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.”

Samsung’s convergence calculation goes like this. Routing + switching + VoIP + security = 1 — One box, one management interface, one architecture. Last month the Korean electronics giant introduced the U.S. enterprise networking market to Samsung’s new math with the Ubigate iBG Series all-in-one enterprise networking platform for SMBs.

Ubigate begs the question: does the world really need another box?

That’s a simplistic and narrow view, according to Samsung Director of North American Enterprise Networks Lynn Tinney. Ubigate, Tinney explains, is a foundation for converged communications.

“When you speak to customers, they’re speaking about investments: how can I make network operation more efficient. It’s not like they woke up one morning and wanted convergence. It’s coming more gradually, in terms of wise investment, pushed by [the need for] making end users more productive, getting more for their investment.”

To meet these perennial business objectives, the infrastructure has to be in place to serve up what end users need. But while big companies have many choices in today’s market, SMBs have a limited range of options.

“To reach an SMB market, you have to recognize that you’re putting a lot of functionality on a single box,” says Tinney. “It’s risky on the low end but cost makes it a bad financial decision on the high end.”

In other words, when you have a dominant market player — that would be Cisco, the elephant in this particular room — all solutions entail sizable compromises for customers.

Enter Samsung Ubigate iBG.

“We recognize that in the SMB market Samsung could develop a box that offered some clear advantages,” explains Tinney.

The first place Samsung hopes customers will work the new math is in their costs. To start, Ubigate pricing is about 30 percent less than its “nearest competitor,” according to Tinney. Further, cost of ownership goes down as well, Tinney says, with less equipment and a single, browser-based network management interface. “Business gateways are new corner stones for any infrastructure, Samsung’s Ubigate can consolidate three or four boxes to one.”

Reliability is another part of the calculus that Tinney says makes a convincing argument for the Ubigate.

“Samsung’s long history of outstanding engineering delivers its worth to customers. They can feel confident Samsung brings to market a well engineered and tested solution. The Ubigate is built for redundant power supply to further ensure network reliability,” Tinney says, adding,”If there’s a flaw in it anywhere, it’s that it’s over-engineered.”

Finally, Samsung is also aiming to change the security versus performance equation.

“Security is often the feature that end users either have to sacrifice to maintain performance or accept slower processing speeds to keep the security levels,” explains Tinney. “With Ubigate, the customer can have AV, IDS, IPS, etc. without giving up on performance. Although I doubt the Ubigate will be looked at for only security, this is a critical benefit that goes to significant TCO and ROI.”

Finally, Samsung’s acknowledged expertise in the consumer market will give the Ubigate an additional market advantage, Tinney says.

“Strategic decision makers recognize that the end user is a consumer. Understanding the consumer is an advantage as we design our product. We understand that single user’s perspective.”

So how does that elephant in the room figure in Samsung’s math?

“It’s one thing to go out and buy a tennis racquet,” she says. “It’s another thing to learn how to play.”

I hardly ever use instant messaging. The reason isn’t a laudable desire to avoid distractions. It’s because I simply forget to open that IM “silo.”

We’re so used to working with applications that operate like silos — email, document editing, instant messaging, media players — that we don’t notice it until someone brings it to our attention.

What’s more, for those of us who have difficulty staying focused in the best of cases, the between-applications shuffle provides endless opportunities for distraction and time wasting. For example, it’s taken me four days to finish this story.

Mill Valley, CA-based IP communications company CommuniGate wants to help me out with its newest offering, Pronto!; a browser-based user interface that brings together e-mail, instant messaging, rich media, RSS feeds, and groupware.

Sold through distributors and service providers, Pronto! can be run by a service provider as a hosted service or on-premises by an enterprise. Business and consumer subscribers can use their Pronto! desktop through any Web browser, anywhere without installing any client software.

What sets the Adobe Flash-based Pronto! apart from other unified communications and office suites is that it brings multi-media into the mix.

