Transcript

Mark Spencer: It’s often a challenge to give a talk about Asterisk at a conference that’s all about open source telephony about Asterisk, since most of you guys already know a lot about it, but I thought I would spend a little bit of time just talking about some of the growth we have seen in Asterisk, especially over the last year to a year and a half, some very interesting things.

Mark: The title of the talk is “The Inescapable Asterisk”, meaning that we’re learning that Asterisk is really becoming more and more pervasive throughout the industry, and I’ll actually give you guys some data that you may not have seen in the past. So, basically I’ll talk a lot about different areas where Asterisk has grown in terms of maturity, in terms of sizes of installations, in terms of user base, in terms of downloads and so on. I’ll try to use some help from one of my favorite websites [unintelligible 1:05] to help illustrate and maybe entertain along the way.

Mark: So when we talk about the maturity of Asterisk, there’s a number of areas where we have seen a lot of progress- in the market acceptance, in the scope of where we see Asterisk being used from both very small installations to extremely large installations, as well as the usability and maturity of the code, the range of integration options, things that you can connect Asterisk to, and even some of the processes that we have in place within the development team.

Mark: So, one area of a lot of progress has been security. We have recently set up an official open handling process around security, ( I don’t know if you guys can see this but this is a great picture of car security, with preventing a car from being stolen), there’s an internal security framework that’s now being developed, so that instead of just discovering through looking at logfiles that your system might be under attack, you might be able to have that passed up to a higher scale monitoring situation.

[laughter 2:41].

Mark: OK, there’s a dCAP certification in that room? Why don’t you come say?

Team Member 1: There’s a dCAP certification, so whoever wants to do a dCAP, we probably have one today and one tomorrow, that’s pretty much a good chance to do it very cheaply and in a very short time, and how good is dCAP? He is here to say.

[laughter 3:13]

Mark: It’s a highly non-trivial certification, I’ll say that; It’s not especially easy, so it means a lot when someone has a dCAP; it’s a lot of understanding about the telephony side, the Linux side, and the Asterisk side, all together.

Man 1: Do you have dCAP?

Mark: I do, but mine is technically only for version 1.2, I think…

[laughter 3:37]

Mark: …so, I don’t know if you guys really want me working on your systems nowadays or not.

[laughter 3:43]

Mark: Another question people want to know about are the sizes of installations of Asterisk— How big can an Asterisk scale, what are the methods people are using to try to increase its capacity, and so on. So, I’ll talk about a few of those.

Mark: The first one is a company called called Petrofac in Malaysia. That’s the largest natural gas company in Malaysia, and they’re using Asterisk and among the aspects of their installation that are interesting, one is that they are actually using Asterisk on the oil rigs with a-50s, which is the small appliance that we make [unintelligible 4:30] And then using IAX trunking over satellite links to be able to hook that up back to their main office, So that’s an area where being multi protocol has enabled to actually work with these satellite links, because obviously you have very limited bandwidth when you are working in an environment like that.

Mark: One of the most interesting companies here in Europe that we have in terms of integrators is a little company called Proformatique in France, who has been winning extremely large enterprise deals in France, even though the company its self is very small less than 15 people.

Mark: Amongst those deals is la Poste which the national postal carrier also has gotten S&F which is the national train company and the la Poste installation the first phase of it was to support the HR department. The HR department has 2500 people there 2500 Human Resources, so their first installation has 2500 phones on it.

Mark: Also in the US the Union County Schools are running off the switch box and there are not only able to install system for the schools but also where able to give emergency operators access to be able to monitor what is going on in the schools in case of an emergency.

Mark: And then Lyca is a company that has been doing movies. I don’t know if there are any of you who have seen the movie Coraline that came out recently but they do a lot of rendering and development of computer animated movies and they actually developed their own LVAC integration. They developed their own click to dial and so on just within the scope of their own PVX implementation.

