Digium is proud to announce the winners of the 2009 Digium Innovation Awards. The company announced the winners today at AstriCon, the official conference for Asterisk, the world's leading open source PBX, telephony engine and telephony applications toolkit. The Innovation Awards, presented in five categories to seven recipients, recognize innovation, enterprise-class solutions, measurable return on investment, use of Asterisk in businesses outside of the communications industry and contributions to the Asterisk community.

Asterisk is currently used in business, government and educational settings around the world. Along with being cost-effective, Asterisk’s flexibility inspires its savvy community to develop novel products and services. Digium presents the Innovation Awards to recognize and showcase the innovation, creativity and commercial success of the many Asterisk-based products and services.

The 2009 winners of the Digium Innovation Awards are:

Pioneer Award :: Abot Tanaw (Philippines) – Abot Tanaw uses dedicated videoconferencing hardware setup, similar to that found in businesses, to deliver high-quality video to overseas Filipino workers who wish to communicate with their families on a regular basis. Abot Tanaw curbs the cost of communication by taking full advantage of an Asterisk-based IP PBX server to provide the video calls at no cost to users.

Pioneer Award :: GreenfieldTech (Udim, Israel) – Working on behalf of a customer, GreenfieldTech created a high-speed, highly scalable Asterisk-based dialer and interactive voice response system that currently serves over 10,000 customers world wide. The platform was used extensively during the 2009 Israeli elections, serving 70% of the political parties in Israel.

ROI Award :: City of Taguig (Taguig, Philippines) – The city of Taguig is the first in the Philippines to implement a unified citywide telecommunications system. Communication is now available 24/7, despite tropical rains and typhoons that previously were a threat to the entire telephone system of Taguig’s City Hall. With newly established centralized hotlines, calls are answered and filtered to the proper department by trained staff, instead of interrupting city workers while being passed from one department to another. Taguig now has an Asterisk-based VoIP telephone systems in over 73 sites, and the implementation has already brought a 50% decrease in city costs while doubling city workers’ productivity.

Inside Out Award :: Teletales (New York, N.Y.) – Teletales enables users to share stories via the telephone and download them online to keep forever in digital form. Users call in to Teletales, an Asterisk-based phone system, and enter the number of the person with whom they would like to share a story. Teletales connects them and then records their call. Users can then log in to Teletales online to download and edit their audio recording to keep forever.

Community Achievement Award :: House Internet (Buenos Aires, Argentina) – House Internet developed FOP, the first real-time switchboard for Asterisk, in 2004, and it remains the most widely used operator console. FOP is currently one of the tools that companies and integrators installing Asterisk use to highlight and visually demonstrate the potential of Asterisk as a VoIP platform. Many individuals involved in Asterisk are able to benefit from the solution, from developers and integrators to phone users.

Big Biz Asterisk Award :: Intuit Innovations (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) – A pioneer in the Malaysian market, Intuit Innovations created a scalable solution able to support 130,000 existing subscribers and handle 10,000 concurrent calls. The solution can be used by ISPs, telephone company providers and VoIP carriers with large subscriber bases who need to provide a reliable but low cost telephony platform.

Big Biz Asterisk Honorable Mention :: Airnet (Chattanooga, Tenn.) – AirNet provided a large-scale VoIP outbound survey solution to the Republican National Committee for the 2008 Presidential Election. Political volunteers were able to walk into a call center where multiple VoIP phones were configured, log into the survey application through the phone and begin making calls. The solution had approximately 250 locations spread across the continental United States, with 6,500 VoIP phones conducting 21 million phone calls for a total of 24 million minutes consumed.

Digium thanks this year’s participants and all of the award winners. Asterisk innovators are invited to participate in the 2010 competition by submitting an application to www.digium.com/en/company/awards/innovation.php.