Happy Holidays and Get Ready for More Exciting Times

As the year comes to an end, the open source world of IP Telephony is booming and making a move on traditional suppliers. Open source Asterisk is not alone in this mission. As we move into 2008, you will see other new players in telephony. What will we experience a year from now? Will people be running their mission critical phone systems on Microsoft or open source Asterisk from Digium or some other Asterisk-based distribution? Will it be Google? Yahoo? Will they continue to select traditional solutions from traditional telephony players? Can consumer VoIP move into the higher demands of business?

Welcome to the 2008 emerging market changes and battlefield. Is your phone system like your search engine? Is it like your home page? What drives your decisions, price - features - simplicity - brand? Do you even care?

Think about it - Who would have predicted YouTube? Facebook? Myspace? IM? Texting? Twitter? Get with it - the business telephony world is changing. It's going to take longer than a consumer movement, but it is in the process of happening. Over the year we will discuss this more.

YCMTSU

One of my favorite sayings. At Digium this week is our NYU guest following a trip to NYU by Mark Spencer and some of the key developers. Soon, you will see a new element of Asterisk you have not seen ever before. The developers are actually using the new Digium building as a backdrop.

Trust me, this falls into the category of "You Can't Make This Stuff Up!

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Fun Days at Digium.

Oh, and I caught Mark in his hammock in his office today! He had to move while Jeffrey installed a new shelf to house all his junk. Mark just has so much fun!!!!!!!!

Happy Thanksgiving

This is a terrific opportunity to reflect over the past for all of us. As I review the past two years, I think about how I came to Digium. Internal debates at 3Com about Asterisk, open source, 3Com's voice products (NBX, VCX, and their own SIP phones) and how we might be better positioned in the future. A team of three people in the convergence business unit did some heavy lifting and voila - "hell day" presentation on 3Com and how Asterisk might be well suited for the future voice business. Then new management changes at 3Com led to my leaving along with some other key folks and in a matter of weeks meeting Mark Spencer, David Skok (the Matrix Partners investor), the rest of Digium's small team, and the rest as they say is history. Today, I give thanks for the sequence of events that brought me here.

I am challenged daily by the balance of open source vs. commercial business. A growing company, a young founder and his friends, a more traditional planning process and budgeting process, and a continued balance of "free" vs. "commercial" across products. This makes the career move here much more interesting!

Check out our free small business Switchvox at www.switchvox.com or www.digium.com; check our free Asterisk - pure code for geeks at www.asterisk.org and for the slightly less technically inclined, a distribution at www.asterisknow.org (release 1.0 replacing beta 6 very soon).

Here is the type of thing we work with daily: http://youtube.com/watch?v=ozEo3FOKCS8)
if that link fails, try this: http://youtube.com/results?search_query=mark+spencer+jeep&search=Search

You tell me how you balance this with traditional strategic and operations planning as well as integration of two acquisitions. Yes, this is quite a period of life that I give thanks for today.

Moving to one last thing I'd like to mention that crosses my mind every Thanksgiving: High School Football. I will watch Pro football today as substitute for my younger days when I attended Needham High School in MA. The rivalry with Wellesley (yes, same town that Hillary attended college) has a history - the oldest in the nation for public schools. In checking out www.boston.com I found this today which made me smile. Check this out: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/22/holiday_spirit/

Reading this reminded me of the spirited rallys and pranks the week before this football game back in the 60's. I think my class was ahead of its time. Anyway, I give thanks today for many things but in this blog today wanted to share Digium and Needham stories. I am sure you have yours!

Happy Thanksgiving to all and enjoy your day!

BAD Asterisk FUD

I had the benefit of getting some market feedback today re: Shoretel spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) about some competitors but also Asterisk. In spite of their recent successes, it shows how ignorant some of their sales folks can be and obviously do not research Digium or Asterisk. We all do what we can to delay competitive threats in an account, but some do it with class some do it with FUD. Here is where they are so far off, it shows they are not concerned about open source Asterisk. Now we know they are targeting the big boys and that's good they are taking their eyes off the ball!

