Asterisk and IP PBX's: Tremendous Investment Opportunity?

We're going to be hearing a lot more about Asterisk in the next couple of years.

Asterisk is the open source software solution for setting up office telephone systems using voice over IP. This new alternative typically costs a tiny fraction of what proprietary PBX solutions would cost. Until recently, managers had no choice but to go with the expensive proprietary set-ups in order to obtain telephone systems with voicemail, call conferencing and call queuing services. This meant going with the huge telephone equipment suppliers such as Nortel, Alcatel and Siemens. But this is no longer the case and we now have an incredibly large market experiencing upheavel and transformation.

It was almost one year ago that one of the leading voices of the Linux community, John "Maddog" Hall, (President of Linux International) predicted that VOIP using Asterisk is likely to generate more business over the next three years than the entire Linux marketplace today.

This seems like an incredible growth opportunity for companies in this sector. Who are the leaders involved in this promising niche of the telecom market? Who's providing the asterisk-compatible software and hardware, the installation, support and third-party applications?

We'll look into this in the next post.





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The above image is "One for the Money" by Susan Zulauf