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Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

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Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#41

Sangoma's doing a good job of consolidating the SMB Telephony market. They bought Schmooze Com Inc.[1] (owners of FreePBX, the largest Asterisk based Linux distro), Dialogic's hardware business, and VoIP Supply[3] (where most independent VARs order phones from). [1] https://www.freepbx.org/sangoma-completes-the-acquisition-of... [2] https://www.dialogic.com/2018-01-09-sangoma-announces-sixth-... [3] http://www.market…

I have little faith in Sangoma's leadership when it comes to open source, it's not in their nature. Products and marketing is not the same as software. This is an old strange beast, and it's being put to sleep.

So Long Asterisk, And Thanks For All The Fish!

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#42
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds good. until you run conferencing services or whatever. Then the pricing is pretty simple: buying wholesale SIP and operating on your own is substantially cheaper. irl maintenance is pretty straightforward. I do it as a side thing to my main job.

Somewhat off-topic, but what wholesale SIP provider would you recommend? Looking for something small-scale for now, pay as you go as opposed to $X,000/month.

voip dot ms has been good to me for many years now

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#43
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their business is in the decline I would imagine. As others have stated, their features are now found in many low cost proprietary solutions. No reason to pay a tax to use open source unless you believe in it.

Most low cost solutions are based on Asterisk or Freeswitch...

Even PBX in a flash has moved away from open source...

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#44
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sounds good. until you run conferencing services or whatever. Then the pricing is pretty simple: buying wholesale SIP and operating on your own is substantially cheaper. irl maintenance is pretty straightforward. I do it as a side thing to my main job.

Somewhat off-topic, but what wholesale SIP provider would you recommend? Looking for something small-scale for now, pay as you go as opposed to $X,000/month.

I've been using flowroute for years now.

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#46
Digium used to host the local Linux Users of North Alabama meetings back in 1999 when they were Linux Support Services. I remember being blown away seeing Asterisk running on commodity hardware. They had all kinds of cool hardware hacks in their office. Kudos to them for revolutionizing the PBX space.

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#47
Mildly hijacking this thread... A few months back I investigated SIP as a replacement for skype, discord, whatsapp etc. It seemed a very insecure protocol: If I have an account on server A, and someone else has an account on server B then a user on server B can call me but neither my client nor my server will verify with server B that the caller is who they say they are.

The email ecosystem had the same problem where anyone could send an email from any address but managed to solve it by adding new standards on top of old ones to verify senders. I hope something similar can happen for SIP.

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former Asterisk guy here! The industry needed this consolidation 10 years ago. Glad to see it’s finally happening. So much talent has left the space now that it absolutely had to happen. Sangoma is a great company and I’m sure they will do a great job.

Indeed, I ran a large-ish asterisk user group for years in Toronto and know a number of people at Digium and Sangoma, and there was always a bit of animosity between them. Glad to see them finally coming together. Most of the talent I know took a step to the right (like myself) and are working with WebRTC. It's all the same stuff! Just more signalling layers on top of RTP channel management. I quite often end up doin…

Indeed the SIP over WebRTC open source stack is a thing of beauty!

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#49

Wow, I forgot I even knew about these companies. The last time I deployed a Sangoma box was in 1998... interesting they still exist.

FreePBX (built on Asterisk, which is the basis for another dozen PBX platforms) is still far-and-away the most popular PBX platform for small businesses and most VARs. FreeSWITCH does exist and it is fantastic, but the two are quite similar in terms of what they can accomplish.

There is really no other option in the FOSS community for small-to-medium phone systems, as Asterisk-based systems are rivaled mainly by 3CX (proprietary) in the industry which is somewhat expensive and significantly less-configurable than the open source options.

Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M

#50

Interesting. I built some VOIP systems on Asterisk about 12 or 13 years ago. It saved a few small companies a ton of money compared to an older proprietary system.

Those systems still save businesses tons of money and make a lot of money for the companies integrating them.
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