Digium Open Source Telephony

About Digium
Digium®, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, created, owns and is the innovative force behind Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony software. Since its founding in 1999, Digium has become the open source alternative to proprietary communication providers, with offerings that cost as much as 80 percent less. Digium offers Asterisk software free to the open source community and offers Switchvox, Digium's Unified Communications solution to power a broad family of products for small, medium and large businesses. The company's product line includes a wide range of telephony hardware and software to enable resellers and customers to implement turnkey VoIP systems or to design their own custom communications solutions. At Digium, we're changing the way businesses communicate.

Digium SwitchVox Systems

Imagine when a phone call comes in, you can look at your computer screen and the Switchvox “switchboard”  program knows who is calling, shows you their name, number and a map of where they are calling from and even brings up an automatic “Google”  page about the caller.  If you have SalesForce, you ‘ll also get that program’s file about the caller plus any comments left on the system after the last time that person called – all before you even pick up your phone.   

You can then decide to answer, transfer to another extension, send it to voicemail or record the call – or finally pick up the phone and answer!  Add to that the fact that you can do so from any IP enabled phone on your network – no matter where it is located – and you begin to see the design philosophy of the company’s premier proprietary product, the Switchvox. 

Come for the hardware lineup……stay for the awesome dance song

The Switchvox phone system comes in three sizes:

Concurrent recordings/conference call users5 recording5 conference callers10 recording15 conference callers20 recording30 conference callersRAID controller, mirrored drive, redundant power supply & optional cold spare failover

Unlike most suppliers, Digium does offer a free trial version of Switchvox.  It is downloadable from the company website and it supports up to 15 users.  But be careful – only download to a computer you don’t use for something else because the software you download will wipe your hard drive.

Support Plans

Silver – $55/user first year then $11/ userActivation plus unlimited e-mail supportGold -  $77/user first year then $17/userActivation plus unlimited e-mail and phone support (during normal business hours of 6 am to 6 pm PST)Platinum – $110/user first year then $28/userActivation plus unlimited e-mail and phone support (during normal business hours of 6 am to 6 pm PST) plus 5 after hours incidents

Beyond the above basic components, options of all sorts are available on an a la carte basis, including:

Analog phone linesEquipment maintenance and warranty plansTelephones – Mostly Polycom Soundpoint phones (from $174 to $549)Conference phonesT-1 lines

Switchvox components and systems are available direct from the manufacturer or through a variety of third-party resellers. 

The company is also the creator of “Asterisk” software, an open source program that can turn an ordinary computer into a communications portal or server.  In combination with Linux and other open-source third-party programs you can assemble a complete communications system from open-sources (non-licensed) programs. 

Both Asterisk and Switchvox are products of Digium, Inc., a privately-held company located in Huntsville, Alabama.  Digium can be contacted at 256-428-6000 or 1-877-DIGIUM1.  Customer support is available from 7 am to 8 pm M-F at 1-258-428-6000.  The company website is www. Digium.com