8 ms·
Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M
- naushit 8y agowow....that's really cheap. Considering Asterisk's market share for VOIP ports.
- Rjevski 8y agoOn the other hand, I'm not sure Asterisk has a future. It's quite a legacy application and is not easily scalable nor made highly available. The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.
- florent42 8y ago> The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk. Correct, but don't forget many hosted communications services use asterisk internally. Twilio did use Asterisk in the past, although I believe they have switched to something else.
- Rjevski 8y agoI believe they built their own, exactly for the reasons I outlined above.
- kimi 8y agoYou can scale Asterisk up quite a bit (we have customers with clusters of 50+ boxes) and every telecom uses it some way or the other.
- Rjevski 8y agoHow do you share state between them?
- kimi 8y agoLots of ways. Usually externally, through a database. An Asterisk box processes and forwards calls - you can hook into a "master controller" that decides what is to be done.
- spditner 8y agoThe state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.
- Rjevski 8y agoSeems like a huge hack. What we really need is some kind of etcd for telecoms, where you just configure it and they replicate and share state automatically.
- dvtrn 8y agoSIP? This sounds like exactly what SIP does. Or at least a function of what it exposes
- florent42 8y agoIt's not a hack. Think of Asterisk as if it was an http server + backend code. How do you scale? You scale horizontally using proxies (kamailio dispatchers), (what you would call "reverse proxies in the http world), and use external storage / database / logic.
- gerdesj 8y agoAsterisk is just another daemon. You could use etcd for it or Puppet or whatever to create config on the fly. On FreePBX you generally use MySQL/MariaDB.
- kimi 8y agoBut they were bleeding money, and just sold $30M total last year. Lots of people use Asterisk (it's basically everywhere - whatever you call - dentist, doctor, plumber... - they have the default Asterisk music-on-hold), but not all of them put a coin in the box. :)
- Rjevski 8y agoThey're everywhere because they're already there, but doesn't mean new boxes are being installed. Personally I wouldn't use it; I'd just write some quick code with Twilio (using Twilio functions or a companion app running on Heroku for the business logic) and let them handle it. Less maintenance overhead.
- naushit 8y agoThis is old battle.... Centrex VS PBX . ( if you are old enough to remember Centrex). Twillio is next-gen Centrex.
- Rjevski 8y agoI'm not really old enough to have experienced Centrex, but for small businesses its promises makes sense from a business point of view. Less maintenance/support overhead is a huge plus.
- yusyusyus 8y agosounds good. until you run conferencing services or whatever. Then the pricing is pretty simple: buying wholesale SIP and operating on your own is substantially cheaper. irl maintenance is pretty straightforward. I do it as a side thing to my main job.
- woodson 8y agoSomewhat off-topic, but what wholesale SIP provider would you recommend? Looking for something small-scale for now, pay as you go as opposed to $X,000/month.
- xroche 8y agoAnd they also have a very decent line or hardware. Digium cards used to be the de-facto standard to build quickly a small PBX system, and I really appreciated their quality.
- jijji 8y agoCha ching
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- cascom 8y agoWhat does ring central use?
- nerdbaggy 8y agoFreeSwitch is really taking over
- amaccuish 8y agoShould I be moving from my FreePBX/Asterisk setup to FreeSwitch?
- nerdbaggy 8y agoIf your solution works I wouldn’t
- segmondy 8y agoAlready took over, when I built a system 10 years ago I choose freeswitch, might be selection bias but I know more folks using freeswitch
- alexforster 8y agoI remember the FreeSWITCH from 10 years ago. They didn't even cut releases, you were just expected to always run at HEAD - and the whole community refused to talk to you until you showed your commit hash. I got cores constantly from all the null derefs littered throughout the code. And at this point they considered themselves a stable, production-ready project. I tried _hard_ to make FreeSWITCH work for me in an SMB environment, but I ended up with such a bad taste from the poor QA that I eventually had to call it all a false start and go back to Asterisk.
- xorLordSeven 8y agoLoL... yeah.. sure.
