Switchvox

Digium, Top VoIP Company 2008: FierceVoIP, Fierce 15

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 16:39:06 -0500

Digium

Where it's based: Huntsville, AL
When it was founded: 1999
Website: www.digium.com

Why it's Fierce: Digium single-handedly defined open source telephony with Asterisk and is now almost always on the checklist for many businesses when it comes time to sit down for a discussion of IP telephony. Other open source competitors compare themselves to Asterisk and - perhaps the ultimate complement - Cisco has an internal marketing document loaded with talking points against the solution.

While it positions Asterisk as a customizable "telephony platform" to build solutions on rather than just a vanilla IP PBX, Digium continues to steadily evolve as it hires the best and brightest programmer and developer talent as well as seasoned executives. Partnering with Skype was a Fierce move and last year's acquisition of Switchvox gave the company a needed boost in providing a flexible SMB turnkey solution for resellers. About the only thing missing to complete its Cinderella story would be a blessing by a Fortune 500 IT powerhouse.

SPOTLIGHT: Digium and BroadSoft Play Well Together

Doug Mohney — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 14:58:13 -0400

Digium and BroadSoft have announced that Digium's Switchvox IP PBX is certified to work with BroadSoft's BroadWorks VoIP application platform.

Since BroadSoft provides VoIP apps to eight of the world's ten largest telecommunications companies, and Asterisk is the world's most widely used open source telephony, this should mean that carriers using BroadWorks should feel comfortable with selling Switchvox turnkey IP PBX solutions to SMBs. Switchvox should go well with SIP trunking options, so carriers should have another option beyond hosted and all the proprietary solutions floating around.

One might suppose this is part of a larger "Play well with others" strategy by Digium. A few weeks ago, Digium announced it was building an interoperability solution between Asterisk and Skype.

For more:
- Broadsoft's release on Switchvox/BroadWorks interoperabiliy

Windham parses Digium

Doug Mohney — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 23:53:59 -0400

Danny Windham has been CEO at Digium for nearly twenty months and realizes there's still a lot of work to be done at the open source telephony company. FierceVoIP caught up with Windham at Astricon a few weeks ago to get his latest thoughts on Digium's progress, the marketplace and challenges that lay ahead.

FierceVoIP: Are you happy with the way Switchvox has gone to market?

Windham: I think not, we haven't been at it long enough. We have gigantic work to do to reach small to medium-sized businesses. The reaction [to Switchvox] is so encouraging, it makes you want to do channel development even faster. The reason why we're not happy is we haven't been at it long enough.

Is it successful? The projections we made at the time we acquired Switchvox were pretty aggressive. We have met those projections and we're where we hoped to be at this point in time. The core team is still there and the strategy is improving month to month.

FierceVoIP: So where do you go from here?

Windham: There are a lot of investments we've been making. If you look at the first year of investments, they're all product related. There [have been] changes in strategy, the Switchvox acquisition, trying to decide what Digium is going to do. There's so much opportunity across so many customer bases. If we try to do it all, we can't do it very well.

It's hard to say, but we can't put all the children on the life raft with us.

Now it's about selling, and investing in sales.

FierceVoIP: How many resellers do you have right now?

Windham: Our reseller count has doubled in the last six months and is between 378 and 400. To get access to SMBs, there are millions of them out there, it's just a big job to get a channel to access them.

[Windham said that he'd like to have about 5 resellers in "lots of geographies," but enabling them to sell and be successful takes a while. VP of Global Marketing Leslie Conway said there was a lot of work to develop sales tools and training and getting in front of resellers to educate them]

FierceVoIP: Fonality sells their product through Dell's website and catalog. Do you see yourself in a mass market channel, like Microsoft's Response Point is down at Costco?

Windham: Dell is very much a marketing organization, it looks at [the catalog and web] as a way to be a profit center. If Dell is coming to commit activity to it, there are plenty of people supporting it. It takes a lot of energy to sell through that channel, just like through CDW, TechData.

[As for the mass market/"bigbox" consumer outlets] I don't think we want to try to address that market. It's so different, those channels are massive too. We won't be going there any time soon. We're selling to a little larger end-user than Respone Point with Switchvox, closer to a 30 end-user installation.

The thing we've heard that what sells Response Point is its really cool voice recognition technology. Most people turn that off after a month. We don't know why, but they do.

FierceVoIP: So what will you be offering to carriers?

Windham: That's one of those children we're not putting in the life raft.

In the short term, we have no plans to create a turn-key solution to sell to carriers... This is not a technology question, this is an availability of resources question. The life raft is not that big.

FierceVoIP: Why hasn't Digium landed a big customer endorsement?

Windham: I don't pretend to understand why. We have larger customers, but there is a reluctance [on their part] to talk about Asterisk. Some of it is they don't want their competitors to know what they're using for competitive reasons. Or they don't want to reveal network details for security considerations.

