Digium caps off a year marked by strong growth in the use of Asterisk and substantial technical advances in the product. Contributions from the open source community matched Digium’s investment in Asterisk over the past year. To date, more than 9,800 people have contributed code to Asterisk, including more than 200 who worked on Asterisk 1.8. After releasing version 1.8 in October, the momentum continued later that month when the company also announced a new open source project, Asterisk SCF. Enthusiasm for Asterisk among users, including developers, resellers, integrators and systems administrators, also increased as they downloaded the software more than two million times in 2010.

Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server that can power IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other communication applications. In over 170 countries today, small businesses, large enterprises, call centers, carriers and governments are using Asterisk to create standards-based, feature-rich communications systems at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems. Digium estimates that more than one million servers around the world are currently running Asterisk to handle billions of minutes of phone calls.

A few highlights from 2010 include:

• Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework—The new framework, which is currently under development, will allow developers to create real-time communications applications that include voice, video and text and that meet the demands of a full range of uses, from embedded applications to enterprise and carrier solutions. Digium designed Asterisk SCF to provide the highest levels of availability, scalability, extensibility, fault-tolerance and performance. Asterisk SCF does not replace Asterisk; Digium is aggressively developing both projects in parallel.
• Asterisk 1.8—Released two months ago, the significant update includes 200 enhancements, including new security features, integration with IPv6 and extensive additions to ISDN-BRI functionality. Asterisk 1.8 is a Long Term Support release, indicating four years of support from Digium.
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony report—In late summer, Digium was positioned in the Visionaries quadrant of Gartner’sMagic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony report.
• AsteriskExchange—In January, Digium announced the official online marketplace featuring both free and commercial products built or integrated with Asterisk. AsteriskExchange helps ecosystem participants market their products to the Asterisk community.