Digium Asterisk: Worldwide Unified Communications Push
Digium, promoter of Asterisk (the open source IP PBX), is making a deeper unified communications push into Europe. The Digium effort leverages EntaTech, a telephony distributor in the United Kingdom (U.K.). The big question: Can Digium expand its international pipelines to maintain the company’s growth?
Digium has carved out a healthy market niche for itself, helping VARs and service providers to build business phone systems (PBXes), call centers, voicemail systems and conferencing systems. Morever, sales of Switchvox — a Digium phone system for SMB customers — grew 40 percent in 2011 vs. 2010, Digium has indicated. EntaTech plans to promote Switchvox’s extensive capabilities — phone, fax, chat, web mashups, and mobile — to VARs in the U.K.
Gayle Magee, director of worldwide distribution at Digium, said she believes the combination of Digium’s product line and EntaTech’s expertise will “help us attract many new resellers to join our partner program.”
Global View
Still, Digium isn’t new to international markets. The company’s annual Pinnacle Partner Awards recently recognized distributors, resellers and marketers across North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), Asia Pacific and Latin America.
In some ways, Digium remains a market upstart. Thousands of VARs continue to focus on unified communications solutions from Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard. But Digium has a secret weapon against traditional UC providers.
Specifically, the Asterisk community has more than 8,000 software developers worldwide. Similar to how Linux developers disrupted the Unix market, Digium hopes Asterisk developers will help the company to disrupt the traditional VoIP and unified communications markets.