Shoretel: Asterisk Appliance.......

........."thousands of other small partners with little investment are trying to undercut you"

Response: Good for end users; low cost and as resellers package complete systems and services they will win the deal and make good margins and the customer will spend far less for the solution! Competition is good for buyers!

Shoretel: Asterisk Upgrades

.........."How does a customer who is sold an asterisk system upgrade if they want to grow?"

Response: Asterisk is SIP but also supports TDM-SIP and IAX (Inter Asterisk Exchange) allowing the customer to keep their phones and can easily connect to other SIP locations. How many Pizza places, Dentists, bagel shops, bakeries, real estate agencies etc need less than 50 phones? Simple upgrades - it's free for open source and the recent Switchvox Free Edition which can easily be upgraded with a SINGLE CLICK!

Shoretel: What happens if IBM, HP or Dell decide to sell asterisk (good for their servers and support business)What happens to your partners when IBM competes for the deals? Who knows, maybe we will see sooner rather than later?

Response: Shoretel might be afraid of competition, but the end user welcomes it as part of a healthy marketplace.

Shoretel: How baked is the solution? Open Source is still evolving How many features do you get?

Response: Asterisk comes from Digium, the world leader and inventor of Asterisk, and the benevolent owner of the Asterisk project (open source software are called projects). There are thousands of daily downloads of Asterisk software. Thousands of community members write, test and fix features daily. Imagine Shoretel identifying all the bugs found globally? Right. But open source users have eyes into every bug and every fix. However, the features are rich and continue to get richer. Asterisk is also the most interoperable IP PBX on the planet since it's the most ubiquitious.

Don't believe it? try it:
IP PBX: www.digium.com or www.switchvox.com (no technical knowledge needed)
Asterisk IP Telephony Platform: www.asterisknow.org (little technical knowledge) or www.asterisk.org (highly technical knowledge required)

Digium Asterisk World

Its been a while since I posted here. I've been busy on Digium's corporate blog. http://blogs.digium.com. Today, Malcolm responded to a TMC blog about Sangoma vs. Digium. Sangoma also hired our old PR firm. That is telling. We terminated them because they could no longer "cut it" with Digium but our board level competitors felt they could help them. Good for both.

So last week was Digium Asterisk World (DAW) at VON. It was incredibly successful! There were minor issues with content in the conference track, but we will fix that for Spring DAW in San Jose in March 2008. Partners and exhibitors seemed happy they took a booth there as traffic was best in years!

I was invited to join the VON Advisory Council which is a diverse group of people who all are trying to reinvent Pulver's VON for the masses and IP Communications! Stay tuned for more.

Digium is planning on some new campaigns for 2008. With Switchvox, 3Com as a partner, and NTT as a partner watch for some exciting new programs! We have some aggressive plans to proliferate open source Asterisk telephony in the mainstream. Follow www.digium.com and you will stay abreast of our efforts. Tell us how you like the new web site.

..the undisputable LEADER in Open Source Telephony....Digium, The Asterisk Company

The Big Move

Today was moving day at Digium. It seems like a century ago that I joined Digium (June 2006) and one of the first things I did was provide input to the new building layout. I stayed out of it mostly after that unless asked. The culmination of this was today, as all Digium Huntsville-based employees moved back into the same building. We had a major customer meeting 11 am to 4 PM, and people were walking by our meeting room with sombreros, desktop Asterisk toys, laptops and printers and boxes of stuff. It's funny how some people enjoy this moving thing, others hate it. It was fun to watch and after our meeting move myself.

Our CEO took our guest to the new building before he went back to the airport, and no doubt the prospect was blown away. Our building was designed for collaboration purposes. There are several open areas with teamwork in mind. Some departments insisted on cubes to collaborate while others have new sizable private offices after having a smaller shared space. The shiny new training center beckons students and computers and people were milling everywhere moving their personal goods ahead of the "boxes" from the other buildings.

