
Sangoma (FreePBX) to Acquire Digium (Asterisk) for $28M - kimi
https://www.sangoma.com/press-releases/sangoma-announces-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-digium-inc/
======
spditner
Sangoma's doing a good job of consolidating the SMB Telephony market. They
bought Schmooze Com Inc.[1] (owners of FreePBX, the largest Asterisk based
Linux distro), Dialogic's hardware business, and VoIP Supply[3] (where most
independent VARs order phones from).

[1] [https://www.freepbx.org/sangoma-completes-the-acquisition-
of...](https://www.freepbx.org/sangoma-completes-the-acquisition-of-two-
businesses/) [2] [https://www.dialogic.com/2018-01-09-sangoma-announces-
sixth-...](https://www.dialogic.com/2018-01-09-sangoma-announces-sixth-
acquisition-in-six-years) [3] [http://www.marketwired.com/press-
release/sangoma-announces-t...](http://www.marketwired.com/press-
release/sangoma-announces-the-acquisition-of-voip-supply-llc-tsx-venture-
stc-2222814.htm)

~~~
singularity2001
> Sangoma's doing a good job of consolidating.

Does that mean they are doing a good job creating yet another monopoly?
Seriously courageous. Are there other players left?

~~~
angphc
I fear more 3CX as a monopoly, the bought elastix and ditched it. 3CX CEO
bought lots of SANGOMA shares back 1n 2016 (and later sold a few of them in
2017) Why your competitor's CEO would buy shares of your company? _tips
tinfoil hat_

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mnutt
Digium used to host the local Linux Users of North Alabama meetings back in
1999 when they were Linux Support Services. I remember being blown away seeing
Asterisk running on commodity hardware. They had all kinds of cool hardware
hacks in their office. Kudos to them for revolutionizing the PBX space.

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srinathrajaram
The valuation sounds really low. Is there a reason for that?

~~~
godzillabrennus
Their business is in the decline I would imagine.

As others have stated, their features are now found in many low cost
proprietary solutions.

No reason to pay a tax to use open source unless you believe in it.

~~~
brewrwe
Most low cost solutions are based on Asterisk or Freeswitch...

~~~
jaboutboul
absolutely not true!! and other competitors like 3cx have been eating their
lunch for years. the fact of the matter is FreePBX, even for the most
knowledgeable audience is still a PITA to work with and configure.

~~~
HammerJack
> FreePBX, even for the most knowledgeable audience is still a PITA to work
> with and configure.

Agree to disagree. I cut my teeth on freepbx; love it, miss it, constantly
yell at my customers digium appliances in disappointment that they don't live
up to their sibling. I rolled my old MSP over to it without any hassle and
afaik they're still running it a few years later and I know none of them have
touched it for admin. Rolled it on my VPS for my own consulting needs and it's
pain free.

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naushit
wow....that's really cheap. Considering Asterisk's market share for VOIP
ports.

~~~
Rjevski
On the other hand, I'm not sure Asterisk has a future.

It's quite a legacy application and is not easily scalable nor made highly
available.

The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is
less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.

~~~
kimi
You can scale Asterisk up quite a bit (we have customers with clusters of 50+
boxes) and every telecom uses it some way or the other.

~~~
Rjevski
How do you share state between them?

~~~
spditner
The state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto
things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of
your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.

~~~
Rjevski
Seems like a huge hack. What we really need is some kind of etcd for telecoms,
where you just configure it and they replicate and share state automatically.

~~~
florent42
It's not a hack. Think of Asterisk as if it was an http server + backend code.
How do you scale?

You scale horizontally using proxies (kamailio dispatchers), (what you would
call "reverse proxies in the http world), and use external storage / database
/ logic.

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icedchai
Interesting. I built some VOIP systems on Asterisk about 12 or 13 years ago.
It saved a few small companies a ton of money compared to an older proprietary
system.

~~~
lemcoe9
Those systems still save businesses tons of money and make a lot of money for
the companies integrating them.

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nerdbaggy
FreeSwitch is really taking over

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amaccuish
Should I be moving from my FreePBX/Asterisk setup to FreeSwitch?

