Asterisk's Contact Center StoryAsterisk's Contact Center Story

Open source is not just for SMB customers.

Today Digium, the Asterisk company, and Altitude Software, a Portugal-based contact center solutions vendor, announced that Altitude Software is a new Digium Premier Solutions Partner. Having followed Altitude for many years, I knew that the company's SIP-based media voice switch, vBox, was based on Asterisk. Given that vBox has been available for several years, I wondered what prompted today's press release.Bill Miller, Digium's VP of Product Management, explained that while vBox is based on Asterisk, that alone is not enough to allow an application to seamlessly interoperate with installed Asterisk implementations and other application partners while at the same time protecting its proprietary contact center software. Altitude needed to interface to open source Asterisk in a certain way, specifically by becoming General Public License (GPL)-compliant. Altitude has now done that development work and become a formal Digium solutions partner.

Altitude joins two other contact center solution companies that are already Digium Solutions Partners, Presence Technology and ContactQ. The benefit of being an official partner is that Digium channel partners looking for a contact center solution for a customer will likely start with one of these three companies. One other contact center solution company that works with Asterisk is worth mentioning, Aheeva. While not currently a member of Digium's partner program, they have the distinction of running the largest Asterisk-based contact center, with over 1,200 agents at last count.

Both the Aheeva story and the fact that Aspect was once an Asterisk partner highlights that open source is not just for SMB customers. Many may recall that before their partnership with Microsoft, Aspect was re-selling Asterisk's Business Edition in conjunction with its Unified IP contact center application. Miller reports that the majority of joint Aspect/Asterisk customers, some of them well known global companies, have stayed on Asterisk.

And it's not just in application complexity that open source continues to go up market. Miller reports that this year Digium won a significant bid in Germany to support 2,600 sites, competing against the usual suspects.Open source is not just for SMB customers.