Digium Acquisition Shakes Up Open-Source VoIP

Digium is stirring up the open-source community it helped create by buying one of the vendors that has built an IP-PBX on its Asterisk VoIP platform.

Digium Thursday will unveil plans to acquire Switchvox, one of the many SMB-focused vendors that have cropped up in recent years with products built on top of Digium's open-source Asterisk VoIP software. Digium is the primary developer of Asterisk.

"Switchvox gives us a more complete solution that scales to several hundred users," said Bill Miller, vice president of product management and marketing at Digium, Huntsville, Ala. "It's a turnkey solution that doesn't require as much expertise to install. Many installations are done remotely."

Both Digium and Switchvox were named as 2007 CRN Emerging Tech vendors in June.

Digium is making the announcement at the AstriCon 2007 open-source telephony conference in Phoenix. Switchvox exhibited at the show on Wednesday under its own name but will be rebranding its booth to exhibit under the Digium name today, Miller said.

The deal officially closes on Friday. Terms were not disclosed, as both companies are privately held. "They're a small company, but they're profitable," Miller noted.

Digium has been aggressively pushing its open-source VoIP agenda through several moves aimed at bolstering its standing in the channel.

In January the company brought on Danny Windham as CEO and Steven Harvey as vice president of worldwide sales. Both came from channel-friendly networking vendor Adtran, a Huntsville neighbor and an investor in the VoIP company.

Harvey in March oversaw the launch of Digium's first formal channel program, which foreshadowed the rollout soon thereafter of a line of partner-friendly Digium appliances.

Digium is currently courting several potential OEM partners for that appliance -- which runs Asterisk Business Edition for up to 50 users -- and expects to disclose its first deal soon, Miller said.

A key piece of the Switchvox acquisition for Digium is the end-user interface that San Diego-based Switchvox has built for its products. The system integrates with CRM packages from Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, enabling records from those systems to automatically pop up on the Switchvox Switchboard interface. The interface is also tied in with Google Maps to create a Web 2.0 mash-up that show the location of inbound callers.

"Switchvox will be the underpinnings of Digium's unified communications strategy going forward," Miller said.

Switchvox has 1,400 installed systems with 65,000 endpoints to its credit. The company has about 30 "extremely active" channel partners, with another 1,400 signed on, Miller said. Digium has approximately 60 solution providers in the United States.

Those partners will eventually be managed under a single Digium channel organization. Both channel programs will continue to operate as is for at least a month, Miller said.

Detailed product plans will be disclosed soon, probably at the Digium AsteriskWorld channel conference in Boston next month, he said.

Switchvox's 15 employees will be joining Digium, which altogether will have just under 120 employees. Switchvox will maintain its San Diego office, with Switchvox President and CEO Joshua Stephens staying on as general manager of that location. Tristan Degenhardt, Switchvox's vice president of operations will join Digium as a product manager.

By Jennifer Hagendorf Follett

Laszlo Webtop links Web 2.0 and VoIP

Laszlo Systems this week unveiled an enhanced version of Laszlo Webtop, which the company refers to as "The Web 2.0 Desktop." The company also is partnering to add VoIP capabilities to the platform.

Version 1.2 of Lazlo Webtop enables delivery of Web 2.0-based, RIAs (rich Internet applications) for popular browsers and devices, the company said.

"This is a tool that allows you to assemble your own Web desktop for delivery to your customers or your employees that may or may not use prebuilt applications from Laszlo," said David Temkin, chief technology officer and founder of Laszlo, at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Featured is the machinery around a windowing system application integration, single sign-on, and capabilities to offer a visually integrated experience with data integration on the back end, Temkin said.

An alliance with CounterPath Solutions brings voice-based communications to Webtop as an optional capability.

"This allows you to make VoIP-based calls from your Laszlo Webtop interface," Temkin said. Users can add CounterPath's CMC (CounterPath Multimedia Communicator) WebPhone software to Webtop, integrating it with Laszlo's Mail and Contacts applications. WebPhone will be available later this year.

The 1.2 version features Laszlo Mail as an optional application module for desktop e-mail and carrier-grade scalability, the company said. Also added were APIs for application integration, in which data access and paging APIs have been added to bolster integration and performance when deploying OpenLaszlo applications with large datasets. OpenLaszlo is the company's RIA development platform.

User-based interactive advertising options is being offered as feature primarily for service providers.

Laszlo is offering bundled solutions based on Laszlo Webtop for enterprise, developers, and service providers. The three specific bundles include:

* Laszlo Webtop for Service Providers, featuring an extensible offering for delivering a customized communications Web portal. Advertising can be integrated. Providers also can add modules such as news, stocks, and productivity applications.
* Laszlo Webtop for Enterprises, to improve the way users access content, complete transactions, and consume multimedia.
* Laszlo Webtop SDK for Developers, featuring a software development kit to build Webtop solutions and leverage OpenLaszlo 4.

Access to an evaluation copy of Lazlo Webtop 1.2 is available for free for 30 days. Pricing for Webtop deployments starts at $27,000 plus a per-user fee. The SDK starts at $795 per year.
Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld.

http://www.infoworld.com

Vyke VoIP Service has One Million Paid Users

Norwegian VoIP firm, Vyke Communications, announced this week that it has signed up more than 1-million paid internet telephony users, with downloads of its digital VoIP client doubling in the first six months of 2007.

“Growth has come from all around the world, but particularly in Asia and the Middle East, where charges are high,” said Vyke Chairman, Tommy Jensen, noting that revenue had increased significantly in recent months.

Mr. Jensen went on to say that the company was close to finalizing its acquisition of an unnamed American VoIP provider. The transaction, which is subject to ongoing due diligence, will apparently give Vyke a presence not only in the U.S., but also in parts of Africa and South East Asia.

Vyke allows users to make cheap long distance and international calls from PCs and data-enabled mobile phones. It’s AIM-listed stock has climbed more than five-fold in the past six months.

http://www.teleclick.ca