By Aaron Huslage

We thought it would be good to give open source VOIP pioneers Digium equal time, given our recent post about Freeswitch. Digium's founder, Mark Spencer was the original author of the Asterisk PBX, one of the more mature open source VOIP platforms. The company's VP of Marketing, Bill Miller, told me that "Last year was a big year for us; at the year-end we had finished our 24th straight profitable quarter. We had grown to about 130 employees." While Digium doesn't disclose financial figures, its sales have reportedly been doubling over the past few years and it has taken at least $14 million in venture capital since launching.

By Aaron Huslage

The world of open source VoIP platforms has been dominated by the Asterisk PBX and the products that surround it. While no one has perfect market share numbers for this beast, it has more than likely over 95 percent of the open source share and some significant portion of IP PBXs installed around the world. As Om Malik wrote in late 2007, Asterisk has been downloaded over 1 million times.

Now, another player could give Asterisk a run for its money. Announced at the Emerging Telephony conference in 2006, Freeswitch is quietly growing in popularity and stability.