~~~
nerdbaggy
If your solution works I wouldn’t

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jpeeler
I worked at Digium from 2008-2011. Digium employed some really great
programmers and I obtained a solid starting foundation for my career as a
developer hacking on Asterisk in C. Definitely enjoyed my time there.

Going back to around that time period, there was a project started called
Asterisk SCF (internally called Hydra, I couldn't remember if it was made
public but it's in the list archives:
[http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-scf-
dev/](http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-scf-dev/)). Asterisk SCF was
going to be new software (written in C++) that supported scalability as a
primary feature. I still wonder if Digium had continued funding it what would
have happened, but eventually development was halted:
[http://www.digium.com/blog/2012/09/14/asterisk-scf-
pause/](http://www.digium.com/blog/2012/09/14/asterisk-scf-pause/).

All that to say I'm happy for Digium's success, but still think an acquisition
could have occurred far sooner with a product based on Asterisk SCF.

------
ChrisArchitect
wow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with some
of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx software...and
now this? Impressed. However I'm curious about Asterisk growth/Digium as it
seems like VOIP service from major telcos, in North America anyways, has
caught up to what was once a very viable open source alternative. I built
asterisk systems for our own in-house multilocation system for years because
it was cheaper and offered infinite more control and options. But we phased it
out a few years ago because big telco had caught up and offered an easily
managed system with alot of the same features, it had just taken them 5-7
years to catch up. The flexibility isn't on par but it's good enough.

~~~
sigstoat
> wow, pretty amazing they started kind of working on top of Asterisk, with
> some of their own hardware, building out their own fork of it/pbx
> software...and now this?

they were selling T1/T3 hardware for years before asterisk was a thing. does
seem like they pivoted to the voice stuff after asterisk, though.

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samstave
Wow, I forgot I even knew about these companies. The last time I deployed a
Sangoma box was in 1998... interesting they still exist.

~~~
lemcoe9
FreePBX (built on Asterisk, which is the basis for another dozen PBX
platforms) is still far-and-away the most popular PBX platform for small
businesses and most VARs. FreeSWITCH does exist and it is fantastic, but the
two are quite similar in terms of what they can accomplish.

There is really no other option in the FOSS community for small-to-medium
phone systems, as Asterisk-based systems are rivaled mainly by 3CX
(proprietary) in the industry which is somewhat expensive and significantly
less-configurable than the open source options.

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cascom
What does ring central use?

~~~
spditner
I believe they were using FreeSWITCH when they first built it out.

~~~
aviv
They use Freeswitch for a lot of their new offerings, they just don't
advertise it. 8x8 too.

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im3w1l
Mildly hijacking this thread... A few months back I investigated SIP as a
replacement for skype, discord, whatsapp etc. It seemed a very insecure
protocol: If I have an account on server A, and someone else has an account on
server B then a user on server B can call me but neither my client nor my
server will verify with server B that the caller is who they say they are.

The email ecosystem had the same problem where anyone could send an email from
any address but managed to solve it by adding new standards on top of old ones
to verify senders. I hope something similar can happen for SIP.

~~~
florent42
If you are talking about SPF and DKIM, none of them verify the sender. The
former indicates which IP adresses are allowed to send a email from for a
specific domain name. The latter lets you verify that the email originated
from the domain. But not from the sender itself.

If you were talking about PGP signatures, ignore my previous words :)

The issue you see in SIP predates voice over IP. PSTN suffers from the very
same issue.

~~~
im3w1l
Well if you get an email from xxx@somemail.com and the SPF and DKIM check out
then it means that the mail really came from somemail and they have had the
chance to verify that xxx is authorized to send the email with e.g. a
password. The system is not 100% foolproof but it's good enough when working
with reputable or selfhosted email services. It's way, way better than "anyone
can trivially pretend to be anyone"

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jijji
Cha ching

~~~
dang
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

