In our ongoing overview of the future of telephony, The PBX Blog sat down with Kevin Fleming, Director of Software technologies for Digium.
The Asterisk Open Source Project, sponsored by Digium, will be releasing a new communications framework in 2012: Asterisk SCF
Asterisk is the largest Open source PBX system in the world. It started way back in 1999 and by 2004 it became a serious challenger to some of the big technology companies and evolved into one of most important pieces of the telephony ecosystem. It is fair to say that much of what has happened in the world of Open Source telephony is a direct result of the creation of Asterisk. The idea was to create a system which would allow individuals to deal with phone calls in a more organic manner which seems counter-intuitive until you realize that it is only in the last 50 years that non-AT&T hardware has been an option. Prior to that, the only equipment a business or individual could use had to be provided by the phone company. Asterisk, along with a host of other pieces of technology, have changed that world, and the next generation of products promise to change it again.
Asterisk SCF, short for Scalable Communications Framework, is intended to provide a more scalable and distributed structure to Asterisk Enterprise clients. The two of us spoke about the project wherein Kevin explained at length about the need to provide a system that had easier extensibility and significant performance improvements. Asterisk has long dominated the world of extreme cost-effective telephony (for developing countries, their software loaded on inexpensive hardware has often been the system of choice) and Asterisk SCF seeks to adapt that same sensibility to larger environments.
Kevin was careful to note that Asterisk SCF is not intended to be a full-on replacement for Asterisk. While Asterisk SCF will have significant economy relative to traditional Asterisk applications at scale, the majority of small Asterisk installs probably won’t benefit from Asterisk SCF, at least initially. In my humble opinion, Asterisk SCF will ultimately replace Asterisk, but that is many years away. Asterisk SCF does have a number of features which have real utility in the Enterprise world.
For example, Asterisk SCF demonstrated in-call failover during Astricon last year, and while they won’t be shipping a beta during the event, we can expect to start testing this application before the end of the year. The second piece that really stood out to me was the distributed nature of their networking scheme. Kevin said that a system design where media was stored internally and switching was performed remotely would be entirely reasonable. That is to say, if a company wanted to host their call recordings internally to ensure security but route calls through offsite hardware in a datacenter, that sort of functionality would be easy and straightforward with Asterisk SCF.
Like Asterisk, the new software is built to tie together the diverse environments that modern businesses operate within. Interoperability is another pillar of the development on this project because there are a huge number of SIP phone manufacturers who will be producing ever-cheaper hardware. Enterprises will often deploy multiple vendors equipment and it’s just silly to be tied to a single vendors hardware.
I left the conversation feeling very positive about this project. While they’ve had a number of hiccups during their development cycle, it seems Asterisk SCF is gearing up for beta testing and that’s a win for everyone.
One thing’s for sure, the PBX community, at the Enterprise level, can always use more competition and Asterisk SCF will bring Cloud telephony in spades.
On our next entry in this series, check out our interview with an upstart VoIP CEO trying to change the world one PBX at a time.