Digium 3COM partnership brings Asterisk to enterprise market
Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com
On the heels of Switchvox acquisition and spreading Digium’s market reach to many SMBs, Digium announced that it is signing a deal with 3COM, a network gear manufacturer, who itself was in a deal that sold itself last week.
But Digium stand to gain from the 3COM deal. As thousands of 3COM dealers and resellers around the world. Also 3COM had a good history with VoIP IP Telephony. (A search on Google for this blogs name, "VoIP IP Telephony" brings 3COM just after me! )
Now Asterisk stands just next to VCX, and NBX, well established telephony brands, at 3COM. I am happy to see "3COMAsterisk" proudly displayed first in the series of VoIP products offered by 3COM.
3Com will sell Asterisk as its 30-and-under solution. That’s because it is aiming it’s own products (NBX, VCX) at the above-30-seat market. But Asterisk might replace now aging NBX gear.
This deal makes Digium make it’s strong hold on enterprise market stronger. 3COM already has a certain VoIP market segments covered. It also have made partnership with IBM in delivering VoIP solutions to the enterprise.
The other aspect of this deal is that 3COM is not repackaging free and open source Asterisk and selling. 3COM is selling the Asterisk Appliance re branded as 3COM Asterisk. Each unit will bring income to Digium.
"3Com is focused on delivering products and solutions for converged secure networks, in which voice is an application that can be readily integrated with many others," said Bob Dechant, senior vice president and general manager for 3Com Corporation. "We’ve announced a complete voice strategy and new product offerings for small businesses, including the 3Com Asterisk Appliance. We also offer innovative enterprise-caliber 3Com Global Services for customers who purchase the 3Com Asterisk. We chose to partner with Digium because of the company’s position as the Asterisk leader, its commitment to open standards and the ease-of-use of the appliance.
Bill Miller, vice president of product management and marketing at Digium, commented: "Digium pioneered Asterisk and is now working to bring the software’s power and rich feature set to a broader array of customers. 3Com’s selection of our new appliance to offer to its own customers validates our strategy of opening new markets to Asterisk by making it user-friendly, and is also testament to the fact that Digium’s products are the gold standard in the Asterisk ecosystem today."
Press release at Digium.
