Digium Closes Year with More Than 2 Million Asterisk Downloads

Digium, the creator and primary sponsor of the Asterisk telephony project, capped off a year marked by strong growth in the use of Asterisk and substantial technical advances in the product. Contributions from the open-source community matched Digium’s investment in Asterisk during the past year. To date, more than 9,800 people have contributed code to Asterisk, including more than 200 who worked on Asterisk 1.8.

After releasing version 1.8 in October, the momentum continued later that month when the company also announced a new open-source project, Asterisk SCF. Enthusiasm for Asterisk among users, including developers, resellers, integrators and systems administrators, also increased as they downloaded the software more than 2 million times in 2010.

Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server that can power IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers, and other communication applications. In more than 170 countries today, small businesses, large enterprises, call centers, carriers, and governments are using Asterisk to create standards-based, feature-rich communications systems at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems. Digium estimates that more than 1 million servers around the world are currently running Asterisk to handle billions of minutes of phone calls.

“Asterisk has made an indelible impression on the voice communications industry in the 11 years since it was released,” said Bryan Johns, Digium’s community director. “Its appeal keeps growing as businesses look for the value, flexibility, standards compliance and the technical superiority that result from the contributions of thousands of talented and visionary software developers. Digium is proud to sponsor Asterisk and to be a part of its community, which now counts 73,000 registered members. The company continues to focus on Asterisk’s development, as we saw with the release of Asterisk 1.8 this fall and with the creation of a new open source project in Asterisk SCF.”

A few highlights from 2010 include:

• Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF)—The new framework, which is currently under development, will allow developers to create real-time communications applications that include voice, video, and text and that meet the demands of a full range of uses, from embedded applications to enterprise and carrier solutions. Digium designed Asterisk SCF to provide the highest levels of availability, scalability, extensibility, fault-tolerance and performance. Asterisk SCF does not replace Asterisk; Digium is aggressively developing both projects in parallel.
• Asterisk 1.8—Released two months ago, the  update includes 200 enhancements, including new security features, integration with IPv6 and extensive additions to ISDN-BRI functionality. Asterisk 1.8 is a long-term support release, indicating four years of support from Digium.
• AsteriskExchange—Digium announced the official online marketplace featuring both free and commercial products built or integrated with Asterisk. AsteriskExchange helps ecosystem participants market their products to the Asterisk community.