Growing Up!

We are experiencing growing pains. Offices are filling. people are being promoted inside to new positions supporting "growth from within" plus outside hiring brings in new blood and thinking. You can see them roaming here!
















As we grow, our event grows: Astricon. Weekly calls. Expansion of keynoters outside of Digium folks. Less Digium speakers. Check it out here: www.astricon.net

Meetings. We strive to keep short, focused, and over with.

We strive for rapid decisions....but with all the facts.

Documentation for commercial products!

We hope to see you in Phoenix!

Heard Around The Office Today

It was a typical day at Digium, so I thought I'd share a few things "I heard" today.

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My favorite:

ZAP-Dahdi

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Also heard:

"They need to sign the waiver before going up with Mark and Danny"

"Can we really sell that many?"

"The Community wants this!"

"Will he really be the keynoter at Astricon?"

Do CIOs Welcome Open Source?

I follow as many open source bloggers as I can find regardless of market, perspective, or message. Today I read Matt Assay's blog and thought I'd share it with my readers who follow Digium and Asterisk.

Check Matt's blog out at http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9968932-16.html

and check out the original Simon Phipps (Sun) referenced blog inside Matt's blog.

As our commercial business grows around Switchvox and Asterisk Business Edition, and as it grows around larger companies getting the message, Matt's message is true in many cases as people in the purchasing process have chosen to continue to embrace the larger company "wine and dine" sales process, corporate boxes at professional sports events (ah, been there, done that!), and choose to hire and/or train IT staff to administer and manage their proprietary systems.

Although I understand why this decision is made, CIOs and IT Executives should consider options and consider running a pilot or two with open source based solutions. Are you one of these IT executives who just laugh off Asterisk and other open source choices because of "support" issues? What are you thinking?

There will be a day we have corporate boxes and wine and dine you, but for today, we can help you get access to Astricon (www.astricon.net), the only open source telephony conference for business and developers, and more importantly could reduce your TCO for your business telephony solution.

Astricon Takes Shape

With a nice mix of the former Sokol & Associates team of Lisa and Steve plus others, along with the new Digium team of Julie and John, we are getting very close to publishing the conference tracks at Astricon (www.astricon.net). We have added two excellent moderators, solid sponsors and many more are interested in signing on, and we have added a new first-time Astricon keynoter from Google (watch the web site soon for posting)and we are working on another new keynoter.

Our team is electronically charged up for the best ever Astricon, to be held in Glendale, AZ in September. See you there! Check out the site!

Office and Parking Lot Filling Up

Well, it's been a while since my last post. Will try and do better. Our building is fast filling up. Good offices are getting scarce and we are having large orientations weekly. It is quite fun. Now the parking lot is another story. People park all over so no one bangs their doors. A 1985 Toyota sits in the back of our lot trying to avoid anyone. I figured its so he won't hit anyone else. What frightens me, is I park a ways away as well so no one hopefully parks next to me. When I saw the Toyota and an older beat up van almost next to me, I cringed. I might have to park even further away.

Seriously, it's great we are growing. We have added some pretty strong community, customer quality, sales folks, software developers, and marketing folks and expect to be busy this coming summer. We are planning Astricon (www.astricon.net).

What is also fun to follow is Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Does anyone think this is an interesting story to follow? Who gets the handicap? Who gets the prize? Do they go it alone? I love the scenarios in front of us. Makes for something to watch besides a few twitter posts!

The Web Site.....Internet Branding

This morning on "Sunday Morning" there was an interesting piece on branding in grocery store aisles. Growing up with parents who owned a similar business I reflected on Digium's user experience for visitors to our web site(s). There are thousands of items in a grocery store. Think about it - when you walk down each aisle...what catches your eye? Do you buy packaging? Color? Labels? Do you care? How easy is it to find what you want? Is it easy to navigate around the store? Do you go back to the same store because you like the experience? Do you not return because of the experience?

These days web sites are for the savvy online shopper, researcher, buyer, reseller - does not matter - the web site must appeal to whoever goes to your site. It must be easy to find, easy to navigate, information must be presented clearly and completely and must be integrated with the overall Internet experience.

At Digium, we have a top notch webmaster for all our sites:

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

....and our secondary event sites are managed jointly:

www.astricon.net
www.digiumasteriskworld.com

....and our acquired Switchvox products:

www.switchvox.com (integration with www.digium.com is in progress)
www.digium.com/switchvox

Digium's web site recently received a 98/100 grade by a partner firm working with us on our Internet Marketing efforts. We receive tremendous credit for our sites, blogs, content, ease of use and we have many programs in motion to make it better and leverage the entire Internet.

The web site is an important element for Digium, the leading IP Telephony open source, viral marketing oriented company who also must monetize the commercial aspects of our business. We take this seriously and have much higher rankings than many traditional players in our market segments for IP Telephony. With our free downloads, value-added products, partner and reseller portals, mailing lists, and overall Asterisk and product information we have many visitors and maintaining the operations is demanding and requires perfection in every possible way. Anyone who knows Digium knows our web sites frequently change and stays as current as possible. Look for more enhancements to the user experience and if you have any comments send a note to the webmaster!

Check it all out at the above web sites.

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!