Back in January at the AsteriskWorld Conference, Digium officially announced their new AsteriskExchange initiative, expanding in ambitious fashion on their existing Partner ecosystem co-marketing program. So what exactly is AsteriskExchange and why should you care about it?
Digium CTO Mark Spencer describes AsteriskExchange as:
An opportunity for other companies to be able to co-market with digium and to be able to able to reach the audience of asterisk users a lot more easily than they can on their own.
Digium CEO Danny Windham describes AsteriskExchange as:
A marketplace that is designed to be a one-stop-shop for products that are Asterisk-based, add-on’s for Asterisk, and products that are interoperable or compatible with Asterisk. It’s a website that Digium has built and will maintain in the future as part of our commitment to trying to expand and grow the Asterisk ecosystem.
AsteriskExchange is currently populated with a variety of software and hardware products, including “plug-in’s” to extend the functionality of Asterisk to include things like faxing, speech recognition, text-to-speech and Skype interoperability. Digium is also showcasing their TDM and voice compression hardware (cards), as well as VoIP Phones and gateways from 3rd party vendors who are Digium/Asterisk platform partners. You can browse by products by category or vendor name and Digium intends for products to be reviewed and ranked by users in terms of quality and usability.
For vendors wishing to promote their products via AsteriskExchange, there are a lot of options in a “pay to play” format, annual pricing for Product Listings starts at $5,000, but Digium is currently offering a 50% discount. If you want to list a “free” product or service within AsteriskExchange, Digium has a free listing option available for those software products that are available for free download. Digium has also rolled out their own marketing communications program in conjunction with AsteriskExchange, which is called Marketing to the Max, and offers additional paid marketing services for vendors wishing to gain additional exposure.
So beyond developers of software add-on’s for Asterisk Open Source PBX, what’s in it for VARs, Resellers and Integrators of Asterisk based solutions? Digium has hinted at future programs for VARs that will allow them to leverage AsteriskExchange.
Digium CEO Danny Windham has stated:
Future implementations of AsteriskExchange will be expanded to include services and service providers and channel partners. But even today, a large portion of our channel partners are in business to provide a product or a service based on open source Asterisk, and the existence of the exchange gives them a one-stop-shop to come to get access to all of the add-on’s that are available for Asterisk today, and it gives them a way to keep track of what the new innovations are that are coming forth to help Asterisk be more usable or more applicable to whatever problem you are trying to solve.
It will remain to be seen if Digium can be successful in attracting developers and vendors to participate in AsteriskExchange. They appear to be taking a page from Apple’s book (iTunes, AppStore, etc) in trying to allow smaller, perhaps relatively unknown software developers and solution providers to leverage the Digium brand which is so synonymous with all things Asterisk. Will Digium look to add a revenue sharing option on the sale of paid applications and lower the up-front cost for would-be software developers to participate? Time will tell.
So what do you think of AsteriskExchange? Has your company created a software add-on for Asterisk and if so, would you consider participating in AsteriskExchange? We’d love to hear from developers or vendors and get your take on AsteriskExchange.
Loading ...