Asterisk: More Than 'Just' a PBX Powerhouse? - Page 2

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Spencer also plugged "Live on the Net," an Asterisk-based service that enables users to listen to sports games over the phone, while also talking about them with other participants. The idea, he said, is to create a living-room experience, where a bunch of friends all watch, enjoy and talk about a game together.

"All of these are examples of cool apps and applying Asterisk as an engineering medium to solve business processes for a wide variety of horizontal and vertical markets," Spencer said.

Given the platform's flexibility, it's not surprising that Digium -- which offers commercial support and hardware -- also expects telecom carriers to become interested in Asterisk. During a robust Q&A session that followed Spencer's presentation he was asked by a member of the audience if Digium would be targeting Telecom Carriers for Asterisk deployment.

"Even from its earliest days, [Asterisk] had applications in the telecom space," Spencer said, in response to an audience question after his keynote. He added that Digium is focused on the SMB PBX market, but has "an eye toward carrier operations, especially carriers where there is PBX functionally at the edge."

However, one challenge Digium faces is the simple fact that it's comprised of only 130 people, he said.

"It's hard for us to be able to convince an enterprise or carrier with thousands of sites that we'll be able to support the product," Spencer said.

But, "there are carriers that have the technical expertise in-house and we can work with those guys to come up with solutions," he added.

Spencer also said he believes Digium ultimately will be able to fully support carriers on its own.

In the meantime, however, Digium and the rest of the Asterisk community are concentrating on beefing up the offering.

Asterisk version 1.6 -- its next large milestone release -- will feature an event system that will allow the software to scale across multiple servers, according to Kevin Fleming, the project's maintainer, who Spencer called on to describe details of its development.

Fleming said one potential use would be to have multiple Asterisk servers to handle voicemail distribution.

"Everything doesn't have to be on one server," he said.

Despite the ongoing work, Fleming agreed with Spencer, saying that Asterisk had become a fully functional PBX four years ago -- and everything being added now is just icing on the cake.

"The exciting stuff is really all about how people are applying Asterisk, rather than just the traditional stuff," Spencer added.