All goods are now delivered, the network should have all ports assigned properly, and workers are fixing last minute things - elevators, coffee areas, copiers, printers, and other common areas. Yes, last minute things are in process today, but moving along nicely. Love the POE switches on our Polycom phones - less cable clutter!

Mark was setting up Markocam and his office (more on Digium corporate blog soon - http://blogs.digium.com/). The building is terrific - large areas for all, lots of room for now as we grow, conference rooms that we no longer need to fight for and all named after penguins!

There is no time for hallway and water cooler time waste, with Digium's recent Switchvox and 3Com news and Digium Asterisk World approaching, so we will be getting back to business fast. There is no doubt about Digium's commitment to collaboration in Asterisk, among employees and within the building. if you get to visit, you will see what I mean.

We are all proud of the new facility. We are proud to be part of Digium. We hope you can get to visit in the future.

How to Prep for Astricon, the Asterisk Users Conference

With the recent acquisition of Sokol and Associates, Digium employees now more than just attend and sponsor Astricon, the premier event for the "converted" - those already drinking from the Asterisk firehose of the world's most popular open source IP Telephony Software, Digium is the proud operator of this event! With less than one week to go, we are approaching the first Digium-operated version of the event on the heels of 5 other Sokol run events.

So what does it mean? It means boxes are everywhere. With all the giveaways, from a white paper on echo cancellation to lots of Asterisk Swag, it's all over the marketing area, the storage areas, and in a couple of the marketing offices! All the lucky attendees at Astricon, being held this year in Phoenix, will receive lots of Asterisk related stuff. It will be both fun, educational, and productive with software licenses being given to those who visit us for G.729 and HPEC. Visit http://www.astricon.net.

What else do we do to prepare? Clear our schedules in Huntsville for the week of August 24-28! Make sure our office areas are packed! We are moving as soon as we return into our new building (See earlier post). We will all be back together as Engineering and Product Quality have been in another building since January.

With major announcements looming, marketing is again at work. Prep the analysts, prep and embargo the press. Make sure all the questions are answered. Prepare Mark Spencer for his closing day keynote on "Asterisk Adventures" - typically the most lively and attended event of the week. Always an adventure!
More details..... is the hotel all set? ..........Speakers still committed? Any changes? ................How will the competitors handle Digium as the event owner? Is the party all ready? ..........Welcome to Digium Marketing's world. We love it!

Visit Digium's new corporate blog at http://blogs.digium.com/.

See you at Astricon!

Digium now has a corporate blog!

I started this blog earlier this summer. We have had plans to get Digium's corporate blog going an today we launched it. For those who like the human interest stories, please visit this new blog at

http://blogs.digium.com/


You may check out the stories below on this blog as a precursor to the Digium blog.
Our motto: "You can't make this stuff up!" is one way to describe the daily action at Digium.

I will slightly modify the direction of my blog here so look for a name modification sometime soon. I'd like to thank my readers for stopping by. I will continue to focus on human interest stories, market updates for VoIP, Unified Communications and Collaboration, and will share interesting data points about open source, VoIP, UC, the markets, and anything else that complements Digium's blog. I will strive for unique angles.

For those of you interested in Asterisk, check out:

www.astricon.net: Tradeshow and conference for "All things Asterisk" for the community and the already Asterisk converted! In Phoenix, September 25-28.

www.digiumasteriskworld.com: The tradeshow inside a tradeshow for business at VON, Boston October 29-Nov 1. Look for "Bold Innovation Awards" on our web site and if you have a great Asterisk application, please submit your application on our website

And of course, Digium and Asterisk:

www.digium.com
www.asterisk.org
www.asterisknow.org

Bye for tonight!

