Digium CEO: We’re Profitable, Channel Driven
Digium CEO Danny Windham has a message for networking VARs seeking a new opportunity in the IT channel: Digium — the provider of Asterisk, the open source IP PBX — is profitable, growing and seeking talented solutions providers. Here are more thoughts from Windham and the Digium executive team.
First, some background. The VAR Guy had breakfast Oct. 14 with Windham, VP of Global Marketing Leslie Conway and VP of Worldwide Sales Steve Harvey. The disussion, held at the Astricon conference, focused on seven Digium-centric questions raised by The VAR Guy in recent days. Here are the questions plus Digium’s paraphrased answers…
1.Will Digium pursue an initial public offering?: The Digium team made it clear the first priority is to build a profitable, fun, sustainable business. Build the assets, as the old saying goes, and the rest of the story will take care of itself. Windham said Digium is profitable, but sales hit a few bumps during the recession. Business has strengthened in recent months as customers seek lower-cost telephony options, he adds.
2. What size customer will Digium target in the future?: The Digium team said the typical Asterisk deployment involves 400 or fewer seats. Longer term, Digium expects to scale Asterisk for larger customers. But positioning Asterisk for tiny businesses doesn’t sound like it’s of much interest — though hardware and software partners are welcome to make such a move.
3. Will Digium land in the home market?: Digium doesn’t plan to pursue consumers, though the door is open for a Digium hardware or software partner to do so.
4. How is Digium empowering VARs?: The company has built a lead generation system that typically generates an 80 percent close rate for Select-level VARs and solutions providers. Not too shabby.
5. Will Asterisk emerge as an applications platform?: Talk to the Switchox folks (which Digium acquired two years ago), and the answer is absolutely yes. Integration work with Salesforce.com and SugarCRM sounds like a hit. And Digium is offering up APIs (application programming interfaces) to help third parties develop more Asterisk apps.
6. Will Digium work with server makers and hardware appliance makers?: Stay tuned to The VAR Guy for the next 12 hours or so. He could be blue with envy soon.
7. Are SaaS- and cloud-based Asterisk solutions gaining critical mass: No doubt, many solutions providers are introducing hosted Asterisk. But the Switchvox team, once again, is quick to to note that customers can easily migrate from a SaaS approach to an on-premise solution.
That’s the scoop on Digium for now. Cbeck back later today for some news from Astricon’s Oct. 15 keynote.
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