AstriCon 2008: Digium & Skype announce interoperability collaboration

PHOENIX, Ariz. - Digium and Skype have announced a "collaboration" between the two companies to bring together the Asterisk telephony platform and Skype's service.

Delivering this morning's keynote address at the conference, Skype VP Stefan Oberg said business users utilizing Skype want a PBX to route their calls. The Skype on Asterisk solution will allow PBX users to make calls using Skype names or via normal phone numbers.

The partnership is being touted as bringing together the 338 million worldwide Skype users to the tens of millions of Asterisk users.  Since about 30 percent of Skype users are business users, there's a lot of potential to introduce more businesses to Digium and Asterisk.

Currently, the solution is being tested in a private beta; people can apply to participate at www.astricon.net/skype.

Connectivity will be delivered through a channel driver. Licensing will be done on a per channel basis and the software will be a commercial, not open source, license.  Pricing will be announced at the time of official release of the product.

On the Skype side, Oberg said businesses will be able to purchase a package to provide some extra support, calling credits and some "additional value-added things."  The exact details on how the packaging will work are not yet fully defined. "The details we'll work out together."

The Skype-Asterisk channel driver will support Skype's wideband codec, and Asterisk will have the capability to transcode between Skype's native codecs and other codecs. It will allow users to register as multiple Skype users, so a particular extension can ring to a Skype name. Multiple calls per user are also supported.

Video will not initially be supported, but video in Skype "may encourage" Asterisk to incorporate video support faster, said Digium CTO Mark Spencer.

Channel partners will have built-in discounts for the Skype Asterisk solution, giving them an opportunity to make margin on the piece. Oberg also noted that channel partners will also have the opportunity for a revenue share on Skype calls.