SPRING VON (Booth 809), SAN JOSE, Calif., March 21, 2007 — Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® company, today announced the Q2 availability of the Asterisk Appliance™ telephony solution. Designed to meet the needs of businesses and branch offices with up to 50 users, the Asterisk Appliance combines the cost savings and flexibility of open source with the rapid installation, high reliability and ease of use of an appliance. The Asterisk Appliance is the latest product from Digium to bring Asterisk, the VoIP software already in use by more than two million people, to an even broader market.
The Asterisk Appliance includes embedded Asterisk Business Edition™ telephony software, Digium hardware, the Digium-developed Asterisk graphical user interface (AsteriskGUI™) and documentation. It can be easily configured by customers or resellers and supports VoIP and traditional analog phones alike.
The Asterisk Appliance has been available to Digium partners, including Internet telephony service providers, resellers, integrators and OEMs, since the fall of 2006 to allow them to begin working on solutions based on the appliance. With today's announcement, which coincides with Asterisk creator and Digium Founder and Chief Technology Officer Mark Spencer's keynote at the Spring VON conference, the product becomes generally available.
"Asterisk has brought the power, flexibility and affordability of open source to millions, and today we're making it an alternative to expensive phone systems for even more organizations," said Spencer. "We've designed the Asterisk Appliance specifically for smaller companies and remote offices by packing it with features their users want, but in a very easy to use and manage solution. This is a milestone for Asterisk and for Digium as we make open source a meaningful option to small businesses."
Asterisk Appliance includes the following:
- Complete Asterisk server
- Support for VoIP and analog phones to allow customers to use the legacy equipment they already own
- Full-featured PBX, interactive voice response (IVR), voicemail, conferencing and automatic call distribution (ACD) software
- Administrative features such as a setup wizard and autoprovisioning of Polycom IP phones
- Call queuing functionality
- Hardware-based echo cancellation
- Compact flash card or MMC to support voicemail and wireless applications with no major parts
- Craft port for debug for field technicians
- Five Ethernet ports (1 WAN, 4 LAN)
- Built-in router ideal for small offices
- Eight analog ports supporting a mix of foreign exchange station (FXS) and foreign exchange office (FXO) interfaces to standard telephones
Pricing and Availability
The Asterisk Appliance can be purchased from Digium and its partners worldwide in early May. Pricing begins at $995. The initial module will support all IP, 4 x FXS/4 x FXO and 8 x FXO. Volume pricing is available.
About Asterisk
Code for Asterisk®, originally written by Mark Spencer of Digium®, Inc., has been contributed from open source software engineers around the world. Currently boasting over two million users, Asterisk supports a wide range of TDM protocols for the handling and transmission of voice over traditional telephony interfaces, featuring VoIP packet protocols such as SIP and IAX among others. It supports U.S. and European standard signaling types used in business phone systems, allowing it to bridge between next-generation voice-data integrated networks and existing infrastructure.
