Digium
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| Privately held company | |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Founded | 1999 |
| Founder | Mark Spencer |
| Headquarters | 445 Jan Davis Dr NW, Huntsville, Alabama, United States |
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Area served
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170 countries |
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Key people
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Mark Spencer Founder and Chairman of the Board Danny Windham Chief Executive Officer Matt Jordan Chief Technology Officer |
| Products | Switchvox Business Phone Systems (Cloud-Based and On-Premises) Switchvox Mobile Cloud Services Asterisk Open Source Software Asterisk Commercial Licensing Asterisk Support WebRTC IP Phones VoIP Gateways Telephony Interface Cards Asterisk Add-On Products |
| Website | www |
Digium, Inc. is a privately held communications technology company based in Huntsville, Alabama. In 1999, Digium’s founder Mark Spencer created Asterisk, the open source software project that can be used to turn a personal computer into a communications server or Voice over IP (VoIP) phone system. Today, Digium’s core business lines include Switchvox, the Asterisk-based VoIP business phone system, Digium IP phones, and Asterisk telephony software and hardware products. Digium continues to make Asterisk available to the global development community for free at Asterisk.org.
Digium, Inc. sells all of its products and services directly to businesses and consumers. It also offers its business-to-business communications products, including Digium Cloud Services, through a worldwide network of resellers.
In 1999, while a Computer Engineering student at Auburn University, Mark Spencer founded Linux Support Services (LSS). The high cost of buying a business phone system for LSS spurred him to use Linux and his programming skills to develop his own solution. He named it Asterisk, after the programming wildcard symbol and the ”star” phone key. It enabled phone calls over the Internet, providing an alternative to hardware-dependent PBX systems at a cost as much as 80% less.
Forbes Magazine characterized Asterisk’s impact as “wreaking havoc on the multibillion-dollar phone equipment business,” and “disrupting the $7 billion market for office telecom (PBX) switches” by enabling individuals and organizations to innovate in what was previously a vendor-locked marketplace. Asterisk-based business phone systems, like Digium’s Switchvox, were the first of a new generation of VoIP-based communications solutions that would emerge to compete with the telecomm giants like Cisco and Avaya. Reflecting the company’s shift away from Linux support to applications and enhancements for Asterisk and the development of new communications solutions, Linux Support Services was renamed Digium in 2001.
Asterisk was released as open source by Spencer; today, the Asterisk Open-Source Software (OSS), the Asterisk community and forum, as well as an annual conference and expo, are all sponsored and maintained by Digium. Developers around the world continue to use Asterisk to create custom IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other solutions for small and large organizations. They have also continued to enhance it, adding hundreds of features. It is estimated that Asterisk is currently being used by developers in 170 countries, is running on approximately 1MM servers, and is the foundation of communications systems for the majority of Fortune 500 companies.
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Wikipedia