Offering regional and national programs, CIO (and CSO) events bring together some of the most respected names and thought leaders in information technology and security. Presented by CIOs and other senior level executives, these invitation-only programs offer timely topics and strong networking. Learn More »
Public Council Teleconference: Application Rationalization — Hidden Costs and Smart Decisions
November 17 at 11:00 am US/Eastern (GMT-5)
Join Honorio Padrón, of The Hackett Group, who will share the drivers for companies to tackle application rationalization and the results of research that define the hidden cost of complexity. Additionally, we will discuss key decision milestones—to start or not, holding the course steady and fulfilling expectations.
Virtual Desktop Cost-Benefit Analysis — Michael Jacobs, Catlin Group
The analysis contained in this presentation measures the cost of everything from the machines and licenses to the infrastructure for virtual vs. traditional desktop environments.
Honor your best senior team members - Apply for the CIO Ones to Watch Award
Get well-earned public recognition for your top up-and-coming team members, your IT organization and your enterprise. Award winners will be announced, publicized and feted in May 2010, great timing to help attract new IT recruits to your company.
Learn more about the CIO Executive Council »November 26, 2008 — IDG News Service —
Imagine an IP voice and unified communications system that can be integrated into any application and customised to meet business needs. Sounds great, right? Well that project is the Asterisk IP-PBX and it's free to use and you get the source code. A far cry from proprietary PBX systems perhaps, but Asterisk has a vibrant ecosystem and is replacing systems from more established telephony vendors.
Following interviews with the leaders of the Horde and Free Telephony projects, the Open Source Identity series talked to Asterisk founder and Digium CEO Mark Spencer about how one application can have such a profound effect on businesses and how open source can be a tough competitive landscape.
When did you first discover free software and begin to develop code using open source development tools?
I discovered Linux and Unix around 1993 while still attending Auburn High School. In 1994, I attended the Research Science Institute at MIT and got to know and love the Athena system. When I came home, I wanted to use it and learned Linux. Later that year, I got a job at ViperNet (which is now part of Deltacom), as its chief systems administrator at the ripe old age of 17, barely old enough to drive myself to work.
The birth of Asterisk is quite a famous story -- you needed an inexpensive PBX to run your Linux support business, but what inspired you release it as an open source project?
I had success with Gaim as my first major open source project. As a result, it just seemed natural to release Asterisk as open source as well, although it would be a few years later before I realised just how significant that would be.
Now Asterisk is a huge success story with millions of people all around the world using it for telephone calls every day. In addition to being zero cost, what do you think has made it such a success?
Asterisk has been successful in large part due to the nature of the industry -- it's a broad product with lots of highly technical contributors, it has a lot of demand for customisation, the high price of proprietary alternatives and opportunities for lots of companies to make money with an open source alternative. Furthermore, there really wasn't a single gorilla that was a monopoly in the industry, so it was much easier to break in as a new entrant. Not to mention on top of that, Linux really had paved the way to where open source was something people already had some understanding of, if not specifically in the telecom or PBX sectors.