iLocus predicts an IPO or acquisition of Digum within 12 months.

Highlights from the article include:

Asterisk Open Source PBX currently downloaded an average of 3000 times per day.

Digium claims to have recently had their 26th consecutive profitable growth quarter.

Digium has shipped over 4 million gateway ports to date.

Digium sales are allocated approximately 52% North America, 25% EMEA, 23% APAC and CALA.

Nearly 45% of all Asterisk downloads these days come from Europe.

According to Digium, there are roughly 3.5 million to 4 million Asterisk servers deployed worldwide.

Digium estimates 110 million end points are connected to Asterisk systems.

Service providers who have built production services on Asterisk accounted for over 6 billion commercial VoIP minutes in 2007, and that volume is expected to double in 2008.

Digium claims 900k IP Phones were added to Asterisk based service provider systems in 2007, excluding the self-managed Asterisk networks of enterprise users.

Digium plans to address scalability issues in the short term.

The remainder of 2008 will certainly not be without drama in the OSS telephony industry. OpenSER, recently re-named Kamailio Project, and FreeSwitch both have aspirations to unseat Asterisk. OpenSER is more widely deployed in the service provider/carrier space, and accounts for more wholesale minute traffic according to iLocus. FreeSwitch have recently aligned themselves with Sangoma, a fierce competitor to Digium in the TDM hardware space.