Q&A: Danny Windham, CEO, Digium

infrastructure networking open source PBX

CRN Assistant Managing Editor Chad Berndtson sat down with Digium's CEO, Danny Windham, at January's Digium Asterisk World conference to talk about why the Asterisk channel--and Digium itself--is finally ready for its close-up. Following are excerpts from the interview.

CRN: We've heard a bunch of metrics and some fascinating data from you and others about how open source has finally emerged and how a lot of the barriers to adoption, especially in enterprise, are falling away. Of all those metrics, what's the most important for you and the growth of Asterisk?

Windham: First, the availability of high-speed Internet and, second, the pricing of PCs. Both of those mean that essentially everyone can now be a developer. If you look at the number of people out there able to do that, it enabled a community to come together that self-selected people all over the world to enhance Asterisk. With 10 years of that happening ... Asterisk can now rival voice and software products from any company on the planet.

CRN: Why is the channel so important to Digium's growth? Jim [Butler, Digium's director of worldwide channel sales] told me Digium signed its 500th reseller in October, which is a noteworthy milestone.

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Windham: Open source traditionally has been adopted in a community of people that I will say are more technically savvy. In this case, you need some level of expertise around telephony and some level of expertise around Linux, and it's a relatively difficult task. Open source adoption, therefore, has gone to that segment of the market that has that expertise, which today is a relatively small percentage of the market. For small businesses out there, we estimate that 80 [percent] to 85 percent need some sort of added expertise to make Voice-over-IP work. You need some level of data networking knowledge, the ability to create quality of service, and the ability to pick the right external service provider, and install and maintain a phone system. That's the partner role. Today, installing and maintaining the phone system is probably the easy part of it.

CRN: Your longtime resellers are Asterisk-savvy. But in November you introduced an affiliate level to Digium's partner program to attract the dabblers--people who don't need to make a big commitment to be a Digium partner. Why is this important?

Windham: We have very aggressive growth targets. The way we think about our business is in two segments: Business phone systems and custom telephony solutions. In both of these areas we're finding ways to serve the market with Asterisk. Some people may have the technical skill to take the product and build something that doesn't yet exist or does exist but needs to be customized, and for them we can offer maintenance subscriptions or other service opportunities. That's still a small segment of the market, however, so the rest of the users out there either don't have the technical expertise or have the desire to apply it. For them, we pack Asterisk and sell it as a turnkey IP-PBX for small business, and that's Switchvox.