By Charlene O'Hanlon

Developers, ISVs and systems integrators looking to add a telephony component to their homegrown portfolio of services now have an open source application from the 2600hz Project, a consortium of developers of telephony-related open source software.

The groups blue.box offering is a telephony system that works with any SIP-compliant system or service and enables the use of the open source FreeSWITCH and Asterisk switching libraries. It is a variation of FreePBX, a well-known open source system featuring a graphical user interface that sits on top of open-source telephony software.

Developers can use blue.box to configure and manage a number of platforms including Polycom, OpenVox, Grandstream and even Skype, as well as develop custom features to meet their customers needs.

According to the 2600hz Project, blue.box is compatible with the most popular telecom equipment and open-source libraries, and provides a fully customizable framework for systems in the cloud or the premise. It has been released under the Mozilla Public License.

According to tech site GigaOm, the 2600hz Project was founded by former developers of FreePBX and is also a subsidiary of VoIP Inc. It was formed as an open-source foundation, focusing specifically on telephony projects, and blue.box is its first project. The group hopes to have an expansive collection of telephony applications and libraries for developers, ISVs and systems integrators to build custom telephony systems.