The system marries two of today’s hot trends: Rich Internet Applications (RIA) — aka Web 2.0 — and unified IP communications. The interactive nature of the application is important; this is not simply a Web mail program. These applications work just like the ones physically on your desktop, says CommuniGate VP of Business Development Jon Doyle, and they are designed go seamlessly with the workflow.

“If you look at the way people work, they’ll have an email client open, they’ll have a media player open, they might be using a blogging tool or working on a document,” explains Doyle. For example, Pronto! integrates your calendar and your email and lets you drag and drop video from your desktop and publish a video press release seamlessly.

Pronto! is designed for small to mid-size businesses with 20 to 200 users — the kind that don’t have the time or resources to invest in managing an in-house system like Microsoft Communicator. Pronto!’s sweet spot is with small-to-medium size legal, medical and media firms.

It’s an underserved market, according to Doyle.

“With Microsoft you have to have Exchange, Active Directory, Live Communications Server, a PBX, the Office suite,” says Doyle. In other words, lots of software and equipment to install, configure and manage.

“If you look at small companies, they don’t have an IT guy to set up Microsoft or Lotus,” he continues. “They can’t have five or six products to deal with. It might be all right for Delta Dental but not for the dentist down the street. Pronto! is technology ‘baked’ to be useful.”

The system’s secret sauce is Adobe Flash. The first reason is security, according to Doyle.

“Flash is inherently secure because it runs in memory space,” he explains. “Flash is a binary that runs in memory space within the Flash or Shockwave layer, and is far more secure. Java, AJAX, Javascript [other technologies used to build RIAs] open security holes because they can execute exploits, and thus can be used by hackers to get into the PC.

“That’s a big thing for us,” Doyle adds, “because we didn’t want to unleash a whole series of fixes.”

Easy handling for multi-media is another benefit, says Doyle. “Multi-media plays inside Flash. Ajax and Java [other technologies for building RIAs] call up a player,” he explains, “and players are a security hole. Once you let it play, it’s on your PC.”

Finally, with Flash Lite bringing RIAs to handsets, Pronto! gets to go along for the ride. “Over the next 24 months you’re going to see a lot of Flash Lite,” says Doyle. “Providers are starting to look at it for games, data applications. If you start a Java application on a cell phone,” he adds, “it’s not intuitive.”

So what’s next? First up in September will be integrated voice services; either through a CommuniGate plug-in or built in capabilities in the next version of Flash Player. After that, Doyle says, “really creative packages of software — voice messaging, SMS, email, all crafted for special uses.”

Now excuse me, I have to go open my IM program and see if any of my old friends from high school want to chat.

When you’re the only national DSL network in the U.S. what do you do for your next act?

You “disintermediate” the copper wire. In plain English, you take it out of the equation. And the way you take it out is with fixed WiMax technology. That’s the idea right now at Covad, according to Director of Marketing Simon McIver.

The SMB market is ripe for a new connection, according to McIver. Small and mid-size businesses are “waking up” to the fact that consumer broadband services don’t cut it for business applications like POS systems, Web servers, or even office email.

“The problem with cable and DSL is that it’s a shared line.” That means that things may work smoothly at 9:00 a.m. when kids are in school, but slow down at 3:00 p.m. when they get out and hit the MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games).

A traditional solution is “a good old fashioned T1 line with 1.5 megabytes locked in,” explains McIver. “It’s consistent, it’s always there.” But for small businesses, it’s a prohibitively costly solution.

That’s where fixed WiMax comes in. Unlike WiFi, WiMax can deliver the assured bandwidth and higher reliability of a T1 with a lot less infrastructure. WiMax also has wider range and better coverage than WiFi — especially indoors.

“You have full independence for the last mile,” McIver says. “You don’t have to deal with a CLEC — you can set up a customer within hours. The on-premises antenna connects to a base station like a standard T1, but wirelessly.”

