Stories about: Asterisk

The open source industry in 2008 will be marked by more news out of Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and other big IT vendors, less start-up funding, more M&A activity, and an increasingly serious talent shortage.

When the city of Madera, California, needed a new voice system, it turned to open source technology -- not just for the IP telephony but for an entire network-infrastructure overhaul and loads of other functions.

British open-source advocates will be boosted by the news that German support vendor Credativ is expanding its open-source center (OSSC) to support all distributions of Linux in the UK.

US open source PABX vendor Fonality has acquired Sydney-based open source CRM provider Insightful Solutions with an aim to provide an integrated business communications and information platform.

Cisco's dominance in enterprise networking doesn't necessarily mean it is the only game in town -- or that you jeopardize job security by bypassing Cisco.

Digium, whose open source Asterisk IP PBX spawned a host of start-ups that commercialise the software, has bought up one of them because it has a better user interface than Digium's.

The impending acquisition of 3Com by Huawei Technologies and Bain Capital, overshadowed its US unveiling of new IP telephony offerings targeted at small and medium sized businesses (SMBs).

If we had to pick the most significant trend in networking today, the VoIP phenomenon might well top the list. And open source is playing no small part. While enterprises remain reluctant to rip out their tried-and-true PBXes, open source VoIP -- usually in the form of Asterisk -- is capturing business communications one small business or branch office at a time. Sooner or later, enterprises too will catch the open source VoIP bug. The cost savings and flexibility are too compelling to resist.

One year ago, Network World highlighted 10 open source companies on the rise 10 open source companies on the rise in such diverse fields as storage, VOIP, systems management, virtualization and the use of software to aid disaster relief.

VoIP vendors say they deliver scalability and security. InteropLabs (iLabs) testing mostly proved them right in multivendor settings. But testing also revealed some implementation gotchas in both of those areas, and pinpointed a few missing pieces when it comes to key exchange for securing VoIP traffic.

New exploits against VoIP continue to emerge, but experts say these demonstrations reveal the need for vigilant security and are not fatal flaws to the technology.