Digium moves forward

Somewhere on the way to ITEXPO - It is fair to say that Digium's heavy-duty upgrade to Switchvox is one of the top three announcements coming out of Miami this week. 

When Digium made its partnership announcement with Skype this fall, I was less than enthused.  

Skype needed Digium more than Digium needed Skype, but people were dropping references to Skype's 300 million registered users like confetti. We're five months out from that initial announcement, and from all appearances, Skype recognizes that it still has a lot of work (and hiring) to do to support both channel partners and the SMB business arena - along with more software development. I'm sure the relationship will ultimately add to the bottom line of Digium, but I don't see either side talking about killer numbers.

Fast forward to this morning and Switchvox 4.0 to see multiple good things. By adding support for fax, presence, chat, and IMAP, Switchbox suddenly becomes much more attractive and sexy for both customers and channel partner/VARs. (Call me back on video, I'm not on that bandwagon quite yet). VARs and developers are also going to get a growing XML API to work with in order to build customized vertical market applications - the bread and butter of data VARs. Faster apps development means happiness for everyone. 

Finally, Digium has demonstrated the ability to take the Switchvox product/acquisition and successfully move it forward. Before 4.0, Switchvox was a nice product, but there was a big "to-do" list of features it needed. The guys in LA (Fonality) have had the voicemail-to-email trick down pat for a while, and they have a bunch of features in their Asterisk-fork that would look good in a future release of Switchvox.

All that said, I expect a lot of channel people to be talking a lot more about Switchvox and Asterisk in the days to come. And I think this time around, a high level of enthusiasm is warranted.

- Doug