Mark: I recently learned from Lloyd about an installation that he has been involved in Portugal that has set up 40 universities with asterisk servers, 250 asterisk servers to be able to connect all their existing PVXs together as well as adding phones to those.

Mark: So we all know is not just about having a tool but figuring out the best way to use the tool. So there is lots of ways that people have creatively have been able to use it both for business applications and for non-business application, I don’t know if you guys have been the asterisk power Roomba but is actually is a little vacuum cleaner that runs asterisk but you can call into and move it around the floor.

[laughter 7:38]

Mark: That involved an Maptech test kit, there is also going to be a little more serious because asterisk can download a 15MB package that designed to be very easy to install. There is also a variety of silly applications that I have learned about. For example there is company in the US has developed a game system where imagine a game that would be on the screen like this or in the movie theater.

Mark: Then you call the number on the screen and you play against other people in the room using your cell phone as a controller to control your character or whatever your representation is on the screen. It’s really has been fascinating to me how people have been able to connect asterisk with different technologies and apply it in ways that has never been thought of before and may never have existed before the development of open source telephony.

Mark: Asterisk itself, one of its strengths is that it lives on the intersection of many different kinds of technology trends. There is of course the transition from TDN to Voice over IP. there’s the transition from closed source to open source, there’s transitions from being DSP centric to being host media processing centric. Because it supports all these different transitions it’s been able to be a very strong player, which I’ll show you in the future.

Mark: One of things that’s interesting now is seeing how other transitions in the industry are starting to intersect with Asterisk as well. We’re seeing conjuring modules, XMPP is being integrated with Asterisk both in terms of actually supporting presence in instant message, as well as being a communications service from an API standpoint to allow different servers to be able to communicate with one another.

Mark: We’ve seen Twilio presenting web-enabled API’s for interacting with the telephone network, without having to even have any telephony hosted. And of course we’ve recently even seen Asterisk growing on the EC2 Cloud of Amazon. I just thought it might be nice to show you guys some of the awards that Asterisk has been winning, by the way, from Internet Telephony and InfoWorld, and so on.

Mark: A little bit of updates, we’ve had more than a million and a half downloads in 2008. This is all just great news about the growth in terms of who’s using Asterisk and how much activity there has been. But for the first time, we actually have someone who is independently publishing information about the market acceptance of Asterisk versus other technologies.

Mark: I have two slides that I think are going to be very interesting to you. First of all, this is just the North American market, but I believe North American market to be the worst case here, so your numbers in Europe will probably be even more attractive than these. This slide is really critical. What this says is that in the North American market, open source, together, all the open source telephony projects, were the number one supplier of VoIP IP PBX in North America. And Asterisk alone was bigger than anyone other than Nortel. I’ll show you that in just a moment. This is really significant here. This means that more systems were deployed with open source than any single proprietary provider so if anyone has wondered whether open source is going to make it, the answer is open source already has really made it.

Mark: And of course, not surprisingly the largest chunk of the open source market is Asterisk, but there’s also a number of other projects that are a part of that and are playing an important role in the IP PBX space.

Mark: Now, of course in the early days, Asterisk was really geared just towards people that were very familiar with Linux and telephony. But end users are really benefiting a lot from both complete systems, things like Switchvox and Asterisk now and other projects that people are putting together. And by people that are providing their own integration, especially for larger systems where canned products are not as useful. So this gets me to the Long Tail. I don’t know if Jay is here today or not, but this diagram here is largely from Jay Phillips of Fusion fame. If we look at the role that Digium plays there’s two aspects to it. On the left side we have technologies that are very broadly used, or I should say applications that are very broadly used, which is primarily, standard IP PBX products. That is where our focus in terms of the things that we sell as far as complete systems are concerned.

Mark: And then, we have a lot of custom-built solutions that other people are going afterwards. That’s going after the hospitality industry, going after this application of movies, or whether it’s gaming, whatever it is, all sorts of other applications that people are coming up with, whether using Asterisk to solve other problems.

