If you haven’t been watching lately there has been lots of activity in the IP PBX and networking space from 3Com and Digium. Here is a recap.
3Com was recently purchased and a minority investor was China’s Huawei. This could be good for 3Com as having improved ties in China for manufacturing and distribution is a good thing. This is also good news for Huawei, a company looking to grow more quickly in the US.
In addition, Digium purchased Switchvox and the goal of this acquisition seems to be making Asterisk as easy to use as possible. TMCnet’s Tom Keating has some interesting perspective on the purchase and even more interesting graphics. I think this purchase is good for the Asterisk community as it takes some very useful proprietary code and makes it open source. According to Mark Spencer, “We definitely intend to move some of the technology from Switchvox into open source Asterisk.”
Finally, there is the news about 3Com and Digium collaborating and the result is two new Asterisk-based phone systems the VCX Connect 100 and 200. By the way the Connect 100 scales to 100 users and the 200 scales to 250. A bit non-intuitive I agree but you’ll be glad this is the case when you hire your 201st worker.
For more information on these new phone systems I direct you to Greg Galitzine’s excellent analysis. By the way, Digium’s VP of Marketing Bill Miller used to work for 3Com and was an important voice in pushing 3Com in the direction of Linux. As Bill is the common element between both companies, the collaboration between 3Com and Digium is natural. It also helps reduce development costs for 3Com and at the same time gives Digium a shot in the arm as more and more PBX manufacturers jump on the Asterisk bandwagon.
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