- spditner 8y agoSangoma's doing a good job of consolidating the SMB Telephony market. They bought Schmooze Com Inc.[1] (owners of FreePBX, the largest Asterisk based Linux distro), Dialogic's hardware business, and VoIP Supply[3] (where most independent VARs order phones from). [1] https://www.freepbx.org/sangoma-completes-the-acquisition-of-two-businesses/ https://www.freepbx.org/sangoma-completes-the-acquisition-of... [2] https://www.dialogic.com/2018-01-09-sangoma-announces-sixth-acquisition-in-six-years https://www.dialogic.com/2018-01-09-sangoma-announces-sixth-... [3] http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/sangoma-announces-the-acquisition-of-voip-supply-llc-tsx-venture-stc-2222814.htm http://www.marketwired.com/press-release/sangoma-announces-t...
- godzillabrennus 8y agoFormer Asterisk guy here! The industry needed this consolidation 10 years ago. Glad to see it’s finally happening. So much talent has left the space now that it absolutely had to happen. Sangoma is a great company and I’m sure they will do a great job.
- spditner 8y agoIndeed, I ran a large-ish asterisk user group for years in Toronto and know a number of people at Digium and Sangoma, and there was always a bit of animosity between them. Glad to see them finally coming together. Most of the talent I know took a step to the right (like myself) and are working with WebRTC. It's all the same stuff! Just more signalling layers on top of RTP channel management. I quite often end up doing SIP over WebRTC with things like sip.js (still backing onto Asterisk and FreeSWITCH) and XMPP over WebRTC with jitsi-meet.
- jchassoul 8y agoIndeed the SIP over WebRTC open source stack is a thing of beauty!
- singularity2001 8y ago> Sangoma's doing a good job of consolidating. Does that mean they are doing a good job creating yet another monopoly? Seriously courageous. Are there other players left?
- srinathrajaram 8y agoThe valuation sounds really low. Is there a reason for that?
- godzillabrennus 8y agoTheir business is in the decline I would imagine. As others have stated, their features are now found in many low cost proprietary solutions. No reason to pay a tax to use open source unless you believe in it.
- brewrwe 8y agoMost low cost solutions are based on Asterisk or Freeswitch...
- jaboutboul 8y agoabsolutely not true!! and other competitors like 3cx have been eating their lunch for years. the fact of the matter is FreePBX, even for the most knowledgeable audience is still a PITA to work with and configure.
- HammerJack 8y ago> FreePBX, even for the most knowledgeable audience is still a PITA to work with and configure. Agree to disagree. I cut my teeth on freepbx; love it, miss it, constantly yell at my customers digium appliances in disappointment that they don't live up to their sibling. I rolled my old MSP over to it without any hassle and afaik they're still running it a few years later and I know none of them have touched it for admin. Rolled it on my VPS for my own consulting needs and it's pain free.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoEven PBX in a flash has moved away from open source...
- ruffrey 8y ago
- ChrisArchitect 8y agowow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with some of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx software...and now this? Impressed. However I'm curious about Asterisk growth/Digium as it seems like VOIP service from major telcos, in North America anyways, has caught up to what was once a very viable open source alternative. I built asterisk systems for our own in-house multilocation system for years because it was cheaper and offered infinite more control and options. But we phased it out a few years ago because big telco had caught up and offered an easily managed system with alot of the same features, it had just taken them 5-7 years to catch up. The flexibility isn't on par but it's good enough.
- msh_sena 8y agoThis is their business model that leads them to where they are now. Open source market is very tricky, you work for others and if you don't know how to earn money, you are done.
- sigstoat 8y ago> wow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with some of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx software...and now this? they were selling T1/T3 hardware for years before asterisk was a thing. does seem like they pivoted to the voice stuff after asterisk, though.
- icedchai 8y agoInteresting. I built some VOIP systems on Asterisk about 12 or 13 years ago. It saved a few small companies a ton of money compared to an older proprietary system.
- lemcoe9 8y agoThose systems still save businesses tons of money and make a lot of money for the companies integrating them.
- samstave 8y agoWow, I forgot I even knew about these companies. The last time I deployed a Sangoma box was in 1998... interesting they still exist.
- lemcoe9 8y agoFreePBX (built on Asterisk, which is the basis for another dozen PBX platforms) is still far-and-away the most popular PBX platform for small businesses and most VARs. FreeSWITCH does exist and it is fantastic, but the two are quite similar in terms of what they can accomplish. There is really no other option in the FOSS community for small-to-medium phone systems, as Asterisk-based systems are rivaled mainly by 3CX (proprietary) in the industry which is somewhat expensive and significantly less-configurable than the open source options.
