innovation | Digium® - The Asterisk Company

innovation | Digium® - The Asterisk Company:

Digium the company that produces Asterisk have announced their 2nd innovation awards.

The catagories are: -

* Pioneer Award: Most innovative implementation
* Big Biz Asterisk: Largest enterprise class installation
* ROI: Best measurable ROI from implementing Asterisk based solution
* Inside Out Award: Best use of Asterisk in a business outside of telecommunications

Awards will be presented for each category on a global basis.

Asterisk is dual licensed in an open source version and commercial version (Asterisk Business Edition being an example of the closed source version), but enhancements tend to be cross developed. Asterisk is an IP PBX supporting both telephony interfaces (POTS, ISDN, etc) and VoIP protocols (SIP, H.323, etc), however it is much more than that and can be used as an IVR (interactive voice response), there are even speech-to-text engines available for integration.

Digium is also now starting to support SS7 (the protocols telecoms carriers use) natively within the telephony interfaces so Asterisk can be used as a "real" telephony switch.