Mark: And this, right here, the sort of long tail is the focus of where Asterisk development at Digium takes place. So, our goal is to be able to support all the applications that people come up with. So, Asterisk integration today, you might think of obviously, there are many people that do it. It’s not at all terribly hard, but it’s not necessarily as elegant as we might like it to be. Asterisk, being not just a PDI could be more, but being as an engine that people need to build from.

Mark: So, some areas that we are working hard on, [unintelligible 14:45] version, of course you guys are probably familiar with that. Expanding the video support, supporting projects like the [unintelligible 14:53] and really, thinking harder about what we can do to expand our existing interfaces into Asterisk and try to make a more consistent traditional ATI that people can depend on more easily.

Mark: And then there’s the other half of this equation, beyond PDXs, It’s also important to start thinking about the other side. What it is that is connected to the PDXs. And I think that media phones are going to be a very important part of what happens going forward. That is, as we start to see things like the iPhone, and the android, where people are developing handsets that of themselves carry a variety of other applications and basics for developing applications, I’d like to see how those are going to be able to interact with Asterisk in today’s experience even richer than it already is.

Mark: And I’ll leave the rest of the time for questions. Any questions?

Man 2: Yeah. I have one question to you. There was once life of market penetration in the West and also North America. And this was based on systems. Do we have a similar graphic about lines and about revenue?

Mark: I do not have one on lines for revenue, but I believe this is built on systems. I’ll try to find out by tomorrow. If I know …

Man 2: OK. That would be great.

Team Member 2: [unintelligible 16:28] lines, Mark.

Mark: It is lines? OK. So this is lines.

Man 2: OK. Thanks.

Man 3: Could you find out about systems?

[laughter 16:37]

Mark: I’ll see what I can find out. Any other questions?

Man 4: What was wrong with the Skype [unintelligible 16:54]?

Mark: What’s going on with Skype [16:57]? Well, this is our…what is it…the fifth month of beta, something like that?

Team Member 2: Yes.

Mark: OK. So, Skype, at some point, decided that they wanted the usage of the Skype Asterisk Module to be tied with another product they have, the business control panel. And there is some technology there, but they want to have out first. So, the idea is that they want Skype or Asterisk only to be used with accounts that are business Skype accounts. Presumably, because of the end-user license associated with it. IE, they don’t want you to go get an unlimited Skype consumer plan and plug it into your PBX and get essentially, unlimited long distance for pennies. Is that — Kevin, do you have any other…?

Kevin Fleming: No, that’s pretty much it.

Mark: That’s pretty much it. So we are waiting, basically, for Skype to complete their piece of their technology. The connector for Asterisk is essentially, complete and that’s really all we’ve got before it goes to an open beta.

Man 5: Will you release it as open source?

Mark: It is not released as open source. There is a binary module that is the Skype stuff and then there is a just a thin kind of wrapper around it so that you can build it against whatever version of Asterisk you’ve got. Although, I think we’re supporting 1.4 and 1.6, right Kevin?

Kevin: Yes.

Man 6: Can you talk a little more about what’s going on in video?

Mark: Well, video is an area where… [speaking under breath 18:52] [coughing and some laughing from audience 18:52] Video is an area where we have had some support for a while, but there hasn’t been as much compatibility sort of between end devices. And as people are starting to get to where their phones are starting to work better together, we are starting to more interested in trying video enabled, PBX functionality, as a way to drive more people to Asterisk. I think historically, you know, video, although the technology has been interesting, has not been something, or even individuals, have really cared about. Because, if you think about it, how many times do you talk on the phone in an environment where you wouldn’t really necessarily want to be seen? All right?

[camera sounds coming from audience 19:45]

Mark: So, the bigger issue is more of people don’t always want to have video all the time. And in fact, one of the things I think has been one of the most important factor in accelerating the adoption of video is things like YouTube and Google Video where people are becoming more at ease with publishing video of themselves or allowing themselves to be seen in situations that are less controlled than just individual photographs. So, that’s one of the reasons I am more interested in it now. Because I think those are really starting to change the way people view video.

