Digium is proud to announce that the winner of the 2010 Digium Innovation Award is ITCenter, located in Santa Maria da Feira, Portugal. Digium announced the winner at AstriCon, the official conference for Asterisk, the world's leading open source PBX, telephony engine and telephony applications toolkit.

Since 2003, ITCenter has differentiated itself by specializing in innovative solutions based on open source technologies, including Asterisk. ITCenter used Asterisk to interconnect all 48 Portuguese Higher Education & Scientific Institutions, integrating 220 existing legacy PBX systems and enabling VoIP communications between all the institutions without any change to its existing phone systems. The implementation provides centralized management and billing of both the legacy and new system, while supporting an infrastructure that processes approximately seven million monthly calls. ITCenter CIO Ruben Sousa presented a case study of the implementation at AstriCon.

Asterisk is currently used in business, government and educational settings around the world. It is the preferred development technology for building phone systems based on its open standards, cost-effectiveness and flexibility. Last month, Digium released Asterisk 1.8, the newest version of its open source communications software. Asterisk 1.8 incorporates more than 200 new additions, many of which came directly from the Asterisk community. The company also introduced Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework, an open source project designed to simplify the creation of complex communications systems.