Source: www.voip-news.com

Digium has announced the winners of the 2007 Innovation Awards, selected from five categories, which are: Big Business, Return on Investment/Cost Savings, Pioneer, Most Unique, and Service Provider. 

“The 2007 Digium Innovation Award winners are truly redefining the VoIP industry through revolutionary and inspiring open source deployments,” said Mark Spencer, CTO of Digium and creator of Asterisk, in a recent press release. “We continue to be impressed with the ways in which developers, partners and customers are using Asterisk to tackle business and social problems that would otherwise be too cost prohibitive or time consuming to address.”

Complete details on the awards can be found here, but in the meantime, the winners are:

Big Business:
Aheeva (Montreal, Canada), selected for its Aheeva Contact Center Suite (CCS) that enables clients to establish a superior full-service contact center for a fraction of the investment required to operate a traditional telephony switch-based call center. This 1200 agent call center utilizes 28 T1’s, handles over 50,000 outbound calls per day, and is based in multiple locations. The flexibility of Asterisk has allowed Aheeva to create a multimedia customer contact and relations management platform that can be deployed quickly and easily integrate with other open source peripherals to meet changing contact center needs. The company leveraged input from the global Asterisk community and, in the true spirit of open source, gave a portion of the resulting work back to the community. For more information about Aheeva, please visit http://www.aheeva.com/.

Return on Investment/Cost Savings:
OneBizTone (Laureldale, PA), selected for working with the University of Pennsylvania to migrate more than 10,000 voicemail users off a discontinued and unsupported legacy voicemail system. OneBizTone used Asterisk to develop a highly scalable unified voicemail system that could easily integrate legacy telephony services and existing electronic messaging systems and store “years’ of voicemail messages. The new Asterisk-based system was deployed for approximately $2000 versus traditional systems that cost $250,000 and only store hours of messages. All enhancements made to Asterisk as part of this initiative were graciously contributed back to the open source community by the University of Pennsylvania. For more information about OneBizTone, please visit http://www.onebiztone.com/.

Pioneer:
Shelton|Johns (Marietta, Georgia) selected for using Asterisk to design and deploy a turn-key, campus-wide VoIP network for Life University that includes 500+ handsets across eight structures aggregated into a redundant Asterisk server platform with 380 concurrent call paths. The new Asterisk-based system supplies significant flexibility and a dramatic expansion of feature-sets including Follow-Me, System-wide directory and remote administration. The new system also reduced Life University’s monthly DIA and dial-tone bills from $18,000 to $8000, a yearly cost savings of $120,000. For more information about Shelton|Johns, please visit http://www.sheltonjohns.com/.

Most Unique:
iPLATEu, selected for inventing the first-ever social platform for motorists using anonymous, mobile-to-mobile voice messaging through license plate numbers. Created by developer Greg Beliczynski as a thesis project for NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, the iPLATEu hotline (888-iPLATEu) employs a hands-free, IVR menu system so that motorists can “plate” each other while driving safely with both hands behind the wheel.

Built with Asterisk and LumenVox’s 7.5 Speech Recognition Engine, iPLATEu can be used by speaking the license plate number into the IVR using phonetic words or texting the license plate number in after leaving a message. Recipients get voice messages directly to their mobile phones only if they have pre-registered with the iPLATEu website: http://www.iplateu.com/.

Service Provider:
Super Technologies (Pensacola, FL) selected for providing Asterisk open source VoIP services to wholesale telephony service providers in 98 countries. Asterisk is used by 78% of the 7000+ internet telephony service providers using DIDX.net to buy and/or sell direct inward dialing phone numbers. The scalability and flexibility of Asterisk has enabled DIDX to guarantee lower costs to its customers and create new revenue streams worldwide. For more information about DIDX, please visit http://www.didx.net/.