Man 7: Do you also plan to improve the hint sub system the next time?

Mark: I’m sorry. I couldn’t hear the question.

Man 7: Do you plan to improve the hint sub system the next time?

Mark: What was that? The what system?

Ole Johansson: The hint.

Man 7: Hint.

Mark: Hint system.

Man 7: Yeah.

Mark: Well, I think a lot of that is kind covered in how we’re trying to do presence overall in Asterisk especially between systems. I suspect somebody else is going to have a talk around that. I am trying to think…

Ole: My talk in the room, after you.

Mark: You what?

Ole: I’ll talk presence in the room after you.

Mark: So, Ole will cover that. But there’s work being done to try and manage presence between multiple Asterisk systems so that would kind of fit it to that.

Man 8: Would you comment on faxing a little bit, please?

Mark: Sure. We just announced, and released actually, a fax for Asterisk which enables you to be able to send and receive faxes.

Man 8: I, not recently but a while ago, received an email from one of your developers or supporters saying that fax isn’t supported by your cards. Did this change?

Mark: Yes, yes. We have a Fax for Asterisk module now, which does work…

Man 8: The software side, and the hardware side?

Mark: Yes and it works with our parts. That is correct. Analog and digital. Any other questions?

Man 9: Well, think back to March you said there was a big jump in the deployment of pre-built systems instead of just custom-engineered. What are the leading systems that you see out there which are ready-made packages?

Mark: Well, of course, we produce one which is Switchvox, actually we produce two, because we have AsteriskNow. So those are the ones we have typically tracked the most closely. But there’s a whole bunch of others, PDX in a Flash and Voxy and all sorts of other things. One of the things I have discovered is that there are a lot of different companies producing these kinds of products that are successful in different localities.

Mark: For example, Sylvan, with Performatie, is using a system Called Xivo that he developed. And he seems to be very successful using that system in France. So one of the things is, for example, that system includes a special kind of secretary – boss functionality that I hadn’t really heard of before. In which, I guess, in France it’s common that the boss only wants calls to be able be received through his secretary, so you have to be able to set up, essentially, a private plan where the only person who can call the boss’s extension is the secretary. So all people have to call that person first to be able to get in there.

Mark: And their GUI makes that very easy and I don’t know of any other GUI’s that really address that problem in exactly that way, because that’s not something that most of us would think of, so, I wouldn’t necessarily think of these pre-packaged systems as being one or two particular vendors as much as a whole family of systems that people have been coming up with. Any other questions?

Man 10: How about speech recognition? How do you see Asterisk, for example, with voice integration and [unintelligible 24:59]?

Mark: We have speech recognition in Asterisk today through the LumenVox connector, but what’s missing is integration of the speech with the regular apps that come with Asterisk. So if you buy the LumenVox module today for Asterisk, essentially what you have is a developer tool for being able to build your own speech recognition app.

Mark: And one of the things that we are working on now is trying to come up with apps that or extending the existing Asterisk applications in a way such that in a way that when you install a speech recognition engine for Asterisk that some of your [camera shutter sound] applications are already voice-enabled. So, by the way, if any of you have ideas about applications within Asterisk that you would like to see voice-enabled, and how you might envision that working, I’d like to hear some of those. Because right now, really only ideas that are really obvious are navigating voice mail and the directory. That’s the most obvious speech-enabled applications, so if you guys have other ideas, I would definitely like to hear from you guys as we start the panels.

Man 11: And how about MRT integration?

Mark: That’s not on our plan, but I think there are other people that are doing MRT stuff with Asterisk.

Randy Resnick: Would you mind doing a commercial for VoicePHP since we waited… It’s the other end. It’s text-to-speech for tomorrow at 4:30. If you could mention it?

Mark: You just did. What Randy said.

Randy: Thank you.

Mark: Your welcome. Any other questions? All right, well, thank you very much.

[applause 26:56]