Digium Introduces Appliance With New Asterisk 1.4 Kit
The kit is aimed to help Digium customers quickly reach businesses with two to 50 users, a group for which traditional IP PBX solutions tend to be too large and expensive, and for which lower-end solutions are typically lacking in features, said Bill Miller, vice president of product management and marketing. He added that more than 87 percent of all PBX office systems still use traditional PBX phones, so the “hybrid” solution – which accepts both analog phones and Ethernet routers – offered by Digium, presents a more feature-rich and flexible solution. Because the appliance is based on Asterisk, service providers and others get all the popular PBX features already offered by the Open Source PBX solution, and they can build specialized features and applications on top of that.
And because the appliance is small and, unlike PC-based solutions, has no hard drive and no power requirements, it has a lower failure rate and takes up less real estate at the customer premises than existing popular IP PBX solutions, Miller explained.
The stackable appliance includes a full Asterisk server; eight analog ports (FXS, FXO); five Ethernet ports (four LAN, WAN); hardware echo cancellation; compact flash for voice mail or wireless; a built-in router; a craft port for debug; a commercial Asterisk license, so any applications developed on the box don’t have to go back to the open-source community; and built-in uCLinux.
Also in the kit is Release 1.4 of the Asterisk Business Edition software, which will be publicly available the first week of October. The new release will dramatically improve performance, interoperability and call quality handling; offer connectivity to GoogleTalk; have the ability to store voice mail in an IMAP server to enable unified messaging; and more, said Kevin Fleming, senior software engineer.
In addition to the appliance and Asterisk software, the kit includes 2-4 port FXS cards; 2-4 port FXO cards; multimedia add-on cards; an 8MB flash; cables for all port types; an IP phone; and a CD containing software, documentation/specs, how-to manuals and Digium support details relating to Asterisk, which Miller said had not been available in one place previously. Also new with the kit is a GUI for Asterisk, said Miller, making it more simple to use, and more easily allowing customers to specialize screens for different business verticals. He added that any changes to the GUI are reflected immediately in the configuration files, and vice versa.
The kit has two options relative to the service piece, one of which includes a day of training with Asterisk inventor Mark Spencer.
The kit will be available directly from Digium in October for $3,995. Production units are expected to be available at a later date with volumes of 10,000 for under $500.
Written by Dal on September 12th, 2006 with
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