There may be some hold over from the image of open source in general. "Open source is for hackers, not for business." I don't know.

We do have installs of around 10,000 end points we can talk about....Integrics builds it, it's carrier class, running on clustered Asterisk. Enswitch is the product.

[There is] the premise that Asterisk doesn't scale. There are a lot of issues associated with scalability, but Asterisk can scale, the premise that it can't scale is wrong. Or at best, dated.

Could it be better? Of course, but it scales well today.

FierceVoIP: Any acquisition plans you can talk about?

Windham: Now that we've worked past the Switchvox acquisition, we can consider something else. There's nothing on the radar..[if we do] we would look for things that are very, very unique and specific that we can't go build.

FierceVoIP: You're hiring a lot of talent out of the open source community. Are you worried about taking too many in-house?

Windham: The company is no more than the sum total of its employees. We want the best people out there, the most knowledgeable, to do what we're trying to do, that's been our approach.

Taking developers out of the open community and putting them on other projects could have a downside. However, the group of open source developers is bigger and we're continuing to support them. We're spending more dollars then we ever have.

Take the concept of our two acquisitions. They were both in the last year, and they have worked out very well.

It is a good thing that [Digium] runs AstriCon. People are more comfortable if we run. But when we run it, we try to put on that third-party hat as tightly as it fits, and try do what is in the best interests of the [Asterisk] open source project. Some small factions could see that and think we have ulterior motives.

The Switchvox acquisition alienated some small portion of the community. They said: One, "We're so glad you did this, but we'd rather sell our own solution;" or Two, "I'm not happy about it, I'm building a solution, I'm going to continue to sell that solution."

AstriCon 2008: Our show wrap-up

Doug Mohney — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 10:27:23 -0400

If you didn't make it to AstriCon, FierceVoIP has the next best thing with our news and pictures from the conference.

News

AstriCon 2008: Working through the Digium/Skype Announcement

AstriCon 2008 - Skype/Asterisk partnership announcement

SPOTLIGHT: Digium/Skype, Deja Switchvox

AstriCon 2008: Digium & Skype announce interoperability collaboration

AstriCon 2008 - Future Asterisk Delivery and Support

AstriCon 2008 - A chat with FreeSWITCH, PIKA

Slideshows

Visiting AstriCon 2008 - Slideshow Feature - FierceVoIP

AstriCon 2008: Our last call slideshow

Digium's Mid-Sized IP PBX Appliance

Doug Mohney — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:56:44 -0400

Digium has rolled out the Digium/Switchvox AA300 appliance, a larger IP PBX turnkey box capable of supporting up to 150 users.

The AA300 appliance provides a mid-sized solution for the Switchvox family; the AA60 appliance supports up to 30 users in a small form factor while the AA350 appliance supports up to 400 users in a redundant, rack-mount server.

Highlights of the new appliance include support for up to 150 users and up to 45 simultaneous calls. It also supports up to 10 recorded calls and up to 15 simultaneous conference calls. The system is VoIP ready, has a standard one year warranty, support for analog and T1/E1 interfaces, and Digium's money-back guarantee through its Exceptional Satisfaction Program.

Available immediately, pricing for the AA300 begins at $4,240 with "substantial discounts" available when customers purchase the product from Digium partners.

This is the latest move by Digium to fill out its product line. In May, the company teamed up with U.K.-based Integrics to offer a carrier-grade switch solution to larger service providers.

For more:
- Digium's announcement of the AA300 appliance.

Related articles:
Digium Pushes into the Carrier Space
Asterisk--Threatening or Boring?

Digium Pushes into the Carrier Space

Doug Mohney — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:56:14 -0400

Digium has teamed up with U.K.-based Integrics for sales and marketing efforts to deliver a carrier-grade switch solution to carriers. The two will promote and sell the Asterisk-based Integric's Enswtich, activities that will expand Digium's involvement in the carrier market.

Integrics sells Enswitch to telecommunications companies, ITSPs, and VoIP providers and claims more than 40 installations with systems serving over 100,000 users. The Enswitch solution is cluster-based and built around open hardware and software. Larger clusters include full redundancy and multiple Asterisk servers running in parallel to increase call capacity. Other servers can be dropped in to handle additional functions as needed, such as pre- and post-paid services, reseller segmentation, and integrated invoicing.

The partnership is a building block to fill in Digium's product line at the higher-end of the IP PBX/softswitch food chain and could be a trial marriage to a potential acquisition of Integrics down the road. Digium executives have long recognized a strategic need for a scalable, high-availability carrier-class solution to larger enterprises and carriers. Integrics could deliver the necessary technical resources to do so, as well as a ready-developed footprint into the carrier market. And Digium's purchase of Switchvox demonstrates the company isn't shy about acquisitions when it makes sense.

For More:
- Digium Integrics Carrier Partner Release