Interview with Digium’s Bill Miller

Things have been a little quiet in the market lately with the economy where its at so we wanted to check in with our friends over at Digium and see what they have been up to so we hit up Bill Miller, VP of Product Management with a few questions.

888VS: Hi Bill, thanks for taking some time to answer some questions. First off, let’s talk about the market. How has the economic downturn affected Digium and has there been a switch from your commercial product Switchvox to pure open source plays like AsteriskNow?

Digium: The market has picked up significantly in the past 3-4 months after a bit of a dip. The value proposition of open source and open source based solutions are well positioned in the small and medium business markets thus everything has increased: downloads, shipments, users, average system size – everything around Asterisk has been a beam of shining light. we are experiencing an increase in sales of our turnkey IP PBX Switchvox and since Q4 last year, a 50% increase in AsteriskNOW downloads. We attribute this success to the downturn in the economy with willingness to consider open source as a solutions well as powerful web-aware Switchvox for small and medium businesses.

888VS: How about on the hardware side? Are companies choosing VoIP services over TDM services to try to save on their phone bills?

Digium:  We do see an increase in SIP trunking for total solution, but TDM is still shipped with nearly every Switchvox system and utilized in a large number of other Asterisk-based solutions.  We also see larger installations of Asterisk adopting SIP trunking as the primary solution.

888VS: We have really only been seeing the economic downturn for about six months now, are sales still going down or have we reached the bottom and things are flat for the moment before hopefully heading back up?

Digium:  We have seen increased sales, shipments, and larger average system sizes for more than three months and believe we are experiencing market stabilization.

888VS: Let’s talk for a moment about Asterisk 1.6, although I keep hearing good things about its performance, I haven’t really been seeing a lot of adoption from the different Asterisk-based distros yet as well as the different commercial Asterisk-based products, is everyone just being extra cautious about migrating or are there technical reasons that the adoption rate is very slow?

Digium: It takes typically a year or so for distros to move to new Asterisk versions and Asterisk 1.6 is no exception. In fact, DAHDI has slowed down a few folks until recently as more folks are making the change. AsteriskNOW is downloaded with Asterisk 1.4, however, you can simply use YUM and install 1.6 and it works just fine. We have published a simple process to accomplish this upgrade. Over time, we will see more adoption due to many of the features such as TLS in 1.6.

888VS: What is happening with AsteriskNOW, your completely open-source ISO distro? It seems as if it goes for extended periods of time without any updates, there have been rumors about a version 2.0 coming soon. What can you tell us about where AsteriskNOW is and what we can expect from it in the near future.

Digium: We have seen an increase in AsteriskNOW downloads by 50% in the past two quarters as well as higher increases in Switchvox Free downloads. AsteriskNOW is an open source distribution that can be used as a PBX. Our philosophy has been simple: Asterisk+Centos Linux+GUI without all sorts of other software that muddies up the download. Switchvox Free is also an award-winning IP PBX  and we are seeing users select it as the IP PBX of choice on increasingly more occasions. We are creating “how to” documentation that will help Asterisk users of all types to build total solutions using our open source downloads. We also introduced open source subscriptions in April 2009 and have seen adoption of this offering on a worldwide basis to purchase 24/7 support for all versions of Asterisk.

888VS: In the past, some of Digium’s PCI cards were known for issues with interrupts due to the chipset that was on the original design. In talking with people, a lot of folks don’t know that all of the cards were redesigned about a year ago and have been significantly improved. What should people know about the new card designs when deciding which cards to choose for their implementations?

Digium: The so-called interrupt issue, with respect to poor handling of shared-interrupts on systems, was addressed and fixed originally in January of 2007 for all products that were not based on the older chipset design.  We’re glad to have corrected the error and we understood at the time that it would take a bit for customers to completely trust that they would no longer have interrupt sharing issues with any Digium products .

The primary culprits in that respect were our older four-port analog interface card, the TDM400P, and our single port T1/E1 card, the TE110P.  Both products have been end of life’d and replaced with newer products, the TDM410 and TE122 respectively, that take advantage of a redesigned PCI/PCI-E interface, Voicebus, that we first introduced on our TDM2400P card.  No current Digium products are based on that older poorly-performing chipset, but all of the clone-cards that you see on the market are based on that poorly-performing chipset.  Since the resolution of the interrupt sharing issue, we’ve put our efforts towards improving our drivers in many directions, among them interrupt resilience.

In February of 2008, we introduced a new capability to our drivers for all of our Voicebus-based interface cards – this includes all analog boards and the single-port T1/E1 interface cards.  This improvement allows our boards to dynamically adjust buffers to deal with system latency – a first for our industry.  This dynamic adjustment capability means for the customer, no matter how bad your PC behaves when talking to PCI/PCIe cards across the system bus, that your audio quality will remain high.  We wrote a whitepaper about this last year comparing the performance of our analog board products audio quality against our competitors – we won – and share the results of benchmarks we executed in our labs.  For our multi-port digital interface card customers, we introduced last year a firmware update that provided a number of PCI compatibility fixes eliminating the PCI Parity Error or NMI Error messages seen on some servers.

