What would you do if you had the market leading commercial distribution of the Asterisk, and you were looking for new ways to expand? If you’re Fonality, you buy the largest online community of Asterisk users, Trixbox. Tom Keating has the scoop on the announcement, which is due to be made today.
According to the interview, Fonality will maintain Trixbox as a 100% GPL platform, and devote engineers to helping Trixbox founder Andrew Gillis to innovate faster. Especially interesting was Fonality CEO Chris Lyman’s assertion that they are getting 50% more downloads of Trixbox per day than Digium has with Asterisk.
What this does is seriously align Fonality and Digium to compete with each other. While at VON, Digium staff were openly describing their upcoming new download, with the new Digium GUI. It will be a head to head competitor with Trixbox. With this acquisition by Fonality, the two companies will have similar products targeted at similar markets.Â
It makes you wonder why Digium didn’t acquire Trixbox themselves.
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Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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