Casual Day

When Mark Spencer sent out an email earlier this week announcing Friday was "casual day" there was quite a bit of buzz around. We had so many new folks this year, they had no idea what it really meant! A couple of folks from the marketing team knew exactly what it was: PJs, absolute casual; almost anything goes. Well, to our surprise, Mark showed up to a meeting in his penguin boxer shorts! Yet another day that falls into the category of, "you can't make this stuff up!" I love my job. I love this place. Work hard. Play hard. Laugh hard! I took cell phone pictures and sent them to one person who was in another location on the conference bridge. Response: SCARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Do you agree?


In this picture above, Mark is teaching a class in Huntsville. People love Mark's guest appearances in classes. He's touching, entertaining, and aloof all in one. Yes, really! Throughout the day, people from sales, marketing, tech support and other departments came out of the woodwork for this event to see who was wearing what. Here is a picture of some of the fun folks.



It makes each and every day a blast to come to the office. It is what makes Digium what it is. Innovative, fun, collaborative. Unpredictable.

For new folks, its enlightening. For students in training, it is eye popping.

That's it for tonight. It was a very nice ending to the week!

Interesting Tradeshow Week

VoiceCon Fall 2007
------------------

The event put on by CMP and BCR under Fred Knight, GM, held as usual in SF was fun this past week. Digium has been there for the past 3 events positioning ourselves in the enterprise. This year Unified Communications has taken center stage over all else as Microsoft's entry to voice business systems continues to upset the applecart. Mark Spencer, our founder and CTO appeared on his first plenary panel. I hope to get a video of the panel, and if so, will try and post it here. Mark left his comfy leather seat during the session and walked the stage, sat down next to Eric Swift from Microsoft and had some fun with him. Put his arm around Eric and told him they were the enemy. Then got up and sat in between Cisco's panelist and Avaya's panelist and had some more fun with them. He told all that if we don't get it right from the PBX and networking sides, Skype, also on the panel, would eat all our lunches! First time ever in all my VoiceCon years I've ever seen anything like it.

In the locknote, which ends the conference, several folks referred to Mark's comments but not him by name. Mark was a hit and made all of us Digiumites proud. This is exactly why he is in my contact database as "Mark, there is no box" - this young man is different, bold, and smart.

This was also the first VoiceCon event for Digium that geeks did not search us out. We focused on business, business process, and operations for Open Source Telephony enterprises of all sizes. Very nice event.

Digium also had a celebration dinner with a new major license and OEM partner midweek at Bobo's in SF. Absolutely the best in-bone filet I and my colleagues have ever had. Watch for our announcement soon. We signed the contracts at the dinner. Plans are to launch in September. Digium will also announce some other exciting news in preparation for Q4 at Astricon (September 25-28 in PHX). Check out www.astricon.net.

So we had some fun this week. Excellent press, making Gartner's magic quadrant; excellent analyst meetings, and some strong promising customers sales.


See you next time and soon!

Astricon, IT Expo and Digium Asterisk World at VON are coming up!
Check them all out at www.digium.com

Asterisk: Genuine and for the People!

Digium, The Asterisk Company.

I started using this tag line a bit over a year ago to clarify Digium is THE Asterisk owner.

Why do we care? Because Digium has invested millions over the years to build the Asterisk open source community. This community makes the engine go. The engine is so powerful that well over 3.5 million servers have been downloaded. We suspect these servers are deployed in everything from enterprises to homes. Users cover the globe: linux geeks to non-technical business users who can download a file and burn a CD and have a phone system.

But open source has rules based on the license you use. Digium uses GPLv2. Digium also commercially licenses Asterisk for people to modify and keep their modifications. Otherwise, to build a commercial business and redistribute derivative works, you are supposed to provide full source code or license it back to the community in our case through Digium. Among the more successful licensees: Aspect Software (IP Contact Centers), and NTT Software in Japan with a large growing base of licensees. Why? It saves significant development costs.

