Working With Digium

Digium is serving larger customers than ever, and now has a partner program that could provide ISPs large and small with valuable sales leads.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 20, 2007]

Asked whether his company is serving larger customers than ever before, Bill Miller, Digium vice president of management and marketing, has a quick answer. "Yeah, we experience that tornado every day."

VoIP is the exciting part of the internet right now, with young people founding rapidly growing companies to serve explosive business demand.

Huntsville, Ala.-based Digium is one such business. The company was founded in 1999 (the same year as this website) by Asterisk author Mark Spencer, who had been at ADTRAN. Digium's new CEO, announced on January 30, 2007, is Danny Windham, former president, COO, and director of ADTRAN.

Be on the dashboard
Vendors can be part of the Asterisk solution sold by Digium, the Asterisk Business Edition. The first hardware vendor to become a part of this solution is well-known IP phone maker Polycom.

Polycom is a preferred partner, and there will be only one preferred partner in each product class, Miller explains. However, other vendors will be able to qualify as premium partners.

In other product classes, the company is looking at potential preferred partners. It is working with an infrastructure vendor and is looking at several candidates for call cente partner.

"We have no formal announcement on this," Miller admits.

The service provider on the portal
Miller says that when customers order products such as Asterisk Business Edition, they can select the ITSP on Digium's website. Digium works with the ITSPs, obtaining a revenue share. The eventual goal is to be able to connect any customer anywhere in the world with an ITSP when they purchase their product from Digium. That means going deeper into the United States and also working with customers worldwide. "51 percent of our sales are international," says Miller.

Not every ITSP will be able to be in Digium's portal, but every ISP will be able to be part of two programs to be announced later this year.

"We're working on self-certification for SIP trunking," says Miller. Even if an ISP did not qualify for the partnership program, the ISP could offer SIP connections to Digium customers.

In fact, Digium wants to be able to certify any and all ISPs. "We would allow ISPs to use our logo and promote their business as Asterisk certified," says Miller. "We're working on a formal service provider program, the Asterisk Certified Service Provider."

Driving sales
Digium is ready to compete with Cisco, Avaya, Broadsoft—all of the companies that currently dominate pieces of the voice services market. Miller says that Digium is doing well with what he calls the "trojan horse." A company installs an Asterisk server to take advantage of one feature, and then finds it can use additional features with out paying per-seat or per-feature licenses.

"It's a whole lot cheaper, and that's why open source is working its way into the enterprise," Miller says.

Price is the first advantage of open source, but to get to demonstrate its price advantage, the product has to overcome one prejudice. "They have to see that this stuff really works," says Miller.

And once a company gets to know an open source product, the biggest advantage of open source, flexibility, becomes evident.

— End