- mnutt 8y agoDigium used to host the local Linux Users of North Alabama meetings back in 1999 when they were Linux Support Services. I remember being blown away seeing Asterisk running on commodity hardware. They had all kinds of cool hardware hacks in their office. Kudos to them for revolutionizing the PBX space.
- im3w1l 8y agoMildly hijacking this thread... A few months back I investigated SIP as a replacement for skype, discord, whatsapp etc. It seemed a very insecure protocol: If I have an account on server A, and someone else has an account on server B then a user on server B can call me but neither my client nor my server will verify with server B that the caller is who they say they are. The email ecosystem had the same problem where anyone could send an email from any address but managed to solve it by adding new standards on top of old ones to verify senders. I hope something similar can happen for SIP.
- DrPhish 8y agoThere are special problems with telephony, but there are efforts to address security in this place. Here is a talk from a couple of years ago : https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/tls_and_sip/ https://archive.fosdem.org/2016/schedule/event/tls_and_sip/ Progress does seem very slow
- florent42 8y agoIf you are talking about SPF and DKIM, none of them verify the sender. The former indicates which IP adresses are allowed to send a email from for a specific domain name. The latter lets you verify that the email originated from the domain. But not from the sender itself. If you were talking about PGP signatures, ignore my previous words :) The issue you see in SIP predates voice over IP. PSTN suffers from the very same issue.
- im3w1l 8y agoWell if you get an email from xxx@somemail.com and the SPF and DKIM check out then it means that the mail really came from somemail and they have had the chance to verify that xxx is authorized to send the email with e.g. a password. The system is not 100% foolproof but it's good enough when working with reputable or selfhosted email services. It's way, way better than "anyone can trivially pretend to be anyone"
- gerdesj 8y agoYou can use many of the same techniques used to drop email spam, for example forward and reverse DNS lookups and of course your favourite next gen firewall can do all sorts of fancy things to help decide "trustworthyness". You can use authenticated trunks between A and B. You can allow anon connections but pre-screen calls by asking the source to identify themselves and play that to the recipient who can choose to accept or drop the call. You can do an awful lot of things with SIP that are unthinkable or plain unlikely with PSTN. SIP can be encrypted (OK the RTP streams can) You can use IAX2 for those times when NAT and SIPnRTP are too hard (hint: try Symmetric RTP - fixes many NAT related problems) Don't confuse SIP with something it isn't! SIP is a comms mechanism and a damn good one, considering how old it is. When you deploy SIP, you also have the option of using all of the very latest funky security stuff around it to support it thanks to the fact that it runs over UDP/IP or TCP/IP. The email ecosystem had the same problem where anyone could send an email from any address - I'm not sure that you can call this a problem. I could call myself Mr Donald Trump, in fact my real name could even be Mr Donald Trump but it wont really make me POTUS but you need some way to tell the difference. Comms is tricky and safe comms in the modern world is very tricky. How far should a comms protocol go in ensuring that the source is who the recipient thinks it is? Or is that really a job for another protocol/system perhaps with some hooks of some sort?
- jpeeler 8y agoI worked at Digium from 2008-2011. Digium employed some really great programmers and I obtained a solid starting foundation for my career as a developer hacking on Asterisk in C. Definitely enjoyed my time there. Going back to around that time period, there was a project started called Asterisk SCF (internally called Hydra, I couldn't remember if it was made public but it's in the list archives: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-scf-dev/ http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-scf-dev/). Asterisk SCF was going to be new software (written in C++) that supported scalability as a primary feature. I still wonder if Digium had continued funding it what would have happened, but eventually development was halted: http://www.digium.com/blog/2012/09/14/asterisk-scf-pause/ http://www.digium.com/blog/2012/09/14/asterisk-scf-pause/. All that to say I'm happy for Digium's success, but still think an acquisition could have occurred far sooner with a product based on Asterisk SCF.
- chriscappuccio 8y agoThis is bad news for anyone who uses Asterisk. Sangoma's software (FreePBX) is utter garbage. Their documentation on their software and hardware is non-existent or intentionally obfuscated to make their "community" edition worthless. Sorry, Asterisk users.