Although much less visible in the last few months, Asterisk and the Asterisk community continues to chug along, demonstrating the tremendous value that open source telephony solutions bring. For instance, just this past week at IT Expo, Neophonetics announced a unified messaging platform based on Asterisk Business Edition, including:
- Multi-tenant voicemail for one telephone or one telephone extension
- Voicemail to email
- Voicemail to paging
- Call forwarding
- SMS messaging
- Message waiting indicator
- Distinctive rings for multi-tenant telephones
- Automated system and voicemail configuration
- Voicemail groups
- Web-based end user portal
Fabulous. Even more interesting was the fact that Neophonetics chose to market a product based on Asterisk that would be an add-on to existing PBX systems rather than a replacement, adopting a business strategy much more friendly to the incumbent PBX players.
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.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Hi Alec,
It was very interesting to see the amopunt of press Neophonetics got from this announcement (blogs or otherwise).
There are a number of people using asterisk for 'specialty applications'. I think standalone UM makes great sense, one of the projects that I've been shopping around for funding uses Asterisk in as a standalone adjunct to an existing pbx/ip-pbx (or even stand alone asterisk server) in a similar method but with a larger SAAS twist.
Considering the minimal costs involved in developing a fully blown application from the already 'free' open source base application I would expect quite a few variations to surface.
Regards,
Dean Collins http://www.Cognation.net