In a fascinating deal, IBM and Digium announced today that they are teaming up to offer Asterisk for Smart Cube, a customized version of Asterisk Business Edition. IBM's Smart Cube is very similar to Microsoft Small Business Server (SBS), a pre-packaged bundle of various IT & business applications - except in this case Smart Cube is based on Linux not Windows. Businesses using Smart Cube can be up and running with a complete IT solution to run their business, including the operating system, integrated middleware, database, security and back-office functionality such as file, print, backup and recovery, and more. Extending the IBM Smart Cube to IP telephony and unified communications is a natural extension of the Smart Cube.
Asterisk for Smart Cube has administration capabilities built right into the Smart Cube Smart Desk GUI, which is perfect for the SMB. Asterisk initially ran on rPath but now uses the very popular CentOS distribution. IBM on the other hand is very partial to SuSe Linux. thus one of the technical challenges IBM and Digium worked on was getting Asterisk Business Edition to run on the SuSE Linux platform. Additionally they worked on seamlessly integrating it into the Smart Desk GUI.
How this affects Digium's own home-grown Switchvox SMB offering remains to be seen. But Digium gaining access to IBM's huge distribution and reseller channel is great news for Digium.
Via internetnews.com
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Doesn't IBM already have a pre-packaged bundle of various IT & business applications designed for the SMB called Lotus Foundation?
They partner with Shoretel and NEC to provide the telephony capabilities on the foundation platform.
I believe it should also be noted that Asterisk doesn't run strictly on "very popular CentOS distribution", instead it can run on a multitude of Linux OS's, though CentOS may be the "officially" supported distro.
We don't want to scare people new to Asterisk away if they are CentOs-phobic/loathing now do we?
True that.
Funny how every Linux guru has their favorite flavor even though just about any of them can do the job.
It's like Coke vs. Pepsi. All a matter of opinion.
Bad analogy, Coke is definitely better!