There are others who claim to be open source, openly modify and redistribute Asterisk-based solutions and even use several versions back. Some of these folks are hippocrates - they talk about Asterisk not being robust enough, but they are using software as old as version 1.09 where today version 1.2 and 1.4 are most recent. They say they have "hardened" Asterisk. Well, they modified code to make their own proprietary solution. Their is nothing wrong with this because thats one of the intents to proliferate Asterisk everywhere, but by following the rules. Some of you readers know who and what I am talking about. There are actually many, some are just more visible and public images than others.

We will continue to educate developers and users everywhere!

Tell you what, if you would like to discuss this, feel free to post here. Maybe I am wrong, maybe I missed an angle, but I can tell you we will continue to develop Asterisk and support the developer community. In the future, many companies and users will benefit. We at Digium do need to make money in areas where it makes sense - business class software, hardware, support, and consulting so we can continue to foster development and proliferate Asterisk and reduce the cost for users worldwide! Leveraging our partner ecosystem can generate sales and profits. Our web sites are well known for downloading our Asterisk versions well over 3000 times per day globally is no small achievement.

Yes, share your thoughts - here or on www.asterisk.org on the forums!

Asterisk.
Genuine Asterisk.
Digium Asterisk

See you at Astricon (www.astricon.net), and/or
See you at Digium Asterisk World (www.digiumasteriskworld.com)

Rumors

Today was an incredible day. It's funny how you can go for days, weeks, months without any juicy rumors. Then today, one right after the others. From a blogger who made a Digium comment about being acquired, an open source competitor being acquired, 3Com being acquired (on Yahoo Finance), competitor announcing a new product tomorrow, and a partner is going to step up their certification of Asterisk.

I am dumbfounded by this flurry of rumors. I know some are absolutely true while some are totally false! Do you have rumors to share? There is already a blog for that, so it won't be here. Who ever thought Avaya would go for $8.2B? Who else is going to be overpriced? Or will the above rumors be bargains?

Anyone confirm the above rumors? Let us know with a post.
I'll be back soon....just a short one tonight.

CAPS Lock Key

Today I am sitting in a meeting with the company folks (From Sokol and Associates) we acquired this week. He has a MAC and I use a Dell Latitude 420. Now I had mistaken the ease of use of a MAC. The MAC and Dell have identical idiosyncrasies: The darn CAPS Lock Key! It's so easy for us non-typists to hit the CAPS Lock rather than the Shift A. or even just plain A.......

So Mr Jobs did NOT outdo anyone in PC Land with the keyboard. The UI might be greeat and easy and consistent, BUT Apple missed the boat fixing this frustrating key.

I am convinced: The CAPS LOCK key must be disabled until manufacturers move the key to the side or top function key line. I had one laptop years ago where the insert key was like this CAPS Lock. Now it's much harder on my Dell to hit by accident.

This is an unusual Digium post, but it's certainly happing at Digium today!

I hope this is the biggest challenge I get today!

Nxtcomm

We exhibited at this service provider event (Formerly SuperComm, Global Comm, and a few others) this past week in Chicago. We were on a mission. You see, Digium's Asterisk is being used by about 200 service providers globally in some fashion. Some provision services, some use it for voice mail, some for IVRs, some combine it with OpenSER and use it as a VoIP gateway. We announced a partnership with Bandwidth.com, who provisions Asterisk-based solutions using Digium hardware to over 48,000 phones and recognize revenues for over 1.2 BILLION minutes! Who says Asterisk is not ready for prime time? Thats one customer! We have many large deployments like this!

Our goal is to grow these partners, build stronger relationships, and expand our offerings jointly.

We enjoyed a busy booth regardless of location. We also attended three parties - TMC's early event at Soldier Field, Jeff Pulver's always wild event with "The Herding Cats" an incredibly fun band, and Adtran from where our CEO Danny Windham, and VP Sales Steve Harvey just recently joined us. Lot's of fun mixed with very successful business!

Watch for more interesting news this next few weeks as we reinforce our global training position with some new announcements, broaden our support for Asterisk users around the world, and lastly expand our product line!

