Today, Digium, creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the leading open source telephony platform will be making a major announcement at Astricon later today. Digium hinted to me that a major announcement would be made at Astricon when I visited their Huntsville, Alabama headquarters in August.I tried to find out what the news will be, but alas Digium couldn't tell me. So I thought it would be fun to prognosticate what this deal could be.
1) Digium's Switchvox will be distributed by Dell, which currently carries another Asterisk competitor, Fonality.
2) Digium will be acquired by Adtran, an avid supporter of Digium in the past.
3) HP seeing that competitor Dell is offering IP-PBXs (i.e. Fonality and Nortel) will partner with Digium to offer Digium's line of IP-PBXs and telephony hardware
4) Now that Adtran, a financial supporter of Digium, offers their own line of IP phones, including the IP706 and IP712, perhaps Digium will offer a bundled IP-PBX package that includes Switchvox and a few Adtran IP phones.
5) Digium will announce this whole open source thing is nonsense, there's no money in it, and they're announcing that they are making Asterisk closed source effective immediately. Ok, maybe in some alternate universe!
6) CDW, a major distributor, will be carrying and distributing Digium's products.
7) Something to do with Skype. After all, Skype is keynoting at Astricon. Though one could setup Skype trunks with Asterisk already, so not sure what they could do together.
Ok, so what's your guess? Costco? And remember the clock is ticking. The announcement could be made at any moment.
Update! 12:24pm
It is Digium/Asterisk and Skype. But it's more than just Skype trunking. The beta version of Skype For Asterisk is an add-on channel driver module that integrates Skype Internet calling with Asterisk-based telephony products. It sounds like you can call Skype users. You can make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware. More details here.
