Digium: Eating its own Asterisk dog food
Digium is buying Switchvox for its UI. Interesting who is behind this.
Matt Asay
Digium is still acquisition fodder itself, but the company has decided to do an acquisition of its own, purchasing one of its partners, Switchvox, as CRN reports:
Digium is stirring up the open-source community it helped create by buying one of the vendors that has built an IP-PBX on its Asterisk VoIP platform.
Digium Thursday will unveil plans to acquire Switchvox, one of the many SMB-focused vendors that have cropped up in recent years with products built on top of Digium's open-source Asterisk VoIP software. Digium is the primary developer of Asterisk.
Why buy Switchvox? For its UI, apparently.
A key piece of the Switchvox acquisition for Digium is the end-user interface that San Diego-based Switchvox has built for its products. The system integrates with CRM packages from Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, enabling records from those systems to automatically pop up on the Switchvox Switchboard interface. The interface is also tied in with Google Maps to create a Web 2.0 mash-up that show the location of inbound callers.
This is reminiscent of JBoss acquisitions of old: buy your suppliers/partners. It's no small wonder, then, that the same VC that, at least in part, masterminded JBoss is also behind Digium: David Skok. It's a small world after all....
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