Quite a Week so far

This week took us on a private flight to North Carolina to a soon-to-be announced partner. We flew two private planes, me as a passenger as I am not a pilot. Mark Spencer was also a passenger but in the other plane. As we flew over the skies of southeastern US, Mark tackled the radio. He was the voice of one of our planes as it was his first ever flight doing this extracurricular activity. It was actually quite comical and funny but he did great. Mark's Pilot, our VP Sales, had to basically battle Mark to take ownership back in order to land. For those who are not pilots or don't get to ride shotgun in one, it's a little nerve racking with air traffic all over the place and you need to have full control to land in case of emergency arising. It was interesting. I loved the trip. It is my second time recently.

After great team meetings, we returned to Huntsville and upon arrival, the Osspry Helicopter was just arriving as well for demonstrations at Space Camp this week. What a marvelous machine. We did get to see it close up, as our plane landed just before the Osspry and we parked right next to it in the small General Aviation plane lot.

Back to seriousness. Digium is getting ready for NxtComm next week in Chicago. We have lots going on as we begin strategic movement in service provider networks.
We are also getting ready for a summer of very strong announcements from OEM relationships, to our new building, to organization to products. Very exciting times.

The glass in our new building is close to all in. It looks great. The picture here shows the artists conception. I will show actual picture soon.

Lots of customers and press talking about Avaya being sold to private equity for $8.2B. Certainly validates our markets. For Digium, we are well-prepared for the next wave of telephony because our model is superior to that of Avaya. Why would private equity over pay? Because the sum of the parts is worth more than the whole. We do believe customers will be uneasy for some time.

Off for now. back again soon!
.....

Just what is open source telephony?

Asterisk(r) is the defacto standard and leader in open source telephony. There are imitators who always want to be considered in the same breath as Digium's Genuine Asterisk(tm). Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Published under the GPL V2, Asterisk has mullions of downloads. You see, www.asterisk.org is THE open source site for the technically astute and is maintained by Digium(r), the creator and primary maintainer of Asterisk software but is populated by the worlds greatest community of developers, contributors and interested parties . Others build their own distribution of this same open source Asterisk, insert their software in or around Asterisk (call them company A) and call it their own asterisk solution. Upon analysis, this now means Digium's Asterisk installed base is downloaded from www.asterisk.org and the Asterisk installed base is Digium's plus company A. Digium is in a unique position where all open source Asterisk-based products are really Asterisk-based contributing to Asterisk's installed base, and Digium creates their own commercial offerings and others create their own Asterisk-based offering. They include Switchvox, Intuitive Voice, Fonality, Trixbox (does use open source, but I believe do not make source code available) and literally dozens of others worldwide. These are ALL based on Asterisk. Some folks modify Asterisk and include it in their distribution and resale of their solution. But do not lose sight of the fact that these are only possible with Asterisk. BUT here is the CATCH: THEY are NOT open source products - they are open source BASED products. They offer CLOSED PROPRIETARY solutions that give customers the benefits of open source such as low cost, fast feature development, flexibility but these products are closed. This subtly goes unnoticed by some folks who blog, are analysts, press and even venture capitalists.

Digium continues to lead the way in open source maintaining Asterisk, managing and hosting the Developers Conference, driving Asterisk everywhere possible to enable the ecosystem to grow and flourish. Digium removes the barriers to entry for new companies to enter the ecosystem and if they have a great idea, they can benefit and provide benefits to business customers.

Digium knows for a fact over 2 million servers are running asterisk today. There are a couple of other million we know about from competitors boasting of their downloads that encapsulate a version of Asterisk in their distribution. That makes over 4 million known servers. If one assumes an average of even 5 users per server, which is very conservative number, that means we know of at least 20 million users running on Asterisk.

Now it gets better. We can find about 200 service providers globally that offer IAX and SIP VoIP service. Why does this matter? IAX and IAX2 IS Asterisk! Make no mistakes, some of these service providers handle millions of calls and minutes per month. Digium will publish some data from some of the partners shortly, but these numbers are incredible.

