Wow! Sangoma just acquired Digium! At first I was a little shocked at the news. Digium and Sangoma have been competitors for long time. Competing in hardware and with the acquisition of FreePBX a few years ago, user experience of their phone system.
We shouldn’t really be too surprised however. With Sangoma’s accusation of Digium, they are gaining the popular asterisk project. Asterisk is the core of many of the advancements in telephony over the last couple decades. With everything from small local VoIP providers to hosted PBX solutions and full fledged call centers. Sangoma, is now in a position to accelerate asterisk adoption even more.
The following are my own opinions based on the currently available information. And may not reflect the goal of Sangoma or Digium.
Asterisk
At the core of the accusation is undoubtedly what is going to happen to Asterisk? Sangoma has provided a quick FAQ addressing many of these topics.
Switchvox
What isn’t so obvious or clear is what Sangoma intends to do with the commercial Switchvox Offering. The only current mentioning I was able to find is quoted below:
Q: How are FreePBX and Switchvox planning on coexisting?
A: FreePBX and Switchvox service two different markets but have the same common goal of providing a full UC solution. We would expect to see some features being shared between the products as the teams work and collaborate more closely together, thereby improving software development efficiencies.
This statement tells me that Sangoma has some internal plans for the Commercial offering, but they are not sharing just what that is yet. What does seem clear is that Sangoma does not plan to abandon or kill the FreePBX project they acquired a few years ago. But what types of shared features could possibly coming?
I have a list of some things I would like to see offered:
- Decoupling the database to let it live out side of the appliance
- Allow mounting of external drives and shares for recordings
- Allow better access to core features via the API.
- Better Queue Support
- Better phone offerings, and provisioning support.
Those are just to name a few. But we shall see as Sangoma has not made any public announcements as to what they plan to share.
Cloud Services
With this accusation, Sangoma gains access to Digium Cloud services for Switchvox Systems. This has been a relatively new front for Digium, and one that has some advantages and disadvantages over on-premise systems.
This may compete with Sangoma’s current offerings, and I would expect to see some consolidation of the services. I wouldn’t expect an overnight change, but I would expect to see some changes in the offerings over the coming year or two.
Times are changing
With the consolidation of major players in the VoIP echo system one thing remains very clear. 2019 will be a year of changes and shakeups in the VoIP market segments. Voice is not going anywhere. But we will see changes in the future, some we will like and welcome, some we will not. But we will adapt and continue to communicate with users in both new ways and proven traditional ways.