Digium recently announced that Brian Aker from Sun Microsystems/MySQL and Stefan Öberg from Skype are slated as keynote speakers for AstriCon ‘08. AstriCon, the world's largest, most informative gathering of expert developers and users of the popular Asterisk telephony platform, also announces expanded track sessions to this year’s conference.

Aker, an open source hacker who has worked on various Apache modules, the Slash system and numerous storage engines for the MySQL database, currently serves as the Director of Architecture for MySQL AB. He plans on speaking on the topic of “The Parallel Evolution of MySQL; One Foot in the Commercial World and the other in the Open Source Community.

Öberg is vice president and general manager for Skype Telecom and Skype for Business. He has previously served in different positions at Tele2, the Swedish telecom operator, initially in Sweden and later in Estonia and Russia. Öberg is also the founder and chairman of Trigger Software, a wholly owned subsidiary to Tele2. His keynote will focus on VoIP for Business.

The contrast between the Skype network and software model and the open source nature of Asterisk and its underlying VoIP protocols may be a controversial topic, but one worthy of exploration. AstriCon is pleased to have secured Öberg as a keynote speaker, and it is certain that his insights will provide an excellent basis for discussions and deliberations well beyond the boundaries of the conference.

Digium, who is the creator and driving force behind Asterisk, anticipates that AstriCon '08 will be the largest and most successful event to date. This year the conference has expanded to five tracks with more than 60 topics to offer attendees more variety and options during this two-day event. These tracks include a business track, technical/introductory track, a carrier/large scale track and two advanced technical tracks.

AstriCon is the pioneer and longest-running event devoted to all things Asterisk, one of the most influential open source projects today. Attendees will learn about trends in Asterisk use, the growing Asterisk ecosystem, the newest applications and a wide range of technical topics from Asterisk developers, users and entrepreneurs.

AstriCon will be held from September 23-25 at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Ariz. FierceVoIP and TMCnet will serve as media sponsors and Polycom and Sangoma will be the platinum sponsors for the event. There is a pre-conference tutorial day on September 23rd with various introductory as well as developer tracks.