With Digium's new Asterisk Appliance(tm), many service providers will offer a customized version of the appliance running Asterisk Business Edition, Digium's commercial and fully supported software, to offer businesses the best of both worlds: Open source + fully supported + SIP and/or IAX trunking to provide cost effective interoperable connections and service.

Yes folks, Asterisk is permeating the world. The ecosystem is growing. If you are not yet familiar with Asterisk, it's time to investigate. Not a Linux guru? Download AsteriskNOW (tm) a free distribution that can get you started. www.asterisknow.org.

I hope this helps clarify a bit about Asterisk, Digium, the Asterisk Community, the Ecosystem, offers based on Asterisk, and if you visit Astricon (www.astricon.net) and Digium Asterisk World (www.digiumasteriskworld.com) at VON later this year, you can learn a lot more!

Cbeyond+Digium+Polycom Seminar

Last night we did a joint seminar in Atlanta, with keynotes by both Chris Gatch, CTO of CBeyond and Mark Spencer CTO and founder of Digium. The unique twist was we drive from Huntsville to Atlanta in the Monday, and back this morning - Tuesday. Of course, Atlanta freeway system did not disappoint: 25,000 pounds of frozen food spread out on side of I75. Ugly.

At the event, great crowd, very solid audience, and we gave away 3 of our appliances in a raffle. of course, they are in beta, so we will send later. Great BBQ. Beer, Iced Tea, BBQ and good friends.

Today, Avaya was acquired by a private equity firm for $8.2B. With revenues of $5.2B, and a strong market position, it reminds me of Digital equipment. Will Digium and other open source based companies enabled by Digium's Asterisk penetrate Avaya's markets and terminate their growth? Sure will be fun at Digium. Disruption in Motion. Cisco, NT, Avaya.....Digium and Asterisk enjoy talking to your customers!

Watch out for our growth in services, training, events, and appliances that scale.

Watch out for our upcoming partnership announcements.

Watch out for the re-birth of our ecosystem growth.

We are targeting new growing markets, turning Mark Spencer loose on Asterisk innovation, and we are on a mission.

One funny story to end with. The last question of the night last night to Mark, "What will your revenues be this year?" After minutes of laughter, Mark told his questioner, "You can't have that on a 1st date!" The room broke out in laughter and the CBeyond moderator ended it right then and there. If I only had a video for uTube!

We had two major partners here in Huntsville tonight that we are moving into deeper partnerships with and had a great dinner tonight.

Yes, activity is at a high point.

Just another day at Digium. You really can't make this stuff up!

Kickoff Posting

It's been just about one year now. The experiences are beyond your wildest dreams. At times, I need to pinch myself. The place is a different culture than anything I've ever experienced in many many years in technology in many parts of the country. I feel like a kid again.

Working for Mark Spencer and getting to know him will lead you to one of my favorite sayings, "You can't make this stuff up!" Although I did not create that saying, it best describes a day in the life of Digium. Digium, in case you may now know, is the entity behind Asterisk, the world's leading open source IP Telephony Platform. Try it. If you are a geek, Linux type, visit www.asterisk.org. if you are not a geek, go to www.asterisknow.org and download it and use the GUI to configure your server.

In the future, I will publish some of those more interesting items here. You will in the future, get to read all the details in my book. More on that later.

Today we started executive meetings at 7:30 AM. Yes, Mark was on time. For that, he basically took $20 from another exec who did not think he'd be there on time for the international conf call! Oh yes, Mark will really focus on delivery and execution for $20!

Mark is a renowned Keynote Speaker, and Monday he will do a keynote in Atlanta with the CTO of CBeyond as they present to 150 people interested in SIP Trunking and the Asterisk Appliance!

Today, we discussed two of our younger employees: 19 year old Business Development person who will be attending university in Paris this year; and a 17 year old home-schooled genius who can write code like no tomorrow! Being around these young men makes me feel young!

As unreal stories unfold, you will hear them on this blog. Enjoy........bill