The valuation sounds really low. Is there a reason for that?
Digium was mostly a hardware company for a long time, which doesn't fetch the valuation of recurring SaaS revenue though they have hosted SaaS services now.
Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#52The valuation sounds really low. Is there a reason for that?
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.
Their hardware business is in slow decline as I understand it, but the SaaS business is in major growth mode (sip trunking, hosted switchvox, etc).
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#53wow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with some of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx software...and now this? Impressed. However I'm curious about Asterisk growth/Digium as it seems like VOIP service from major telcos, in North America anyways, has caught up to what was once a very viable open source alternative. I built asterisk systems for our own in-house mult…
This is their business model that leads them to where they are now. Open source market is very tricky, you work for others and if you don't know how to earn money, you are done.
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#54Sangoma'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…
As someone who previously worked for a Dialogic customer with a single-digit customer number, I didn’t realize Dialogic had sold its hardware business off (again; after the IBM acquisition and subsequent spin-off). About time.
That said, I never really saw Dialogic as in the SMB space, certainly not their hardware division.
We must have had over 300 D480SC-2T1 boards in service at peak. Absolute workhorses. Their cPCI offerings were never as stable but 16 T1s or 1000 SIP ports in a single slot was extremely attractive. I recall them having issues with their supply chain for the high-density SIP boards in conjunction with field failures that pushed us towards their software product, HMP.
Dialogic’s HMP product was more stable and ultimately cheaper at scale (for SIP anyway; never had good luck with their T1 interface boards on HMP). Funny they didn’t sell that division off. Perhaps it’s still profitable or maybe Sangoma was simply uninterested as it isn’t really aligned with the Asterisk/FreeSWITCH ecosystem.
Wonder how much of that stuff is still running. You left a year after me so I suppose you wouldn’t know ;)
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#55wow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with some of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx software...and now this? Impressed. However I'm curious about Asterisk growth/Digium as it seems like VOIP service from major telcos, in North America anyways, has caught up to what was once a very viable open source alternative. I built asterisk systems for our own in-house mult…
> wow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with some of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx software...and now this?
they were selling T1/T3 hardware for years before asterisk was a thing. does seem like they pivoted to the voice stuff after asterisk, though.
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#56Mildly 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…
There are special problems with telephony, but there are efforts to address security in this place. Here is a talk from a couple of years ago : https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/tls_and_sip/
Progress does seem very slow
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#57Sangoma'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…
> Sangoma's doing a good job of consolidating. Does that mean they are doing a good job creating yet another monopoly? Seriously courageous. Are there other players left?
There are 3cx and Vodia.
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#58wow....that's really cheap. Considering Asterisk's market share for VOIP ports.
On the other hand, I'm not sure Asterisk has a future. It's quite a legacy application and is not easily scalable nor made highly available. The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.
> The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.
Correct, but don't forget many hosted communications services use asterisk internally.
Twilio did use Asterisk in the past, although I believe they have switched to something else.
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
The state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.
Seems like a huge hack. What we really need is some kind of etcd for telecoms, where you just configure it and they replicate and share state automatically.
It's not a hack. Think of Asterisk as if it was an http server + backend code. How do you scale?
You scale horizontally using proxies (kamailio dispatchers), (what you would call "reverse proxies in the http world), and use external storage / database / logic.
Re: Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
#60Mildly 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…
If you are talking about SPF and DKIM, none of them verify the sender. The former indicates which IP adresses are allowed to send a email from for a specific domain name. The latter lets you verify that the email originated from the domain. But not from the sender itself.
If you were talking about PGP signatures, ignore my previous words :)
The issue you see in SIP predates voice over IP. PSTN suffers from the very same issue.