper ready and lots of ink cartridges. Asterisk could lead to the creation of thousands of businesses, as people begin thinking about the phone the same way they saw the personal computer in 1980, as a platform on which to build. Spencer had this in mind when he named his software after the symbol used in Unix computer programming to signify "everything." Digium, the company Spencer created in 1999 is based in "high tech Huntsville, Alabama". (Hey I didn't write that, they did!) and now offers a full range of quality hardware and software products that enable telephony applications including legacy PBX, IVR, auto attendant, next generation gateways, media servers and application servers. While on a full scholarship at Auburn, Spencer started Digium as a Linux consultant. He sold one-seventh of the firm for $500,000 to Adtran, a Huntsville telecom equipment maker where he had interned two years before. He wanted a really cool phone switch to handle sales orders, but when he learned that it would cost $10,000, he began writing Asterisk. "I'd never touched a traditional PBX" Spencer says. "I used to go on industry panels, and the guys from Cisco would be nice and baby me, never saying anything bad about Asterisk," Spencer says. "They've stopped seeing me as a charity. It's their business." This is a company to be watched! Note: Chris von Nieda is a contributing writer on Technology for AXcess News as well as an SEO specialist with VerticalMeasures.com |
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