Digium hits the one millionth download of Asterisk in 2007, capping off a record year for the leading open source telephony company. Digium, which will complete its 24th consecutive quarter of growth and profitability this year, created headlines with new executive appointments, industry awards, strategic partnerships and acquisitions aimed at further advancing the company’s presence in the small-to-medium-sized VoIP market.

Open source Asterisk continues to revolutionize the VoIP market by giving companies a cheaper and more flexible alternative to proprietary solutions. The 2007 introduction of Digium’s Asterisk Appliance based on Embedded Asterisk Business Edition successfully combined the cost savings and flexibility of open source with the rapid installation, high reliability and ease of use of a business appliance. PC Magazine called the Asterisk Appliance “astonishingly compact” and packed with “high-end features.”

Digium announces OrecX’s support for Asterisk Business Edition, the professional version of Digium's open source telephony engine. Compatibility with Asterisk Business Edition allows OrecX to provide small and mid-sized businesses running the Asterisk platform a modular, cross-platform recording and retrieval system for audio streams. OrecX has also become a Digium|Asterisk Software Partner to enhance the relationship between OrecX and Digium.

By leveraging the power of open source, the OrecX suite of applications delivers end users a voice recording platform that is easy to install and maintain and that continually evolves to meet the needs of Asterisk users at a significantly lower cost than proprietary voice recorders.

Digium announces the immediate availability of Switchvox Free Edition. The new product includes the telephony features of the widely used Switchvox SOHO edition and can be downloaded and installed in minutes on existing hardware. The release underscores Digium’s commitment to delivering full-featured telephony systems at low price points to allow organizations around the world to benefit from the Asterisk open source movement and flexibility of VoIP.

Digium is making final preparations for AstriCon 2007, the longest running conference of the most widely used open source telephony software, Asterisk. Digium created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk and uses it as the basis for its own voice over IP (VoIP) solutions. Using a dual-licensing model, Digium licenses Asterisk for use by myriad software and telecommunications companies around the world to enable them to deliver their own differentiated solutions. Asterisk’s widespread use and feature set make it one of the most influential open source projects today.

Digium the Asterisk Company announces that Asterisk creator and Digium Founder Mark Spencer will join leaders from Cisco, Avaya, IBM, Microsoft, Siemens and Skype to discuss the future of VoIP and unified communications. Digium’s Spencer will represent the open source telephony industry in this high-powered discussion as Digium continues its charge to move the revolutionary open source technology deeper into the enterprise market with emerging and new software architectures for unified communications.

Spencer’s “Software Architecture and Unified Communications” panel will take place on Thursday, August 23 from 10:30 am–11:30 am. Also representing the open source industry at VoiceCon 2007 will be Digium’s VP of Product Management Bill Miller who will present “Open Source’s Role in Converged Networks” with Digium customer Southern Company, one of America’s largest generators of electricity with 4.3 million customers. Miller’s presentation will take place on Thursday, August 23 from 8:00 - 8:45 AM.

Companies can now download trixbox Pro, a free business-grade phone system that allows companies with five to 500 employees to make free VoIP calls. In addition to traditional PSTN dialing and PBX features, trixbox Pro also includes conference calling, unified messaging between voicemail and email, employee presence management, embedded corporate chat server, and the ability to integrate with Microsoft Outlook, Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

Fonality announces the beta release of trixbox 2.4, the latest version of the Asterisk-based telephony platform that has become synonymous with open source telephony and home to the largest Asterisk-based community. trixbox 2.4 incorporates the newest releases of CentOS 5, Asterisk 1.4 and FreePBX 2.3 for broader compatibility, choice and usability. trixbox 2.4 is beta software and timing of the general release will be gated by stability of Asterisk 1.4, as well as integration of all of the components and testing to ensure that it is ready for deployment in a demanding production environment.

Digium introduces a new subscription-based service offering designed to give Digium Asterisk customers and partners faster, easier and unlimited access to Digium service and support. Offered in Silver, Gold and Platinum levels, Digium’s subscription-based services will be available for all business-class products beginning with the Digium Asterisk Appliance, now available.

The voice communications market continues to experience rapid growth with more companies evaluating and choosing open source as a cost-effective and flexible alternative to proprietary telephony solutions. The increased demand for open source brings a greater business need for service and support during business hours and around the clock. Digium is the first open source telephony provider to offer businesses a service offering rivaling that of proprietary vendors in terms of price, scope and scale.

Digium announces it has acquired Sokol & Associates. Digium has long enjoyed a close relationship with Steve Sokol and his colleagues, all of whom have joined Digium’s team. By acquiring the company, Digium gains an additional channel through which it can communicate Asterisk enhancements to the IT, telephony, software development, reseller and call center professionals who use the software every day.

