The company that created and develops Asterisk (
News -
Alert), the popular open source telephony platform,
announced this week that it’s making support subscriptions for its software generally available.
Officials at Hunstville, Alabama-based
Digium Inc. say that now, a decade after creating Asterisk, organizations can access support services for technical help, hardware replacements and discounts on training programs.
Digium’s (
News -
Alert) founder and chief technology officer, Mark Spencer, said the services give Asterisk users the best of both worlds: They can download and use Asterisk free of charge, as always, and also now can call on Digium for technical support when needed.
“We think the combo of free and open, with support, is going to appeal to many of our most technical users,” Spencer said. “The Asterisk community has long been a source of great expertise through online forums, and now we’re supplementing that with the ability to call us, around-the-clock, for access to our Asterisk experts.”
The support subscriptions are bundles of services sold on an annual basis. Available
here at the Digium Web store, they’ll be available through Digium channel partners in the second quarter.
SMB pricing starts at $595 per year for support during the subscriber’s business hours (8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Monday through Friday). Around-the-clock support for an SMB begins at $1,995 per year. Enterprise subscriptions, including around-the-clock support, sarts at $3,995 per year.
We expect the service to garner subscribers quickly, as the open-source telephony platform gains traction – as many open source solutions do – in this slower economy.
Developers, VARs and systems integrators use Asterisk as a telephony communications toolkit to create custom voice applications and sophisticated VoIP communications solutions.
For Danny Windham, chief executive officer of Digium, which will be exhibiting in booth 206 at the
Internet Telephony Conference & Expo in Los Angeles from Sept. 1 to 3 – the event’s upcoming dates are announced
here – as Asterisk gains traction within large businesses, demand for professional support is on the rise.
“Our deep knowledge of open source Asterisk and total commitment to its development makes us ideally suited to offer these new services,” Windham said. “Companies that purchase subscriptions will receive support from the most knowledgeable group of Asterisk experts in the industry. We see this offering as a substantial step forward for Asterisk in the enterprise and a valuable service for companies of all sizes.”
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Michael Dinan is a contributing editor for TMCnet, covering news in the IP communications, call center and customer relationship management industries. To read more of Michael's articles, please visit his columnist page.
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Michael Dinan