888VS: Digium has also just announced a new TCE400 VoIP Transcoder code, what is this used for and when should someone look into using it?

Digium: The TCE400B is a packet-to-packet PCI-Express VoIP card used to perform codec translation between simple and complex codecs without taxing the host CPU.  It’s a PCI-Express version of our existing TC400B PCI-based card, but it comes with a number of improvements that we’ve made in the past year or so – a bump in the number of G.729a transcodes from 92 to 120, and the inclusion of support for decoding both bitrates of G.723.1 – 6.3 and 5.3kbit/s.  It’s used so that you can save your CPU for other tasks – like mixing audio in conference bridges, recording audio, playing back IVRs, or running your fancy AGI scripts – while the hardware does the work.

In any given Asterisk installation, the most difficult, computationally, task is echo cancellation.  You can solve this by using any of Digium’s carrier-class G.168 echo cancellation modules.  The second is codec translation.  Most people solve this for G.729a by using Digium’s software-based G.729a codec (there is no software solution for G.723.1).  But, the software codec has the drawbacks of eating your CPU and requiring use of Digium’s register utility to tie it to your hardware.

The TC400B has none of those drawbacks and you also get G.723.1.  Customers should look at the TCE400B if and only if they need to perform large scale transcoding of G.729a or G.723.1.  The card is useful for those creating larger IP>PSTN gateways (in combination with Digium four port T1/E1 cards with hardware echo cancellation), those with large remote offices but limited bandwidth, and those that need G.723.1 support.

888VS: Recently there was a new release of Switchvox  (version 4.0), what are some of the highlights in the new version?

The idea behind Switchvox SMB 4.0 is “Web-Aware Unified Communications.” Switchvox has always presented some unique options for developers looking to integrate the solution with web based applications but didn’t have all the necessary components where we would feel comfortable calling it a Unified Communications Platform- until now. Switchvox SMB 4.0 represents a graduation of sorts, from an IP PBX to a true UC solution, with the addition of features like a built in chat server, fax capabilities and video calling. And when you factor in the web integration components,Switchvox can be seen as offering more than a typical UC platform- hence, “Web-Aware Unified Communications.”

888VS: Along with the release of Switchvox 4.0, you announced the Switchvox Developer Central (http://developers.digium.com/switchvox/), what kind of things are you seeing people build with the new Switchvox API?

We’re really excited to see people working on everything from very specific applications for their companies, to more general purpose apps, like conference scheduling applications that automatically call participants together into a conference room at a scheduled time, monitoringapplications that call to alert administrators to brewing trouble with their IP Network, and click-to-be-called applications for customer service on business websites. It’s exactly what we hoped for, actually, to be able to provide an API that looks familiar to anyone that’s had any experience at all with these types of web services and developer communities that are being promoted by companies like Google, facebook or Twitter. That familiarity is what will drive rapid adoption of Switchvox’s new Extend API and ultimately lead to an incredible variety of applications being developed for Switchvox SMB.

888VS: Astricon 2009 is coming up soon. Watching the how the Astricon event has evolved over the years, it doesn’t seem like it is so much of a pure developer event anymore and has grown to be a mini-trade show as well as having speaker topics geared at resellers. What is Digium’s “elevator pitch” about what Astricon is today and who should attend?

Digium:  Our Astricon mission is to expand awareness and knowledge of Asterisk. Astricon has evolved into a conference for users, developers, application developers, integrators, service providers, and hardware and software vendors offering Asterisk based solutions. Bolstered by world class technical and business educational tracks that can only be found at Astricon it is the only official Asterisk Conference in existence. This year, we will see many new talks and many covering Asterisk in the enterprise  and we have two keynotes that will be announced shortly that are exciting. We also have training classes at Astricon. visit www.astricon.net.

888VS: Earlier Astricons were pretty much centered around developing Astrisk-based solutions, code development, and implementations. This year I am speaking there about how to maximize your sales, is there going to be even more focus on resellers and integrators versus developers moving forward?

Digium: We see this a natural evolution of Astricon where many developers and integrators want to market and sell their open source-based creations. This event provides an excellent platform for this. Last year every track was packed and our surveys indicated more business orientation was needed to complement the already top notch technical sessions. we are accomodating those requests and your submission was accepted to contribute towards this effort.

888VS: Any last thoughts you would like to share with our readers?

Digium: attend Astricon and you will not be disappointed; the excitement and electricity is unmatched and the venue is excellent. Meet the world’s top Asterisk developers, maintainers, Mark Spencer the creator or Asterisk and many ecosystem partners. We also want to thank you for the opportunity to share with your readers.

Digium products can be found on the 888VoipStore Digium Product Page.

For more information, please visit http://digium.com

Tags: Asterisk, Digium, FAX, VoIP Interviews, VoIP Software, VoIP Systems