Digium Woos SMBs/Enterprises with Support Packages for Open Source Asterisk

OSS Telephony leader Digium recently fired another shot across the bow of traditional proprietary Tier 1 vendors including Cisco, 3Com and Avaya.

In the enterprise space, one of the traditional arguments against open source has been the lack of available support. There are plenty of VARs out there these days helping enterprises of all different shapes and sizes deploy open IP Comms platforms like Asterisk, but nobody will argue that Asterisk’ support ecosystem is as reliable and robust as the likes of Cisco.

Digium is looking to change the perception that Asterisk can’t compete for enterprise customers in several ways. First, they are heavily promoting their DCAP (Digium Certified Asterisk Professional) curriculum to incubate a future army of open source VoIP technicians. Second, Digium is shoring up their own internal support offerings, and recently announced several tiers of paid support for open source Asterisk ranging from 1-3 year increments.

Components that are covered under the new Digium plans includes Asterisk Open Source 1.4, Asterisk Open Source 1.6, Asterisk GUI, G.729 Codec, HPEC, Lumenvox Speech Recognition for Asterisk and Cepstral Text-to-Speech for Asterisk.

Digium is also promising 24X7 availability, Web Case Management, Remote Troubleshooting, Advanced Hardware Replacement, Scheduled Upgrade Assistance, Configuration Review, Performance Review and AGI Script Application Review.