Digium created, maintains, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the open source telephony communications software in use by more than two million servers today. Asterisk powers Digium’s family of software and hardware appliances and enables other companies, which often use older versions of the software in their own VoIP products.

Digium the Asterisk company announces a new family of telephony interface cards based on the PCI Express (PCIe) format. PCIe is fast becoming the dominant form factor in expansion cards for server, workstation and desktop systems because it offers numerous performance benefits over traditional PCI and PCI Extended interface formats. Digium is rolling out PCIe cards across its full product family and will continue to support interface cards based on the PCI and PCI Extended formats.

Digium is the creator and driving force behind Asterisk, the open source voice communications software deployed by more than two million servers and serving well over 10 million people today. The company’s hardware, including the new PCIe cards, is designed to help customers realize the full power and flexibility of Asterisk by meeting precise requirements for scalability; network connectivity; and support for IP, traditional analog or mixed telephony lines.

Fonality announces that more than 2,000 customers with 45,000 phones in 37 countries have adopted its open source business phone system, PBXtra, and used it to place more than 75 million calls. Fonality continues to reliably scale as small and medium-sized businesses rapidly adopt PBXtra, the world’s largest commercial Asterisk deployment. Continued growth is fueled by demand among smaller companies for high-quality, value-priced alternatives to the expensive, rigid offerings sold by traditional communications companies.

Fonality is transforming the telephony market by combining the cost savings of open source software with award-winning ease-of-use, making sophisticated business phone systems a reality for small to medium-sized businesses worldwide. Fonality’s patent-pending, hybrid-hosted technology enables seamless use of PBXtra to support branch offices, as well as mobile and home-based workers.

Sayers Media Group announces the launch of PBX Prompts. PBX Prompts offers a variety of standard voice prompt packages for the Asterisk Open Source PBX and custom voice prompts for your IVR, Voicemail, or in addition to our standard prompts packages. Recorded in professional sound studios, PBX Prompts’ standard, advanced, and custom voice prompts give your company a voice that is representative of your business. With no minimums, and a quick 72 hour turnaround, PBX Prompts can meet the demands of any voice prompt project.

Digium announces the final beta of its AsteriskNOW software appliance. New AsteriskNOW beta 5 features, as well as extensive product testing and feedback from the Asterisk community, make this the final beta leading up to Q2 availability of AsteriskNOW 1.0. Customers can deploy AsteriskNOW in minutes to start using Asterisk, the most popular open source telephone system in the world, in their organizations.

Introduced last quarter by Digium, the creator and primary developer of Asterisk, AsteriskNOW includes all the software customers need to install and configure a phone system that offers the advanced features found in expensive proprietary products. AsteriskNOW is free and can run on customers’ existing servers. An easy-to-read AsteriskNOW screen helps customers who do not have an Internet VoIP service provider choose a Digium Asterisk Certified Service Provider or add another that they select.

An AsteriskNOW installation demo will be held in the Digium World Theatre at VON on Wednesday, March 21 at 11:00 a.m. Copies of the new book AsteriskNOW for Dummies are also available at the conference. Those not attending VON can view a YouTube video of Mark Spencer walking users through the easy installation.

Fonality announce a new enterprise telephony appliance based on trixbox and a range of complementary professional support options. The trixbox Appliance comes pre-installed with the trixbox software platform and is an industrial grade rack-mountable server with dual hard disk and dual power supply redundancy options. It is aimed at businesses with five to 500 employees and can be purchased for use with VoIP, E1/T1 or up to 48 analog lines. Created for trixbox and Asterisk resellers, as well as IT professionals, the trixbox Appliance costs $999 and delivers the industry’s best price performance value for a PBX.

The trixbox Appliance is powered by Intel and comes with pre-configured Sangoma line cards with industry-leading Octasic echo-cancellation hardware inside. Broad support for the appliance has been announced by a growing trixbox ecosystem that includes phone manufacturers Polycom, Aastra, and Grandstream, as well as VoIP service providers VoicePulse and Teliax.

Digium the Asterisk company, has more than doubled its presence at Spring VON, through the addition of new exhibiting partners, and the creation of the Digium Theatre on the VON show floor. As a result, the Asterisk Pavilion now occupies 5,000 sq. feet of exhibit space, representing the largest single entity in the VON Expo.

More than a dozen Asterisk partners are showcasing their wares in the Asterisk Pavilion, including: Aspect Software; Intel Corporation; LumenVox; Switchvox; TransNexus; VoicePulse; Polycom; Simple Signal; and others.