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I challenge new and old users of Asterisk alike to revisit what Asterisk can do, to learn
new features that have been added, and to build something new and exciting out of
your normal skill set. If you hit a roadblock where Asterisk can’t do what you need,
then participate in the project and contribute. Help others who may be trying to do
the same thing. Become not just someone who uses Asterisk, but also someone who
helps others realize their dream.
Dan Jenkins (Founder, Nimble Ape Ltd)
Asterisk was my first foray into the open source telephony world, and as a web devel‐
oper, I found it very different from what I was used to, coming from the web industry.
The Asterisk project has moved on since then, and now the project incorporates
many APIs and technologies that a typical web developer has come to expect. The
inclusion of WebRTC and Asterisk’s REST interface is vital for integration from
developers used to building for the web platform. Asterisk is what I eventually ended
building a business around—it is truly a remarkable piece of software and has a bril‐
liant community of people who both use and improve it. It’s been my pleasure being a
part of this community and proofreading this book for the future community.
Joyce Wilmot (Senior Web Developer)
I was introduced to Asterisk in 2012 when I was working for Voicenation, a company
that provides live answering service 24/7/365 for thousands of customers. At the
time, the call center was quickly outgrowing the third-party software they were using.
Unable to find a flexible and cost-effective solution for their quickly expanding call
center, Voicenation decided that they needed to create their own call center software.
I was tasked with creating this software, which started my journey with Asterisk.
What started as a monumental task (since I did not have prior IP telephony experi‐
ence) quickly became a fascination with Asterisk as I discovered how it simplified our
setup without sacrificing power and flexibility.
Fast-forward nine years and tens of millions of calls later, and Asterisk still faithfully
and reliably runs our call center. This was my first exposure to open source software.
Asterisk is obviously an open source success story that illustrates how open source
software fuels entrepreneurism—and how entrepreneurism, in return, fuels develop‐
ment and enhancement of the open source software. I’m thrilled to be part of that
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cycle, and look forward to being part of the community as Asterisk continually
evolves to keep up with the ever-changing world of telecommunications.
Matt Florell (Founder, VICIdial)
My first exposure to open source telephony back in 2001 was actually not with Aster‐
isk. It was with a different software package, one that took me a couple of months to
get working, using a simple IVR to log contact requests for my employer at the time.
It was not an easy system to work with or modify, so I didn’t do much else with it
beyond that first IVR project. Two years later, I had a request from a client to build a
much more complex telephony system, one that would require user interactions
through a computer. I knew the platform I had been using wasn’t going to work for a
project like this, so I looked around at both commercial and open source options.
That’s when I learned about Asterisk, which looked like it could be an ideal platform
for this project. I bought a T1 card with which to do some testing, and within two
hours of its arrival, I had configured it and I was able to replicate the old project that
had taken me two months to build. After that, I was hooked. The VICIdial Open-
Source Contact Center project grew out of that project; to date, over 100,000 Asterisk
systems have been installed as a part of VICIdial clusters, and those are just the ones
we know about.
Asterisk was very different from the mostly web-based open source packages that I
had worked with in the past, and it had quite a few quirks and bugs in the earlier days
that you had to work around (sometimes in pretty creative ways). But our more
recent experiences with the Asterisk 13 branch have shown significant improvements
in both capacity and stability, compared to earlier branches. There have also been
many new features added that have allowed us to add new functionality to our VICI‐
dial package. Two of those are the ability to pause call recordings and the addition of
several layers of new SIP carrier logging.
Back in 2003 when I started using Asterisk, there were no real “releases.” You had to
find a stable build from one of the recent CVS revisions and test it out. As time went
on, the development and maintenance of the different branches became much more
stable, and the use of Asterisk in production systems all over the world skyrocketed.
Today, Asterisk is the telephony core of thousands of different service offerings, with
billions of phone calls a day being placed through them. It is being installed on wide
varieties of hardware, from tiny embedded systems to server farms with hundreds of
high-powered machines. There are now millions of people who use Asterisk every
day who have no idea that they are interacting with a piece of open source software.
Among our client base alone, we have several Fortune 500 companies, as well as
school districts, social clubs, political organizations, municipal emergency services
organizations, and of course, thousands of different types of commercial operations.
While the low acquisition cost is a common reason given for going with an Asterisk-
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based solution, we often hear that the fact that it is open source is a big plus, as well as
there being no possibility of vendor lock-in. One of our larger clients even cited their
use of open source telephony software as a “distinct strategic advantage” over their
competitors because of the flexibility of the systems and their ability to self-manage
them without having to rely on outside vendors. From what I’ve seen so far, the
future of Asterisk is an ever-growing installed base and continued enhancements. I
look forward to working with it for another 16 years, at least.