AstriCon brings corporate adoption of Asterisk to light

Asterisk-focused show evolves from a code-hacking event to an exchange of ideas about how to use open-source VoIP.

Some 700 users and enthusiasts of the Asterisk IP telephony system gathered in Dallas this week for the third-annual AstriCon conference, focusing on the open-source IP PBX and messaging software package.

A diverse crowd of corporate telecom professionals, open-source developers, vendors and entrepreneurs attending AstriCon gave the signal that IP telephony, and open-source VoIP are evolving from being a niche market or open-source programming hobby into the mainstream of IT, at least according to one attendee at the show.

"I attended the first AstriCon three years ago, and it was really a narrowly-focused [open-source] developers' conference," says AstriCon attendee Arnold Solomon, an IT architect at the Southern Company, a conglomerate that manages energy utilities in five southern states. He estimated that about a third of the attendees at this year's conference were enterprise or small business IT professionals looking to find out more about open-source telephony.

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Some 700 users and enthusiasts of the Asterisk IP telephony system gathered in Dallas this week for the third-annual AstriCon conference, focusing on the open-source IP PBX and messaging software package.

A diverse crowd of corporate telecom professionals, open-source developers, vendors and entrepreneurs attending AstriCon gave the signal that IP telephony, and open-source VoIP are evolving from being a niche market or open-source programming hobby into the mainstream of IT, at least according to one attendee at the show.

"I attended the first AstriCon three years ago, and it was really a narrowly-focused [open-source] developers' conference," says AstriCon attendee Arnold Solomon, an IT architect at the Southern Company, a conglomerate that manages energy utilities in five southern states. He estimated that about a third of the attendees at this year's conference were enterprise or small business IT professionals looking to find out more about open-source telephony.

The conference, which was held at the Dallas Westin Park Central, attracted around 35 exhibitors, including IP phone maker Polycom and Digium, the corporate face of the Asterisk, which sells support and services around the open-source platform.

Solomon gave a talk at AstriCon on some of his company's production implementations and test applications using Asterisk. These include a system that integrates the company's older Siemens PBX system with its BlackBerry servers, allowing the phone system to send e-mail alerts to users about important voicemail messages left for them on the systems. Solomon also discussed a possible scenario for moving large blocks of direct inward dial (DID) numbers to a different location using SIP-based servers and Asterisk.

"We demonstrated a way you can move a gigantic block of numbers in seconds, while keeping those calls on the internal voice network," Solomon said. The company did this using SIP number diversion, where calls made to an incoming PBX number can be rerouted via an Asterisk SIP server. Solomon says this technology could be used in disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina, in which large numbers of workers could be relocated to another facility, but keep their telephone numbers while working out of a temporary space.

"I don't know of many businesses, large companies, that have moved a large number of phones off of PBXs to an Asterisk box," Solomon says. "But businesses such as ours, who are experimenting and deploying some Asterisk functions are seeing that these are some of the values of SIP. And these are the reasons we're asking companies such as Avaya, Nortel and Cisco, so we can have this kind of interoperability" in the kinds of systems offered by such large vendors.

Announcements out of AstriCon included a new version of the Trixbox from Fonality, a maker of an Asterisk-based small office phone system application, pre-configured with other open source software. In addition to the Astrisk IP PBX software, the product is based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/PERL) software stack, making it a completely open-source product. A new GUI interface for setup and configuration is included with Trixbox 2.0 allows users to install the software and decide whith components to use. MySQL and PHP can be used to integrate Asterisk-based Trixbox with other business systems or Web applications. Trixbox 2.0 can also be configured as just a basic Asterisk telephony sever with minimal extra software, the company says.