Asterisk creator and sponsor Digium put the mass market squarely in its sights today with its acquisition of three year-old Asterisk PBX company Switchvox.

While Asterisk has earned a devoted following among technology experts, the formidable challenges of implementing the open source telephony system is a barrier to wide adoption. Earlier this year, Digium took a first step toward greater simplicity by introducing the AsteriskNow appliance. Now the company is adding to its portfolio a feature-rich turnkey PBX that claims 66,000 users (seats).

“If you look at where Asterisk has been adopted, it’s a technically sophisticated audience – system integrators and enterprises, organizations that have the telephony expertise and technology expertise to use Asterisk,” explains Digium CEO Danny Windham.

“We have been looking at things that are necessary to grow the business. The most important thing is making it easy to use – packaging it for small and medium sized applications. Switchvox has made it [Asterisk] really easy to use.”

Digium looked at about 30 different packaged PBX offerings before finally deciding on the Switchvox acquisition, according to Windham. “Switchvox had the most reliable product, the most functional product and the Switchvox team is culturally compatible.”

He points to the value-add that comes built-in with Switchvox’s product as significant customer benefits.

“Take the example of a small business, a real estate office running Switchvox PBX and a CRM system like Salesforce.com or SugarCRM. When the phone rings, the customer record in the CRM system is displayed. It also brings up Google Maps showing the caller’s location and opens up the caller’s URL. Before answering the phone you know who’s calling and the whole history.”

But does this move put into question Digium’s commitment to the open source community? An emphatic ‘no’ is Windham’s answer.

“Digium is spending more today to support the open source project than anytime in its history,” he says. “The stronger the [Switchvox] business is, the more resources we have to apply to open source projects.”

At the end of the day, Switchvox and Digium appears to be a marriage made in heaven, albeit a long distance marriage, as the Switchvox team will remain in San Diego as Digium’s western regional office.

“We believe Asterisk is the most popular open source IP telephony system out there,” Windham says. “We believe that Switchvox is the most popular open source PBX out there.”

Digium advanced its make-it-easy-for-the-customer strategy with a SMB VoIP provider Bandwidth.com partnership announced today. Bottom line is that Bandwidth.com will be rolled into in the AsteriskGUI graphical user interface as a service provider option, making implementation even more turnkey. The two also plan to cooperate in developing new services.

Kevin Fleming, Digium Senior Software Engineer and co-maintainer of Asterisk, opened his talk at last week’s Communications Developer conference by asking how many in the audience knew what Asterisk was. About half raised their hands. Then he asked what Asterisk was. Most answered that it was a PBX.

Which was his point.

“Asterisk isn’t a PBX, it’s a platform,” he said. A PBX is only one of the things it can be used for. Fleming spent the remainder of his time sharing some of the other things that Digium has been doing to make it easier to build applications on Asterisk.

One piece of the effort is this week’s announcement of the partnership with San Mateo, CA- based Vyatta to integrate Asterisk into Vyatta’s open source router. The integrated appliance will eliminate network management issues for Asterisk developers and will automatically request the necessary resources for the traffic.

Another of those efforts is the productizing of Asterisk.

The Asterisk GUI project not only provides an easy-to-use interface for the platform, but also allows developers to easily customize the interface as well, according to Fleming.

Another new offering is the Asterisk software appliance, Asterisk Now. Developers can bundle software applications into the box and deliver the whole thing as a turnkey package. Digium also plans to offer Asterisk as an on-demand software service.

The company has also enhanced Asterisk, adding more redundancy so the system can handleSS more calls and increasing performance. “It should be practical to handle 1,000 SIP calls on a garden variety server,” Fleming said.

Digium is also exposing more complex dialing features to allow the implementation of features like find me-follow me. Call event logging will support more complex applications like call transfer and increase visibility of data like call wait times for call auditing. SS7 support allows Asterisk to be connected to SS7 networks.

Digium is also getting more formal about security advisories and coordinating with other reporting agencies. (http://www.asterisk.org/security).

By year end open source fans will have a unified platform for networking and VoIP thanks to a partnership between Digium and Vyatta to integrate Asterisk with Vyatta’s Open Source Router.

EQO has added long distance mobile VoIP and messaging at local rates to its mobile social networking service.

European WiFi hotspot provider Trustive reports that hotspot users are paying for way more than they get. No surprise there. Trustive also predicts that VoIP will be the killer app for hotspots.

Apple has found a way to marginalize the iPhone even before it hits the market by giving AT&T an exclusive five-year distribution deal. Leslie Cauley of USA Today sees this as an aggressive move that will put competitors on the defensive. The VoIP community might think differently. We just may be used to having it our way — not The Phone Company’s way.

To those of you who made it by the new Voxilla online store for some year-end shopping, we’ve been glad to see you! And we hope you’ve been pleased to see our fresh paint and the new goodies on our shelves. We are still working out some distribution logistics, but look forward to a year of new growth in 2007.

For you with no idea what I’m going on about, we quietly changed a week or so ago from the old-stand-by shopping cart with the groovy orange graphics to a brand-new platform sporting fresh design that integrates well with the rest of Voxilla’s on-line properties. In the process, we’ve made the experience of shopping at Voxilla faster, clearer, and more consistent, in addition to nearly tripling our inventory of products — hello Digium users, hello Netgear fans — and launching new partnerships with Talkswitch and Vegastream.

We’ve also added International shipping via U.S. Postal Service and secured new distribution alliances that should improve all facets of our approach to helping you find the right product for your IP communications needs.

Returning customers should find your old log-in credentials work on the new store, and your order history is preserved and accessible on the new site. New users will find registration a snap and our secure online ordering process easy to navigate. As always, your privacy and satisfaction remain our highest priorities.

We are very excited about this step forward in Voxilla’s evolution; it’s something we’ve been working toward much of the last quarter of this year and we’re happy to have it finally in place. We hope you find our changes useful and pleasing as well.