Digium Launches Online Marketplace For Asterisk Products

The goal, according to Digium, is to better connect the broader Asterisk community -- of which Digium is the dominant networking vendor -- by giving Asterisk developers and manufacturers a landing pad for products and giving customers and VARs a place to get at those products easily.

Asterisk Exchange will catalog Asterisk-related IP phones, gateways, speech and text engines, voice prompts and vertical market-specific applications.

Prospective participants contact Digium to get listed; companies offering free and downloadable products can list for no charge, and companies selling commercial products in the marketplace pay Digium to do so under various pricing packages.

Digium first mentioned Asterisk Exchange at Astricon in October and officially debuted it at this week's Digium Asterisk World conference in Miami Beach.

According to Digium President and CEO Danny Windham, the Asterisk community numbers 65,000 members, 800 active and current contributors and offers more than 150 applications. What it lacks, he suggested, is a landing site to help the community grow.

"It's a one-stop shop for all solutions that are Asterisk-based," said Windham in a Thursday morning keynote session at Digium Asterisk World. "Asterisk remains the de facto choice for open-source telephony and is 88 percent of the open-source telephony market."

"The water's going to get wider, and the deployed base of Digium/Asterisk is going to continue to eclipse legacy vendors," said Corey MacFadden, managing partner at Infradapt, an Easton, Pa.-based solution provider. "This will help widen it further."