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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

#61

Post by gerdesj »

Rjevski wrote: post #24
spditner wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

Asterisk is just another daemon. You could use etcd for it or Puppet or whatever to create config on the fly. On FreePBX you generally use MySQL/MariaDB.

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

#62

Post by gerdesj »

im3w1l wrote: post #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…

You can use many of the same techniques used to drop email spam, for example forward and reverse DNS lookups and of course your favourite next gen firewall can do all sorts of fancy things to help decide "trustworthyness". You can use authenticated trunks between A and B. You can allow anon connections but pre-screen calls by asking the source to identify themselves and play that to the recipient who can choose to accept or drop the call.

You can do an awful lot of things with SIP that are unthinkable or plain unlikely with PSTN. SIP can be encrypted (OK the RTP streams can) You can use IAX2 for those times when NAT and SIPnRTP are too hard (hint: try Symmetric RTP - fixes many NAT related problems)

Don't confuse SIP with something it isn't! SIP is a comms mechanism and a damn good one, considering how old it is. When you deploy SIP, you also have the option of using all of the very latest funky security stuff around it to support it thanks to the fact that it runs over UDP/IP or TCP/IP.

The email ecosystem had the same problem where anyone could send an email from any address - I'm not sure that you can call this a problem. I could call myself Mr Donald Trump, in fact my real name could even be Mr Donald Trump but it wont really make me POTUS but you need some way to tell the difference. Comms is tricky and safe comms in the modern world is very tricky. How far should a comms protocol go in ensuring that the source is who the recipient thinks it is? Or is that really a job for another protocol/system perhaps with some hooks of some sort?

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

#63

Post by HammerJack »

jaboutboul wrote: post #32
brewrwe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

absolutely not true!! and other competitors like 3cx have been eating their lunch for years. the fact of the matter is FreePBX, even for the most knowledgeable audience is still a PITA to work with and configure.

> FreePBX, even for the most knowledgeable audience is still a PITA to work with and configure.

Agree to disagree. I cut my teeth on freepbx; love it, miss it, constantly yell at my customers digium appliances in disappointment that they don't live up to their sibling. I rolled my old MSP over to it without any hassle and afaik they're still running it a few years later and I know none of them have touched it for admin. Rolled it on my VPS for my own consulting needs and it's pain free.

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

#64

Post by Rjevski »

florent42 wrote: post #58
Rjevski wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I believe they built their own, exactly for the reasons I outlined above.

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

#65

Post by MertsA »

woodson wrote: post #31
yusyusyus wrote: post #29

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.

Twilio, voip.ms, or DIDlogic. Twilio may be for large users, but it works great for tiny ones as well. No minimums, simple wholesale pricing, and they still have free support even if you don't want to spend thousands a month for 24/7/365 phone support with an expert.

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

#66

Post by jpeeler »

I worked at Digium from 2008-2011. Digium employed some really great programmers and I obtained a solid starting foundation for my career as a developer hacking on Asterisk in C. Definitely enjoyed my time there.

Going back to around that time period, there was a project started called Asterisk SCF (internally called Hydra, I couldn't remember if it was made public but it's in the list archives: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-scf-dev/). Asterisk SCF was going to be new software (written in C++) that supported scalability as a primary feature. I still wonder if Digium had continued funding it what would have happened, but eventually development was halted: http://www.digium.com/blog/2012/09/14/asterisk-scf-pause/.

All that to say I'm happy for Digium's success, but still think an acquisition could have occurred far sooner with a product based on Asterisk SCF.

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

#67

Post by chriscappuccio »

This is bad news for anyone who uses Asterisk. Sangoma's software (FreePBX) is utter garbage. Their documentation on their software and hardware is non-existent or intentionally obfuscated to make their "community" edition worthless. Sorry, Asterisk users.

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

#68

Post by alexforster »

segmondy wrote: post #15
nerdbaggy wrote: post #10

FreeSwitch is really taking over

Already took over, when I built a system 10 years ago I choose freeswitch, might be selection bias but I know more folks using freeswitch

I remember the FreeSWITCH from 10 years ago. They didn't even cut releases, you were just expected to always run at HEAD - and the whole community refused to talk to you until you showed your commit hash. I got cores constantly from all the null derefs littered throughout the code. And at this point they considered themselves a stable, production-ready project.

I tried _hard_ to make FreeSWITCH work for me in an SMB environment, but I ended up with such a bad taste from the poor QA that I eventually had to call it all a false start and go back to Asterisk.

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

#69

Post by im3w1l »

florent42 wrote: post #60
im3w1l wrote: post #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…

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 s…

Well if you get an email from xxx@somemail.com and the SPF and DKIM check out then it means that the mail really came from somemail and they have had the chance to verify that xxx is authorized to send the email with e.g. a password. The system is not 100% foolproof but it's good enough when working with reputable or selfhosted email services. It's way, way better than "anyone can trivially pretend to be anyone"

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

#70

Post by angphc »

singularity2001 wrote: post #38
spditner wrote: post #16

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…

> 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?

I fear more 3CX as a monopoly, the bought elastix and ditched it. 3CX CEO bought lots of SANGOMA shares back 1n 2016 (and later sold a few of them in 2017) Why your competitor's CEO would buy shares of your company? tips tinfoil hat
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