Businesses aren’t the only customers that will find Covad WiMax broadband attractive. “There are plenty of people who want a big pipe to the house,” McIver explains. “They don’t care how you deliver it. ”

But Covad doesn’t plan to sell directly to consumers. “We want to enable brands like Earthlink and AOL to be successful,” McIver adds. “Covad will continue to be the small business brand.

Covad is currently running a “pre-WiMax” version of its service in four metro areas: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Chicago. “Standards are being finalized and we expect the first true WiMax network in Q3 – Q4,” McIver explains.

The lowdown on enterprise telephony is more of a low-up, with pure IP PBX systems sales growth of 3 percent in the first quarter of 2007, up 76 percent from last quarter, according to Infonetics Research. In the meantime, traditional TDM PBX system sales feebly lifted its head, after five quarters running of losses, showing a flash of life in a declining picture, marked by a sorry medical chart at the foot of its bed — negative 45 percent over the last five years.

You can see which way the wind is blowing, but where exactly is the take-off for IP PBX? The launch of Microsoft’s unified communications product — Office Communicator 2007 — a spate of vendor consolidation with Inter-Tel and Mitel and Avaya as the players, and ShoreTel’s imminent IPO are the focus of current interest in the industry’s upswing.

I asked Infonetics Research Analyst Mathias Machowinski to expand on the report’s findings.

Voxilla.com: Why aren’t buyers abandoning their PBX’s for a pure unified system?

Machowinski: Just inertia. Change takes time. I think if companies will adopt OCS, they’ll keep their PBX system in place and layer OCS on top of that. It’s not like they are perfect matches for each other’s features. If a company needs some of the nice features OCS offers like presence, messaging, collaboration tools, then they’ll go there.

Voxilla.com: What kind of impact will vendor consolidation and the Avaya acquisition have?

Machowinski: Well, first with consolidation, like with Mitel and Inter-Tel, there will be fewer competitors in a very crowded market. Then, the acquisition of a public company like Avaya by a couple of private equity firms changes the landscape. Too much cutthroat competition isn’t good, because the market is at the end of the competition picture where having so many companies isn’t good for the customers and isn’t too great for the companies either. In this crowded a field, mergers like this will produce stronger more efficient companies. We’re far far from the point where you have to worry about companies becoming monopolistic behemoths.

Voxilla.com: What does ShoreTel’s IPO mean in terms of IP PBX sales?

Machowinski: This is the reverse dynamic, where ShoreTel, a private company, will be going public. Being private in its early days let Shoretel focus on developing its product without a lot of interference, and develop a strong product which was good for them. But now they’re ready to go public. The access to capital will let them expand more. So far, they’ve focused on the North American market, but this move will let them grow their distribution overseas.

Voxilla.com: In the mass of information your report gives, what most interests or surprises you?

Machowinski: That the TDM market grew at all. And that the IP phone market is growing so slowly, especially on the softphone side. I expected that to sell more strongly, especially because manufacturers can sell additional phones, almost double, for every desk phone. Not all employees need that softphone, but still many could use it. That’s where I expected more action.

Highlights from Infonetics PBX Report:

• Overall enterprise telephony revenue is on track for another year of double-digit growth.
• In 1Q07, worldwide total PBX/KTS system sales inched up 1% sequentially, and are up 8% from a year ago in 1Q06.
• The overall market will total $11.9 billion in 2010.
• Hybrid PBX systems represent 63% of all PBX/KTS system line shipments worldwide in 1Q07, and will increase to 72% by 2010.
• The enterprise telephony market was flat in North America in 1Q07, weak in Europe, and strong in Asia Pacific.
• Avaya is the market share leader for worldwide IP PBX revenue in 1Q07, followed closely by Cisco and Siemens.
• Cisco maintains a strong lead in IP deskphone and IP softphone sales, accounting for almost half the units shipped worldwide in 1Q07.

Find more data and a .jpg chart at the Infonetics Research press portal in the Enterprise Voice & Data section at http://www.info.infonetics.com.