Digium Expands Partner Program With New Level
Digium is expanding its channel partner program — potentially engaging more resellers that want to embrace Asterisk, the open source IP PBX. Digium has been particularly active with channel partners in recent months. Here’s the scoop.
First, the latest news: Digium’s Authorized Reseller Partner Program now includes an Affiliate level, which “provides an entry-level tier for resellers who are interested in selling Digium Unified Communications and IP Telephony solutions, without a required minimum annual revenue commitment.”
According to a Digium press release:
Affiliate partners will have access to Digium’s ongoing partner communications, as well as the partner portal, which includes marketing toolkits, videos and sales and technical training. As partners migrate to the higher levels in the program, Registered and Select, Digium provides greater benefits, including discounts, demo kits, sales and marketing support and enhanced technical and sales training. This tiered approach is designed to help partners grow their businesses with Digium’s Switchvox VoIP phone system and Asterisk custom telephony solutions.
Translation: Digium is growing up and leveraging a tiered channel approach that many networking companies pioneered in the 1990s.
Recent Momentum
Still, Digium itself is no stranger to the channel. The company landed near the top of the 2009 Open Source 50 report, which tracks the world’s most promising open source partner programs. (A 2010 research report launches in December 2009.) More recently, CEO Danny Windham has stated that Digium is profitable, growing and extremely channel focused.
True believers include EUS Networks, a VAR and developer in New York that has developed Asterisk-based solutions for hedge fund trading floors. Jeronimo Romero, CTO of EUS Networks, says he’s been partnering with Digium since before the company had an official partner program. “They’re big enough to be a real company but small enough to still pick up the phone when you call,” says Romero.
Despite that praise, Digium certainly faces plenty of competition. On the one hand, Digium is a market disrupter. But on the other hand, entrenched rivals like Cisco Systems, Avaya and ShoreTel (just to name a few) continue to enjoy strong VoIP-related phone system sales.
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Is Digium software, hardware or both? I get the impression that Asterisk is a command-line system and not really a “product” that a company like ours can work with.
We’re a 15 year old consulting firm in Buffalo that has experience with voip and switched network environments. We never really dealt with telephony applications but our customers are starting to ask about small business phone systems.
Rather than contact Digium and receive a ton of marketing I figured I’d ask a few questions here.
Digium is both. They have hardware that run on Asterisk as well as hardware cards that interface with Asterisk servers. Like any program, Asterisk has a command line interface that is accessible to server administrators and developers but over the years Asterisk has spawned a few GUI frontends that you can simply access to configure as needed.
JPLC: And let’s not forget about the SwitchVox hardware/software solution…
Think of Asterisk as a telephony engine. You can build applications on top of it, anything from easy-to-use PBX appliances to custom applications. You can route calls between analog lines, ISDN, SIP and other transports. You can run custom programs as part of the process of sending or receiving a call. You can run custom programs that make calls and monitor calls.
There’s a lot you can do with it.
Lawrence: Well said.