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).

Lost in the shuffle of — yawn — “top VoIP predictions for 2007” was an announcement today by Santa Clara, CA-based startup Packet Island about its new “plug and play” PacketSmart solution for VoIP-specific network assessment and monitoring. PacketSmart combines a 4” x 4.5” monitoring “micro-appliance” with on-demand network monitoring and management software.

Now, individually, none of these components are unique. Nothing to make the pulse race like, say, video on the Net.

What makes PacketSmart interesting is how it brings the pieces together in a solution that adds up for service providers to fewer truck rolls and lower cost.

First, it marries network management appliances — reducing their size into the bargain — and provides on-demand network management applications that can be accessed via the Internet from a Web browser (no installation required). Then the whole package is tuned for the needs of VoIP.

“Deploying VoIP over pre-existing data networks is a big challenge that many of our VoIP service provider and VAR customers face today,” said Praveen Kumar, Packet Island co-founder and president in today’s press release.

“Troubleshooting VoIP quality problems adds even more complexity to this challenge, because of the need to understand the SMB customer’s internal network. Since our micro-appliance is essential in this troubleshooting process, we’ve taken extra effort to make it easily deployable in a vast variety of SMB network configurations.”

Packet Island also offers an Asterisk version of PacketSmart, which was released in Oct. 2006. Stay tuned for more insight into that.

Last week Asterisk users got a peek at their Christmas present from Digium: a beta version of the new AsteriskNow GUI. A formal announcement and a splashy launch are in the works for December.

But as important as a user-friendly Asterisk interface is, even more important, the development signals a new direction for the creator of the open source PBX, according to Digium VP of Product management Bill Miller.

While the company promises that it will continue to serve the open source community, it’s also aiming to make new Asterisk converts, especially among users without Linux or Asterisk experience.

“We are clearly investing in Asterisk products and software appliances — packages that include Linux, and Asterisk and are focused very specifically on target markets,” he explains. “The intent is plug-and-play, 10 minutes to dial tone.”

But isn’t Digium positioning itself to cannibalize the ecosystem that it has fostered around Asterisk?

Well for years Digium didn’t develop a GUI for exactly that reason despite the fact that customers have been asking for a Digium branded GUI.

Now the company wants its ecosystem partners to expand their horizons to reach a changing market.

“We want to make it easier to build applications because it’s applications that are driving voice, not IP-PBX,” explains Miller. “The GUI is very easy to customize, to brand. We want people to build on it. We’re enabling lots of people to go after different parts of the market.”

Miller certainly isn’t thinking small.

“We have a tremendous roadmap to help people use Asterisk to take over the world with open source,” he says. “We’re looking at a whole series of new ways to reach people beyond Asterisk.org. We’re going to add significant new capabilities to the site. Stay tuned for new developments. Wait ’til you see VON.”