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